[lgbr]

> Anybody up for joining the "reduced-calorie segment"?

In all seriousness, yes, I'm actually thrilled at the continued prominence of sugar-free drinks. We still have an obesity epidemic going on, and sugar-free drinks to me seem like a true have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too offering. Having people switch from sugary sodas to their sugar-free equivalent seems like the easiest win to improve health.

I get the argument "Just drink water", but do the people making that argument really think that everyone is going to do this? And why should we anyway? Research continues to show that artificial sweeteners are harmless, and drinking soda is just plain fun.

[jskdvsksnb]

Anecdotally, a lot of people I know who have trouble losing weight drink diet soda. I don't know what mechanism would cause that, but metabolism and satiety are complicated enough that I could believe there's a correlation. I'm lucky that artificial sweeteners taste disgusting to me anyways.

[baumandm]

This is likely misleading for two reasons: about half of Americans say they are trying to lose weight[1], and roughly 90% of people who lose a lot of weight eventually regain just about all of it[2].

So even if there is a mechanism that makes diet sodas counterproductive for weight loss, it's clearly part of a much broader problem. There are also possibly confounding factors, e.g. people most serious about their health and weight loss may have already determined that diet sodas are not good for them.

[1] https://time.com/5334532/weight-loss-americans/ [2] https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/health-management/weighing...

[micheljansen]

I don't know the details, but evidence seems to suggest that artificial sweeteners can still contribute to obesity in other ways.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29159583/

[ethbr0]

If you drink enough soda that drinking diet soda seriously impacts your calorie count, you probably aren't making the healthiest food choices.

[nmfisher]

I don't think it's about calories, there's some speculation that artificial sweeteners still spike your insulin, messing with people's ability to lose weight.

Jury's still out AFAIK though.

[enkid]

I haven't dived too deeply into the research, but no, it's not clear that diet soda helps people lose weight: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/diet-soda-weight-gain-metab...

[eMSF]

There's an endless amount of worthless junk science and not-science around anything deemed by some as "too artificial". Especially when it comes to nutrition.

Hardly anything to dive into, though.

[dingaling]

>And why should we anyway?

Because the environmental cost of producing, shipping and disposing carbonated drinks is nearly incalculably higher than just drinking tap water? Even you add a post-tap filter stage it's still magnitudes less impactful.

[lgbr]

This is absolutely valid. I do welcome diet sodas as an alternative to regular sodas, but that concerns health outcomes, not environmental concerns. This problem applies to any drink that isn't tap water (including bottled water), so it's a separate discussion to be had from artificial sweeteners.

[treeman79]

Sugar substitutes promote weight gain. Also a good trigger for migraines.

[lgbr]

This is something that really needs a source, because after a ton of searching, all of the analysis that I can find refutes this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4135487/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28394643/