My read of this suggests that they're specifically looking for a link between "using NSS's" and the actual desired outcome of "people lose weight / are able to

My read of this suggests that they're specifically looking for a link between "using NSS's" and the actual desired outcome of "people lose weight / are able to control it better". Does that sound right? Given that, I think this isn't quite as strong of a suggestion as the title would imply at a glance. When I read the title, I thought "what? did we find out that NSS's are metabolizable or that they somehow offset something and cause other calories to be absorbed more readily?" But no, this is just saying that, it turns out just switching to diet coke alone isn't enough to make you lose weight, and in aggregate it's not even a big enough dent to turn up in the statistics. They say as much in the last paragraph: "Because the link observed in the evidence between NSS and disease outcomes might be confounded by baseline characteristics of study participants and complicated patterns of NSS use, the recommendation has been assessed as conditional, following WHO processes for developing guidelines. This signals that policy decisions based on this recommendation may require substantive discussion in specific country contexts, linked for example to the extent of consumption in different age groups." "may require substantive discussion in specific country contexts" imo translates to "those facebook posts of morbidly obese people eating 3000 calories in one sitting but their otherwise-200-calorie soda can is instead 0-calorie-NSS". I am a bit surprised it doesn't even make a dent in it though. But maybe it does have a psychological "offset" - people prone to overweightness will on average think "well my soda is 0-calorie so I can have this extra thing". Overall, a bit of a non-statement from the WHO I think. I was hoping we'd learned more about the effects of non-metabolizable sugars on the gut biome or something similar.