Food Politics

I agree with your hesitancy, but I welcome any study that gets people talking about how bad diet soda is for you. When I put this on my facebook page, my friend posted this reply:

“A couple years ago, my organs started not functioning. My heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys were all having severe issues. They suspected aspartame poisoning started it all. From diet drinks. I drank 3 or 4 a day for months to stay awake at work. As soon as I stopped the diet drinks, did several cleanses and supported my body with alternative medicines , everything is back to normal. It took over a year to get my health stable again. I don’t think people realize how dangerous diet drinks really are.”

Additionally, my brother-in-law’s joints freeze up and he can’t even move if he has artificial sweeteners. I wish more people knew the truth about this stuff.

Really shocked at your normally outspoken call for natural foods to be absent here. Do we really need skepticism in this case? After 30+ yrs. of these products being used in excess by adults and children alike, we have seen more associations of serious health consequences than just the study’s mention of heart dis. and stroke. Why is it that experts like yourself always caution us to be cautious about findings like these that, whether accurate or not, point to a potentially life-threatening outcome of consuming these products the way we have been? I recognize your admission that diet sodas fall under your “don’t eat it if it’s artificial” edict, however you seem awfully careful not to condemn this artificially flavored drink. Drinks containing a chemical that has been associated with all sorts of ills. If you plan to point out that most of these associations are anecdotal or understudied or not specifically tested out, I would purport that this is where science fails us. If there are large numbers of individuals who notice specific symptoms, say headache, while drinking diet sodas, then no longer suffer the symptom within days of removing the sodas from diet, and even have recurring headaches when the sodas are reintroduced, is it not common sense to connect the dots? Why do experts seem to tell us to just continue drinking in moderation until we sort all this out? Those supplement you’re taking though? Toss them right now! Can’t be too careful.
Apparently neither can you, Ms. Nestle. I fear your “care” is misdirected.

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marion Nestle, Andy Bellatti, Doug Porter, Aaron Fro$t, Nutrition Simplified and others. Nutrition Simplified said: Either way, I'm happy it's making ppl rethink dt soda @ClaudiaZapata RT @marionnestle Do diet sodas really cause stroke? http://t.co/xOOoPlU [...]

A girl I went to school with got aspartame poisoning from chewing too much gum. I never want to put that stuff in my body.

A friend drinks almost exclusively diet soda. She is enormously overweight (as an aside, she is overweight from eating too much McDonalds and Subway. I saw her eating a McD’s apple pie the other day and said I hadn’t had one in years – she whipped a spare one out of her takeaway bag and gave it to me. If I hadn’t said that she would have eaten the second one too)

Anyway, this friend refuses to drink water – she says it tastes weird and the texture is chalky. It makes me so sad that she is so disconnected from real food that she can’t even drink water.

Occasionally I will have a full fat soft drink – but only because I’m not in the States, I wouldn’t drink it if it had HFCS instead of cane sugar. I think it’s far better to drink something that has more calories but fewer chemicals, just drink it less often.

I will stand up and say that I drink diet soda all day and am neither overweight nor suffering. I also cook my own food, eat plenty of veggies/fruit/healthy proteins/good fats. Plus – I just finished my first half marathon in January, with a second planned for September, with other runs in between. Just to get this out there as a background and a counterpoint experience to James and Jan.

With saying that, I do wish that I would stop drinking diet soda. I know it is bad for me but I just haven’t found a reason to stop. And this study doesn’t do it either. Healthy skepticism is always a good thing. Causation and correlation – we’ve all heard that before.

Thanks for the skepticism. However, there is a very simple way to kick the diet soda habit … I’m surprised that it isn’t discussed more frequently … http://bit.ly/cRG9b0

possible culprit – phosphoric acid. This would imply that clear diet sodas may be different from the brown ones.

See this post about a study showing colas (diet and regular) and an increased risk of chronic kidney disease
http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2007/07/coke-adds-death.html

I too think your caution is disconcerting. There have been studies for as long as I can remember pointing to a variety of awful side affects linked to artificial sweeteners and diet soda. While I don’t know the specifics of many of the studies, I think the fact that they seem to keep cropping up and then seem to be hushed almost as fast is suspicious. Soda of any sort is not that great, but I think that occasionally drinking a full sugar soda is far healthier than drinking 3-4 diet sodas a day.

I also think it is both ironic and sad that many (not all, but many) people who drink diet soda are obese and are drinking that diet soda in the same sitting as a whopper and extra large fries.

I just want to address Susan’s comment: I should have clarified earlier that I am a Holistic Nutrition Counselor, therefor my observations come from a professional standpoint. That being said, I would pose that you said you know diet soda is bad for you, but haven’t found a reason to quit yet. That statement could be interchangeable with a smoker or junk food junkie. The reason is in the statement: if you know something is bad for you, and wish you could reduce or stop it, but don’t, there is an addiction lurking there. Just went through it a few weeks ago with a client who is now detoxing from her daily diet soda habit.
Just something to think on. Wishing you well..

Donald Rumsfeld was the mastermind behind getting aspartame approved by the FDA. Do we really need more evidence than the blessing of the Devil’s Lieutenant?

What about caffeine?

A number of studies show there is higher risk of cardiovascular events in people who consume caffeine and are “slow metabolizers” of caffeine, compared with fast metabolizers. Caffeine metabolism is largely a genetically determined function. Think about people who can’t sleep if they have caffeine in the afternoon, vs. those who drink a pot of coffee every evening and sleep with no problem.

Not all diet sodas contain caffeine, but most do. I wonder if they looked at this — if they didn’t, it’s a bit of negligence in study design.

http://www.doctorslounge.com/cardiology/articles/ischemic_heart/coffee_heart_attack/

@Jan — part of the “detoxing” could be caffeine withdrawal?

Cathy – I consider myself fortunate to be caffeine sensitive, so a little goes a long way. That said, I do develop a tolerance the more I consume. Doesn’t everyone?

I applaud your objective analysis of this study. It is very easy to scapegoat something like diet soda when there are so many other considerations to take into account. For example, diet soda drinkers are frequently overweight, physically inactive, and consume large amounts of the beverage mixed with alcohol. Aspartame poisoning is a very rare occurrence in the population and with soda consumption in the United States being outrageously high, the amount of calories spared goes a long weigh to reducing the weight of Americans. Don’t get me wrong if I could wave a magic wand and make all sodas disappear (along cigarettes and violence) I sure would, but that just isn’t the world we live in. It’s extremely dangerous to blindly get behind a scientifically questionable study simply because the result appeals to our individual beliefs.

I don’t think you can metabolize any faster, but you might get used to the conscious feeling of having caffeine in your system, while sytematic effects continue?? Not an expert in the various alleles and enzyme pathways — maybe the enzyme pathways do respond to increased intake, just as they do with vitamin C, that would help explain some of the withdrawal symptoms. Just know that most studies on caffeine have lumped everyone together, and only when they separate out the fast from slow metabolizers can effects be clearly proven (or disproven).

Hope you call yourself “sensitive” in a good way, rather than in a “weak” way. I know some coffee drinkers who take great pride in their ability to drink it and sleep, like it’s a character builder

Jan and Brandis, I actually applaud MN’s addressing of this as not necessarily being a clear link–one of the things I admire most about her writings is, if you don’t mind my saying so, her apparently flawless BS-meter. She cuts through the crap and makes sense logically and rationally, and if something is tossed out there in a knee-jerk kind of way, she calls it.

That she can and does call it on both “sides” of the real food issue only, in my opinion, adds to her credibility.

That said–yes, diet soda is evil, its side effects are horrible, and Rumsfeld is Satan.
–Jenn

I do like reading scepticism and things that make me think.
Some of the people who believe you should be condemning the artificial sweeteners and supporting the study results may be influenced by some of the non-science which circulated a few years ago and blamed nearly every malady on aspartame. Anyway, making us think is good.

[...] Tässä on yksi varoittava esimerkki, joka levisi eilen jenkkimediassa ja tänään odotetusti Suomessa. Professori Marion Nestle ehti uutisointia kommentoimaan. [...]

Marion,

Why don’t you exhibit the same skepticism for Ancel Keys’s hypothesis (which has since morphed into governmental policy) that saturated fat causes heart disease, and that we should avoid saturated fats and cholesterol? This is probably the greatest “fishing expedition” of all time!

With all respect, I left the American Dietetic Association due to their posture “all foods can fit”, soda diet or not is not a food.
How about sodium benzoate, it is a common ingredient…..
If prior studies shown relationship with soda consumption and metabolic syndrome and diabetes, may as well “cause” vascular problems……As someone already stated I would never pour it in my body

Although they controlled for calories, they did not control for the subject’s weight. Wouldn’t that be something obvious to control for? I am skeptical about this study until I see a peer-reviewed published paper with their methodology.

@ Ana — I too left my association (Dietitians of Canada) for a while due to a number of things: no breastfeeding policy, their all foods can fit message, their sponsorship by sugar industry and subsequent questionable recommendation to feds to not label added vs natural sugars separately, and their McDonald’s sponsorship of our annual conference fun runs where we were served sugary V8 Splash as a breakfast beverage…that’s just my short list.

I did rejoin a couple years later so that I could help change things, but I think my initial letter of resignation did make a bit of a ripple.

My saying is now “All foods fit, as long as your pants do”. It’s not completely true, and it’s a little sizist, but I hope people see it’s about not gaining too many inches as we age rather than one size fits all.

A non-peer reviewed study. A non-experimental study. No plausible mechanism by which diet sodas alone “cause” strokes. (Association does not equal causation.) Exposure to diet sodas was determined at one point in time by a food frequency questionnaire. Did people who drank more diet soda have higher risk for strokes? I want to see the complete list of variables that were controlled for – family history, etc.

In other words, this report means nothing until the paper is reviewed and many, many questions are answered.

I’m with Marion on this. It looks like she is pointing to flaws in a scientific study, not promoting diet sodas. It was a qualitative, correlational study. I am “dubious” as well.

That being said, I detest diet soda. It’s not necessary and it’s not good for diabetics. Added sweeteners (chemical or no) are not an essential nutrient. I do think their ‘could’ be some issues with these sweeteners. I would not be shocked if data were found pointing to harmful effects. They are man made chemicals. This study just doesn’t do it.

Evidently this study also shows that strokes are caused by living in New York City! What I find “dubious” is why diet soda is what made the news. What were the other factors that went to paragraphs below the fold?

What I have heard often from public health officials is how the soda industry has an unfair advantage because of large profits and advertising budgets. Is this dubious finding the latest grasp at finding the soda industry’s Acilles heel ? Kind of seems so.

Marion,
I fully applaud the fact that unlike most media, you didn’t look at it and say “Wow! Cause and effect!” and have instead taken a dubious note at this. I’ll say I’m an amateur statistician, having taken statistics in college and then having written a thesis based upon a statistical analysis of a large database. However, a couple things about the study do seem to pop out at me. A huge factor is the amount of questions going into it, and the answers coming out. In my own work, I quickly realized that even with a sample group of over 4000 specimen, I still had a difficult time comparing things, as there were so many differences between the specimen that no sort of control could be taken into account. As you point out, in order to directly link stroke and diet sodas, a much more rigorous study would have to be implemented. The value of a broad study such as this though is the fact that it can show correlations between two or more variables, and that these can then be independently investigated. As the authors themselves show, their findings are potential, not absolute.

In any case, I completely agree with you: an artificial sweetener isn’t real food. I’d rather consume sugar.

To further it, last year I remember reading a book from the early 70′s entitled “The Sugar Trap and How to Avoid It” which had a lengthy section on artificial sweeteners, which were just becoming the hip new thing. Besides the typical link between artificial sweeteners and cancer, the book raised another important point. Multiple studies showed that the consumption of artificial sweeteners did not show a marked decrease in sugar consumption. On the contrary, the sweeteners trained the subject’s taste to enjoy even sweeter things. Therefore, while the caloric sweet from the products with artificial sweeteners was removed, the subjects began to consume other sugary products in larger amounts, therefore leading to an overall increase in sugary products.

Marion is correct- we need to look at the empirical evidence to determine if this stuff is bad- a personal dislike of artificial foods (which I fully share) is not enough. The next steps are to replicate these findings, rule out confounding factors and to determine a possible causal mechanism. Science takes time. If you don’t want to eat foods you find suspicious, by all means avoid them.

[...] Do diet sodas really cause stroke? I'm dubious. - Food Politics [...]

[...] Dr. Marion Nestle’s take on the study linking diet soda & strokes. [...]

It is a delight, whenever a bolt of reality strikes, to witness the resulting confusion among the blindly faithful disciples of any evangelist.

Marion Nestle’s unusual restraint, sponsoring surprise and confusion as it has, clearly is less to do with scientific principles than with food politics.

She finds a reported 48% increased incidence of stroke risk (after correction for factors including metabolic syndrome) to be “astonishingly high”. Oddly, however, in her book “Food Politics” she champions study conclusions “that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 times” [that's an eye-popping 60% increase!]. Nestle is hesitant over the “questionaire” or survey approach…but seems perfectly content to conduct most of the ‘research’ for her popular books while shopping the aisles of her favorite local supermarket [Wegman of Ithaca].

This little diet soda study, flawed as it is, dares to challenge the nebulous concept of ‘metabolic syndrome’, a concept whole-heartedly embraced by Dr. Nestle and from which she derives her license to profitably preach social pop-science over nutritional pure science.

Thus, light is shed on the paradox of Nestle’s sudden display of healthy skepticism…it’s just food politics in action.