Diet soda not making us fat

Evil?

Health related journalism makes me crazy.  It's so often filled with generalizations and inaccuracies and half-formed ideas that are presented as fact.  Nutrition and fitness related reporting is the worst.  Publishers of websites and magazines know that "the latest science secret to help you get thin!" is nearly the ultimate bait to get readers' eyes on their publications.  (There's only one other topic that works better).

Recent reports suggesting that diet soda could cause weight gain have always seemed questionable.  While I'm not a huge diet soda fan, I'm also not the only one to wonder if the correlation between diet soda and weight gain might not equal causation.  

Well, a ground breaking study (#sarcasm) by researchers at the University of North Carolina has answered the question.
According to a report on NPR's "Morning Edition" the earlier studies that correlated weight gain and diet soda consumption (here's the best part) never controlled for the subjects' other dietary habits.  The UNC researchers thought this was kind of a big omission. 

So in a large study of  4,000 adults who had completed detailed food surveys over a period of 20 years.  They found that diet soda drinkers who ate a prudent diet were 13% less likely to develop metabolic syndrome (obesity related disorders) than those who drank diet soda and ate a typical Western diet high in fatty, processed foods.  Healthy-eating, diet soda drinkers were only 2.2% more likely to develop metabolic syndrome than prudent eaters who drank no diet soda.

As you can see, this study (while not proving that diet soda is actually good for you) opens big holes in the idea that drinking diet soda causes weight gain.

If only some critical thinking and analytical skills were applied in advance with stories like this, but that is extremely unlikely to happen.