Today's WebMD email has an interesting factoid...

[TreasonousBastard]

Just one diet soda a day could triple your chances of dementia.

Now, who do we know who drinks even more than one?

https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-worst-foods-for-your-brain

[niyad]

1. still waiting for cholesterol to do its damned job.

[MontanaMama]

6. I have been saying this for YEARS!

If lipids don’t take him then by all means, let diet soda be our guest!

[MLAA]

2. I'm currently reading The Alzheimer's Solution

Sugar is also a big culprit. I’m trying to reduce then eliminate it. Just bought some monk fruit that looks like sugar.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Saturated fat, too. And donuts! No more comfort food.

[MLAA]

4. I try to stick to Whole Foods plant based.

But I use more packaged food than is good for me like impossible burgers and Just Egg (egg replacer). I need to cook more 😬

[Lord Ludd]

7. You're still doing better than most

I've eaten only processed/packaged veggie/vegan "foods" nearly all my adult life, & the only health condition I have in my mid-70s is an enlarged prostate (BFD).

Have you tried Boca burgers? Their Original Vegan Burgers (box of 12 for $9.99 at Fry's/Kroger's) are pretty tasty & are only 70 calories each with 0g sugar, 0.5g fat & 13g protein.

[MLAA]

20. I will try the Boca burgers they sound really good and healthy.

I also like the Quorn spicy chicken-like patties. I just found Gardein frozen battered chicken (not the strips). They come 3 to a bag and make great sandwiches.

[NJCher]

15. Come join us on the

What’s for dinner thread. There you will find many cooks with 3-5 ingredient dishes.

Btw, I like the beyond products and use them on occasion.

[Orrex]

10. Perhaps it's better stated that sugar is *suspected* as a big culprit

or that the authors *name* sugar as a big culprit, but I'm not aware of a controlled study that clearly identifies sugar as a big culprit, any more than diet sodas are.

By all means, cut back on refined sugar, which seems to have little or no positive impact on health, but it's risky to make firm declarations about sugar's blame in this or that particular medical condition without fairly solid data.


Unless you have access to such a peer-reviewed study, of course; in which case I will cheerfully recant.

[Duppers]

13. Sugar is worse,* so we should just skip sodas...

altogether.

* for us diabetics.

Phooey! I love diet soda but luckily, have cut back immensely in the last few yrs.

[Quixote1818]

5. These studies are not very convincing

As this article points out, people could be sneaking regular sugary drinks among all kinds of other problems with the studies.

Snip: This study is just more of the junk epidemiology that we have debunked for the past 21 years. It has all the usual pitfalls (i.e., poor quality data, statistical malpractice, no biological plausibility, etc.) but I spotlight it because of this: The soda intake data is derived from patient recall (self-report) — not very reliable to start with but here compounded by subjects with… dementia. That’s the ticket, ask people with memory problems how much soda they consumed.

https://junkscience.com/2017/04/claim-diet-soda-causes-dementia/

[Warpy]

12. No, they're not

It seems whenever milk sales go down or prices are about to jump again, they come out with another one of these bogus studies.

One thing does seem clear, that people who drink a lot of diet soda tend to be heavier, probably because they think since they saved the calories in the soda, they can spend them by eating a quart of ice cream.

[progressoid]

8. Researchers are quick to point out that this demonstrates correlation but not cause-and-effect

Researchers are quick to point out that these findings, which appear separately in the journals Alzheimer’s & Dementia and Stroke,

Although the researchers took age, smoking, diet quality, and other factors into account, they could not completely control for preexisting conditions like diabetes, which may have developed over the course of the study and is a known risk factor for dementia. Diabetics, as a group, drink more diet soda on average, as a way to limit their sugar consumption, and some of the correlation between diet soda intake and dementia may be due to diabetes, as well as other vascular risk factors.

Study does not prove diet soda causes Alzheimer’s disease or stroke
The recent study in the journal Stroke has some major caveats

The study did not prove that artificial sweeteners cause stroke, Alzheimer’s disease or any type of dementia. In fact, this kind of study design cannot prove causation. To be fair, the authors were careful to say that the study was not “able to prove cause and effect and only shows a trend among one group of people.”

Many news articles didn't reflect this.

[NNadir]

9. Thank you. n/t.

[Quixote1818]

11. This channel covers this quite nicely

[progressoid]

18. +1

Nicely done indeed.

[CloudWatcher]

19. +1000000

Correlation does not imply cause and effect.

But unless you've studied a little bit of statistics, that means nothing to you.

So a very large percentage of our population has no framework to understand what's being reported. And after dozens of breathless stories that report apparently conflicting results, confidence in science is basically shattered.

All of which would be a big yawn, except for little things like covid and a world population that doesn't trust science ... and doesn't have the skills to understand the risks involved.

I wonder ... if we'd all had statistics in high school, would we still have this political divide on taking the covid vaccines?

[Duppers]

14. No wonder...

I'm losing what brain cells I had.


Anyway, water has been my #1 beverage, but still, I've been drinking one a day for too long.

[NJCher]

16. I don't like the stuff

I make my own alkaline water. I also drink herb teas (no teabags, loose leaf) and kombucha.

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

17. How do you make alkaline water, and why do you drink it? nt