[logicallee]

the title we've been given and the abstract you just quoted fits with my prior that the sugar industry pays for such studies. after all it's obvious that someone who drinks diet sodas isn't getting more Calories than on the packaging, whereas if they drank sugared drinks it would be a huge source.

maybe water would be better as far as "expected weight loss" but it's obviously false that diet soda can prevent weight loss. (unless it takes away a person's will to exercise and takes away a person's ability to make correct calorie-related choices.) If someone is active and eating less than they're using, or exercising heavily and especially building muscle, it's obvious that drinking any amount of diet soda won't inhibit these processes, since people do it all the time.

since you've read and quoted the abstract, could you suggest a title for the mods that's even vaguely true?

[beloch]

" among the groups that received a high-fat diet, the mice that drank the sweetener solution became considerably heavier than those who drank plain water. However, the blood sugar level was higher than normal in all of the mice that received sweetener solution. "

In mice, at least, it seems that the artificial sweetener helped them accumulate more fat than mice who were given water and the same diet. So, aspartame may act like an obesogen[1] in mice.

If you think this is hard to believe and that calories in are calories in, consider diabetics. If untreated, they excrete sugars to the point where they have difficulty maintaining weight on a diet that would make somebody else quite fat. The body's chemistry is complex and, as far as I can tell, not well understood at all, especially when it comes to diet. There seems to be a lot more funding available to develop drugs and procedures to treat illness than there is to optimize (relatively) healthy peoples' diets.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesogen

[logicallee]

I still didn't click through but you do not suggest a title. Can you summarize in a neutral way? Maybe "on a high-fat diet, artificial sweeteners may exacerbate weight gain?" Is that fair?

[logicallee]

While I was downvoted, 12 hours later Reddit managed to post a much more accurate title (which made its front page). This is Reddit's title:

>Low-calorie sweetener use is independently associated with heavier relative weight, larger waist, and higher prevalence and incidence of abdominal obesity, suggesting that low-calorie sweetener use may not be an effective means of weight control, based on a study of 1,454 participants over 10 years.

This makes total sense to me. It is not fair to summarize this as "prevents weight loss."