Oh look it's Bash Diet Coke day again What this study DID show = kids who drink artificial sweeteners also eat more sugar/calories What this study DIDN'T show = Diet Coke makes you eat more This is total nonsensepic.twitter.com/lLj4z5z1oz
You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
In this new study, the researchers basically took a large sample of kids, asked them to recall what they ate in the last 24 hours, and then compared them in terms of their beverage intake
They put kids into 4 groups: 1. Water 2. Artificially sweetened drinks (i.e. Diet Coke) 3. Sugar sweetened drinks (i.e. Coke) 4. 2+3
They found that kids who drank diet drinks ate more calories than kids who only drank water They also found that kids who drank any sugary drinks consumed far more calories than either of those groupspic.twitter.com/uFy2HQ1thI
So water was best, but diet soft drinks were MUCH better than sugary ones Not exactly what the headlines imply so far
But then another wrinkle - this was an observational (cross-sectional) study What this means is that the researchers took one time-point, asked the kids questions, and based all of their results on that
The problem is that there is no way to determine causality from a study like this Maybe Diet Coke causes kids to eat more Maybe kids who eat more tend to drink more Diet Coke Maybe kids who are poor tend to both eat more AND drink more Diet Cokepic.twitter.com/ho4S1ourNZ
And at least one of these things is true, because kids who drank more artificial sweeteners in this study were poorer on average than kids who only drank water
Also, in studies like this, you usually control for dozens of factors There are literally hundreds of things that can influence complex associations like beverage drinking and obesity In this study? They controlled for 5
As I've said before; we can control for the things we know about, but we can't control for things we don't know or don't measure In this study, that included MOST THINGSpic.twitter.com/UVfTKLpTIX
The only thing we can say from this study is that kids who drink more diet coke are also unhealthier than kids who drink only water WHAT A FUCKING SURPRISE
Maybe they're drinking Diet Coke BECAUSE they're unhealthy It's entirely possible - even likely - that this is the case
And even more than that, it's worth remembering that Diet Coke usually REPLACES something If these kids weren't drinking Diet Coke, they'd probably be drinking...Cokepic.twitter.com/8b13x4Bi4K
Guess what was worse for kids IN THIS STUDY than Diet Coke? Coke This is also unsurprising
Too much sugar is bad for you It's probably bad for kids as well It seems, based on the evidence so far, that replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners is at the least safe if not necessarily effective
Will artificial sweeteners make you lose weight? Maybe. Maybe not Will they make you (or your kids) GAIN weight? Probably not, especially if they're REPLACING sugar
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.