[fartsucker69]

>The design appears to be based on the notion that most of the confounders are washing out in the propensity to seek cardiac treatment, which was a precursor for recruitment into the study

What a bad assumption for a design. It should be obvious that there is still a relationship between lifestyle health and things like artificial sweetener intake even among that filtered group.

Nutritional studies are just all kinds of worthless when you try to use it for making actual decisions. They should be used to guide future and more detailled/well funded research, and that is literally the only thing they should be used for.