7 ms·

One diet soda a day increases type 2 diabetes risk by 38%

• andsoitis 1y ago
  Drink water! Or even flavored water, like LaCroix, or Bubbly, if you want some pizazz. Soda is poison.
  • somenameforme 1y ago
    No idea what LaCroix or Bubbly are, but there's a million flavors of tea and coffee. Coffee is the weirdest thing ever because one would intuitively expect it ought be unhealthy, but it seems to endlessly correlate positively with health. Obviously I mean just plain coffee - not the diabetes in a cup served at places like Starbucks.
    • andsoitis 1y ago
      > No idea what LaCroix or Bubbly are LaCroix: https://www.lacroixwater.com/ https://www.lacroixwater.com/ Bubly: https://www.bubly.com/#/ https://www.bubly.com/#/
  • herbst 1y ago
    Also don't fall for holy or other synthetically sweetened brands of "water flavor powder" there are alternatives with real or no sugar (even if there aren't a lot) It's probably super local still but I really do like "teaballs"
  • vorgol 1y ago
    Exactly. The enormously forceful craving you get for soda/beer/whatever drink will be wiped out 90%-100% by a quick chug of water. Your brain will tell you "no that won't work", but after the water your body will approve and your brain will accept that.
  • makingstuffs 1y ago
    Not sure if you are referring to the US meaning of soda (as in pop in the UK) or actual soda water (essentially fizzy water with sodium bicarbonate in it). If it is the latter can I ask what this is based on? Genuinely interested, not being snarky or anything like that.
    • financetechbro 1y ago
      My intuition tells me they’re referring to pop
      • makingstuffs 1y ago
        That was my thinking, too, but life has taught me that I am a blithering idiot who is often wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • steanne 1y ago
      that term is not really us-specific as a whole. https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18fyz9q/use_of_pop_vs_coke_vs_soda_to_refer_to_sweet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18fyz9q/use_of_pop...
      • makingstuffs 1y ago
        Oh wow, TIL!
  • xnx 1y ago
    > flavored water, like LaCroix, or Bubbly, Spindrift the best. Water with light bubbles and a splash of real fruit juice. ~10 calories
  • JohnBooty 1y ago
    If a person really craves "fizzy sweetness"... here's what I do for myself. 4 parts seltzer water + ice 1 part lemonade It's 50 calories, or something like that (obviously depends on lemonade, size of drinking glass, etc) fulfills my sweetness craving and is also filling
• ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  These things are all so confusingly written I can't help but feel it's a pro sugar conspiracy. If I'm understanding the article correctly, drinking sugary beverages makes you fat, and then you only have a 23% higher chance of diabetes than an equally fat person who doesn't drink sugary sodas. While drinking artificially sweetened drinks doesn't make you fat but does make you more likely to have diabetes than an equally non-fat person. So the obvious but unanswered question seems to be, would you rather be fat and have the absolute risk of diabetes 23% more than that standard fat person plus other health problems of being overweight, or be thinner and have a 43% more chance of diabetes than a thinner person? What's the actual risk, not percentage increase compared with different baselines? Answering that straightforward question would let you know "is it better to drink artificial sweetened than sugary beverages" that always seems to go unanswered in these studies while heavily implying that it's worse than sugar, presumably because they're funded by big sugar.
  • ggm 1y ago
    I think its It's multivariate conditional. The sweetener doesn't provide direct calorific input, but that encourages more to be drunk and so exacerbates the problem. Weight for weight liquids taken, to energy, to signal received by endocrine system, to outcome on blood sugar levels. Now add genetic variability to risk/predisposition, exercise levels, bmi, gender, age, co-morbidities..
    • zihotki 1y ago
      There is nothing in the article or studies to justify your point about encouragement. The points raised at the start of the thread are still very valid - who participated in the study and whether there were other important factors which were negleted intentionally or not. Anecdotal point - I'm fit, it doesn't matter if I drink sugar free soda or water. My calorie intake doesn't change because of that at all. It changes due to other factors like lack of sleep or stress levels.
  • ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    Replying to myself: > Obesity is considered the main modifiable risk factor for type 2 diabetes, and it's estimated to account for 80-85% of the overall risk, according to Nice CKS
• emsy 1y ago
  "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke." - President Donald Trump
  • mort96 1y ago
    Guessing that's because he doesn't hang out with thin people much? I see thin people drink diet coke literally all the time
  • JohnBooty 1y ago
    I wouldn't exactly put it that way but I've known a lot of people who take great care of their bodies and I never see them going anywhere near diet soda
• beardyw 1y ago
  I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. The diet I went onto more or less cut out anything sweet. It's surprising how quickly I became sensitive to sweetness and now I just don't want it. And blood tests show the diet worked. Life goes on without sweet!
  • stolencode 1y ago
    I gave up sugar because of my poor tooth health. My taste preference also quickly changed. It's surprising how many American products have ridiculous amounts of sugar added to them, how difficult it is to find unadulterated products, and how little sweetener foods actually require to have their flavor perfectly enhanced. The sweetest I can tolerate is the 1/4 tsp of raw honey I add to my oatmeal. There are very few restaurants I can eat at any more and most processed foods taste and smell horrible.
    • arghwhat 1y ago
      If you truly mean tolerate, then your sensitivity might be a bit in the extreme. I wouldn't expect anyone to be bothered by eating a bit of pure sugar or honey even if they prefer their food unsweetened. But yes, a lot of food is excessively oversweetened (it's a cheap way to win kids and therefore long-term habits), and you become desensitized to anything you constantly taste and will notice differences when you stop. However, everyone has different taste, both genetically and because of whatever else they eat and is more or less sensitive to, so there's no such thing as "flavor perfectly enhanced", only your own particular preference for a particular dish. Someone eating less sour or being genetically predisposed to bitter might violently disagree with your flavoring for example.
• michalu 1y ago
  Typical bogus study. This shows exactly what's the problem with most of these studies. So if you look at the participants in the study, it's 40,000 people between 40 to 60. The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40. So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks. People who are 40 years old and they drink diet soda, a great deal of them, not all, do it because they already have a problem. Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar. And health councious people don't even drink soda because they've never built an addiction to that type of drink in first place - mind that this study is not in the US. So the fact that this group is more likely to end up with diabetes, there might be a million factors that lead to that result. Maybe because drinking diet soda already makes a chunk of them preselected to be more likely to develop some kind of metabolic disease. Again, I don't generalize this study returns some kibd of arithmetic average. You only need 10% of participants to be off limits and you get very different result vs. general population. Because if you look at diabetes 2 rates, out of 40k people maybe 4k max gets it (edit. 1.7k in the study) that's a sample that can show wild variation. Edit. people seem to have problem with the verbiage. "Nobody drinks artific..." ok that's a way to make a point what I wanted to say "you're more likely to pick diet soda if you already habe a problem" especially for 40-60 demographic who probably includes 100% of people ordered to drink diet soda by their doctor. Also yes people drink soda outside the US. But not people 40-60 where a chunk of them comes from generation that weren't subject to heavy advertising by american sugar soda companies. This is Europe New Zeland and just do a wuick search on the demographics of diet soda consumers in the Europe - it's 25-44 age group.
  • mort96 1y ago
    > Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. I mean I just don't agree? I'm young-ish (approaching 30), don't have a problem with excessive sugar in my diet, I don't have medical conditions which make sugar a problem, but most of the time when I drink soda I pick one without sugar. I find it tastes fine and I don't exactly want more sugar in my diet. I'm not saying that your comments about bias introduced by the selection criteria is wrong, I haven't read the study so I don't know if they corrected for it or designed the study in a way which makes it a non-issue. But you seem to have some very strong personal preferences regarding soda, and you've assumed that those personal preferences are universal. They're not.
• blenderob 1y ago
  Link to the research paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diabet.2025.101665 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diabet.2025.101665 (click "View PDF" there) This is actually a solid study, despite what the current top comment might suggest. It's frustrating how frequently shallow, dismissive takes that don't engage with the substance of a paper rise to the top on HN. I genuinely don't understand what drives such upvotes. That's not how science works, folks. If you're going to criticize a study, the least you can do is read it carefully and refer to specific sections and quote specific excerpts where you believe the authors went wrong. Anything less is just noise.
  • arghwhat 1y ago
    One important note (also mentioned in the study) is that this may be a reverse causality. Their study also indicates an association between high Artificially Sweetened Beverage ("ASB" in the study) consumption and high total calorie intake/obesity. The link may therefore that obesity was the cause of all diabetes incidents and that obese individuals tend to want to reduce weight by drinking diet soda (and are less likely to have preference for foods and drinks traditionally considered healthy like plain water or tea), without the diet soda consumption itself being a contributing factor. (There will be many correlations like this - e.g., if you look at statistics for knee problems you might find a large overlap between people with diabetes and with knee problems, because obesity causes both more load on the knees and a higher risk of diabetes.) Quote: > The mechanisms linking high habitual consumption of ASBs and the risk of type 2 diabetes are not fully understood. It is suggested that reverse causality between obesity and ASB intake may partly explain the observed association, where individuals with relatively high BMI at baseline might be using ASB to try to reduce weight and follow a healthy lifestyle [35,37]. Our results, showing the attenuation of the association of ASB with type 2 diabetes after adjustment for body size measures, were consistent with supportive of obesity being a confounder of the association.
  • khelavastr 1y ago
    The conclusions reported are extremely low quality. The research is fine, but only shows an association and not causation. I agree that people at high risk of diabetes are probably much more likely to drink diet soft drinks than average people
• mbirth 1y ago
  Do we know of a T2 epidemic in the UK? Because they have a sugar tax and basically everything is artificially sweetened.
• fastball 1y ago
  Can we stop publishing diet studies that use self-reported diet journals/questionnaires as the method for controlling variables? They are completely unreliable and invalidate anything they touch. In this particular study it is even worse, because there is very likely to be confounding reporting related to what is being tested, i.e. the type of person who specifically seeks out diet soda is probably going to report their other intake in a different way to the person who YOLOs on sugar.