[heyparkerj]

Which blows my mind, because when all else in the diet holds equal, swapping two sugar'd sodas with two artificially sweetened sodas will save you (using my old vice Dr Pepper as an example) 54g sugar and 200 calories per day. It's just a little annoying that WHO (or this article, not sure who's most at fault) decided not to get into the nuance that people tend to make up those missing 200 calories in other ways.

[jwally]

Agree. The lede "Don't consume artificial sweeteners" reads like "they're poison". They're not. The better title should have been "Artificial Sweetener Use Is Not A Long Term Weight Management Strategy".

Not that anybody actually reads or pays attention to these things when they're wolfing down a bag of fritos; but still to the person at What-a-burger getting an 1100 calorie meal - they're probably better off opting for 400 fewer calories with a diet Coke than a fully loaded one.

[hinkley]

We now know that the intestines have 'taste buds' that can detect sweetness.

There's a theory, and I don't know how tested it is at present, that the body uses these detectors to control the digestion process. Within this theory, the presence of the artificial sweeteners may encourage the body to work harder to scavenge calories from your digestive tract.

The upshot of this model is that if you eat a burger with a glass of water, you absorb X calories. If you eat the burger with a diet Sprite, you might be absorbing X + Y calories instead.

Remember, calorie counts for food are based on measures of caloric value of a unit of food minus the caloric value of what the average person excretes. If we were furnaces instead of meat we would get more calories from our food. And if you have odd digestive microbes you may be absorbing more or less calories from your food.

[jwally]

So I could be totally off, but I think the calories listed on food are derived from the Atwater factors of Carbs:4kc/g, Protein:4kc/g, and Fat:9kc/g.

[hinkley]

The caveats section covers a lot of variations, between food samples and individual digestive tracts.

I've you've ever been diagnosed with anything that isn't mainstream, you're familiar with how much the medical community likes to stuff pegs of any shape into their favorite receptacles. A patient with ideopathic symptoms could be lying to you and sneaking food in the parking lot (I've known a couple of those), or they could be an anomaly. Singular or a few percent of the population. The world of genetics is vast and a handful of rare conditions can net you several examples within your Dunbar number.

We have a lot of people these days who don't seem to correspond directly to calories in/calories out. And unless they're absorbing energy from the universe, then something about our assumptions is broken.

At work I often find myself having to remind people that if your assumptions tell you that an event must be impossible, then it's not your eyes that are wrong but your assumptions. Half of debugging is being able to efficiently name your assumptions and sort them by probability x difficulty of verification.

If people aren't losing weight on diet soda, we need to be dismissing rules of thumb and directly testing patients instead of shrugging and saying, "exercise more, scrub." Which is a polite characterization of how medical people treat my obese friends.

[rjmunro]

"All else being equal" doesn't seem to really happen in practise. Some mechanism means this doesn't work. Maybe Swapping 2 sodas (diet or not) for e.g. 2 glasses of water means you will have less sugar dependence over time and will get healthier all around.

[heyparkerj]

It does happen in practice, but unfortunately because it doesn't happen in practice on average, the WHO has opted away from educating people on the nuances and instead continue this maddening war about which is worse.

The other issue is that there's so much variance. Are you making an effort at improving the quality of your food and made up that 200 calories with nutrient rich items? Too bad, you still aren't losing weight, so WHO declares that diet soda is ineffective for weight loss, articles summarize and declare that artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and you still get people thinking that diet soda is worse for you than regular soda.

[SirMaster]

Why doesn't it happen?

I meal prep for all my meals. All my food is measured out and counted beforehand.

I started exchanging regular soda for zero sugar soda and did not change a single thing about my diet otherwise.

[rjmunro]

"Doesn't happen in practise" probably didn't fully describe what I meant - i.e. on average across populations if you tell people to "just" change their drinks for diet drinks, it seems other parts of the diet compensate for the lost calories.

> All my food is measured out and counted beforehand.

That's great, but that is not representative of most people.

[SirMaster]

That's what personally I don't like about information like this.

How can I apply it to my own situation then I wonder?

It seems like rarely does information that applies to people in general ever seems to apply to me in a relevant way.