[docandrew]

Any change in absorption is going to be minuscule in comparison to the difference in calories one gets from all the excess sugar.

Anecdotally, switching from full-sugar soda to diet has been a hugely beneficial change to my own health. Would water be better? Maybe, but I’ll settle for harm reduction.

[hinkley]

I switched from soda to tea three or four times in my life before swearing off soda entirely. Lost 10 lbs every time.

The problem with artificial sweeteners is that we have “taste buds” for sweet in our intestines, and there’s a theory that reacting to that increases absorption, so your body pulls more carbs from French fries you ate with your Diet Coke.

This is likely a big part of why lecturing people about CICO is such a dick move.

“Calories” in food are net calories, not gross calories. We didn’t calculate the calories in bread by burning it in a sensor chamber. We got it by isolating volunteers, measuring the energy in their food versus the energy in their poop, assuming the rest ends up in your body.

But of course any heat generated by gut microbes might be shed, and the hydrogen bonds in your burps are also lost calories.

I was a very gassy person when I was a young beanpole. Not so much anymore.

[kenjackson]

Anecdotally my wife changed her diet and basically tried to replace sugar with sucralose wherever she could. The end result was a significant weight loss. I should note she also did start exercising more at the same time, so definitely not a controlled study. But the delta in calories from sugar was far greater than the caloric expenditure from exercise.

[hinkley]

I started long distance walking this year, and nearly every time I see the calorie count I am reminded of the aphorism about not being able to outrun a bad diet. I think that’s bullshit, with a proviso.

The provision is that you can’t outrun a bad diet by exercising a half hour a day. That 30 minutes is a number doctors settled on not to scare sedentary people into not starting an exercise program. You really need an hour or more a day.

I’m trying to get my walk route down to 90 minutes, in prep for a half marathon next year. If I stop for a matcha at the halfway point, I’ve still burned well over twice what I consumed. If I get the smoothie still come out ahead.

The real “secret” there is that when I watch TV I nibble. Not getting food on books is the only reason I don’t nibble when reading. What I’ve done in a 90 minute walk is to forestall eating more than one single thing in that ninety minutes. And lowered my stress level. Cortisol is the other killer here.

Even before that the nearest good coffee shop was a mile away and my net calories were ~100. If I avoided a certain cream based beverage.

For some people, banning prepared foods does a similar thing. Preparing a snack takes fifteen minutes instead of fifteen seconds. You just don’t have as much time in the day to stuff your face once the convenience is gone.

The other aphorism is that you lose weight at the grocery store, which I do believe. If you come home with fruit instead of pie and chips you’ve already fought half the battle.

[watwut]

Regular moderate exercise improves your health results whether you loose weight or not. It is one of the few interventions that actually have statistical results. It also affects your life positively by making you stronger or faster or just able to walk longer depending on how exactly you exercise.

If you dont care about health or improvment in things like strength stamina, then the "dont exercise it is waste" knee jerk response makes some sense. If you care about health, it does not at all.

[hinkley]

I’ve only lost a few pounds but inches off my waist. To the point I’m wondering if I’m going to have to repurchase running shorts next year. Muscle is heavy.

To your point on mood: there’s definitely a feedback loop or three there. Once you say “fuck it” a lot of things unravel and everything spirals. Better mood means more chores get done, which is both more exercise and improves self image and mood. Being happier about the mirror does the same thing.

Before the pandemic I wanted to walk a 10k. Now that’s practically my baseline, and new goals I wouldn’t allow myself are popping up. You can get a lot of places in 10k round trip, especially if you aren’t a sweaty mess on the other end. That’s 75% of the way to downtown for me.

[layer8]

> there’s a theory that reacting to that increases absorption, so your body pulls more carbs

There doesn’t seem to be any good studies about that. Anecdotally, as someone who has been drinking 2-3 liters of Diet Coke or Coke Zero daily for over two decades, I haven’t experienced such an effect.

[hinkley]

George Burns smoked cigars into his nineties. He was famous for smoking them while performing.

Anecdotes don’t mean shit for public policy.

And is this even an anecdote? Were you overweight before you started drinking diet and now you’re not, with no other lifestyle changes? Food? Mood? Exercise?

[layer8]

> Anecdotes don’t mean shit for public policy.

Right, and so yours doesn’t either.

My point is, the theory that artificial sweeteners somehow cause more “net” calorie intake doesn’t have much grounded evidence. Presenting it as a likely truth is fallacious.

[hinkley]

That's specious. One is based on a chain of events. The other is based on the absence of a chain of events. Your anecdote and George Burns are of a kind: I did something and nothing bad happened. You've implied that you've proven a negative.

Mine is "I stopped doing something and something good happened (3x)". I did a lot of single variable experiments on myself during that phase of my life. I didn't stop soda and start exercising. I was too 'lazy' for that, but it was more informative.

Anecdotes are lousy for public policy but they're great for research grants. Except for accidental discoveries, most medical advances come from looking at clusters of people or animals or microbes that don't behave the way you thought they would. Those are anecdotes, and the cause-effect variety are much easier to spot.

[docandrew]

I thought calories were measured using a calorimeter which burns the food. I'm pretty sure nutritionists don't have armies of volunteers who eat nothing but a single ingredient for 24-hours, whose poop is then burned in a calorimeter to measure the difference?

How much increased absorption are we talking about? If I don't drink a can of Coke containing 150 calories of pure sugar, and instead drink a Diet Coke with basically 0 calories, are you saying that my gut is going to somehow grab 150 calories that it would have otherwise ignored?

[yamtaddle]

> Any change in absorption is going to be minuscule in comparison to the difference in calories one gets from all the excess sugar.

I think that depends on how much it takes to have this effect. If the equivalent of one diet soda every couple days (the doses in the article seemed pretty small to me?) is acting like a kind of pesticide, even in small doses, and killing a lot of calorie-eating gut flora, the harm might exceed the benefit. On the other hand if the artificial sweetener is replacing the sugar in 64+oz of soda per day rather than 16ish oz every couple days, sure, the benefits probably overwhelm any harm.