Diet soda hasn’t been enjoying much love from the scientific community lately; everyone already knows that aspartame might actually hinder weight loss efforts and that big soda’s”real sugar” ad angle has been debunked. And now there’s a terrifying new headline floating around. It claims that a new study has found that drinking diet soda can increase your risk of dementia and stroke. Except that’s what the media is saying about the study, not what the study actually says.
If you’ve been freaking out about the fact that your diet soda consumption could lead to potentially life-threatening diseases, hold on just one moment, because the article you read probably didn’t link to the actual study, which is far more cautious. In fact, this is the second paragraph of the press release:
The authors caution that the long-term observational study was not designed or able to prove cause and effect, and only shows a trend among one group of people.
Essentially, the study looked at data from the Framingham Heart Study, an incredibly useful piece of research that tracks the health of a few thousand people in the city of Framingham, MA. Parsing the data, the study team found that higher consumption of artificially sweetened drinks, like diet soda, led to a rate of stroke and dementia three times that of people who had one or less artificially sweetened drink a week.
Overall, the actual numbers are low. 3% of people in the study had a stroke, and 5% developed dementia, and the heavy diet soda drinkers were a subset within those groups. In other words, while drinking diet soda might potentially raise your chances of stroke or dementia, your overall chances are really low in the first place. Even if there does turn out to be a clear risk of developing these health problems when you consume diet soda, that risk will be extremely low and more likely to be something those with hereditary problems should consider, not the wider public.
The point of the study is not to prove that diet drinks rot your mind and give you stroke. Instead, the study authors have found a trend that scientists need to explore in more detail. Diet drinks might not have anything to do with it, and it’s not clear what mechanism would even be involved in raising your chances of getting sick. That said, having some water might be a better idea, no matter what.
(Via The Washington Post)
