Coca-Cola paid 8 million in euro to influence French health researches - Sensationalist Headlines

Reminds me of a video I saw years back where someone added milk to a bottle of Coke and the milk instantly curdled due to the citric acid content and separated out the food coloring. The video was titled something like "You'll never drink coke again after watching this!" or something equally asinine, and I'm still not entirely sure what they were trying to prove.

Milk curdles when you add vodka to it after a long enough period but people still drink White Russians. I've drank a curdled White Russian and I can honestly tell you it's the worst fucking shit holy god do not do that. Ever.

Y'know the government sells dilapidated missile silos every now and then on the cheap. you could look into those!

When I need a drink at college I always buy a Vit-Hit, not because I particularly like it but because it's the only drink I could find with less than 10 grams of sugar per millilitre. I would buy water but the college has water fountains you can use for free and water is more expensive than most drinks. Shits fucked up.

Water's the way to go, or if you can find it kombucha and other fermented drinks are usually low/no sugar.

I want it to look normal and have reasonable access to things like high-speed internet and civilization, though. Like, you'd never know by looking at it that it wasn't just a normal-ass brick house.

I see nothing in that suggesting it increases Insulin offtake, the report you linked seems to mostly touch up on psychological plays that people can be vulnerable and educated on.

It's not a myth, it's something that has conflicting evidence and is not settled science. Even the Harvard article you linked mentions this (not at work so can't pull the full article): You've asked a question scientists are still working to answer. Studies of artificial sweeteners are mixed, with some indicating that people using them eat fewer calories and lose weight or maintain a stable weight. However, in a few studies, artificial sweeteners were associated with weight gain, which might increase the risk of developing insulin resistance—a condition in which body cells do not respond properly to insulin and thus cannot easily absorb glucose from the blood-stream. Insulin resistance occurs due to the body becoming habituated to the effects of insulin, so more insulin is needed to convert the same amount of blood sugar into fat (lipogenesis). It happens to all carbohydrates (which are broken down into glucose, a sugar), which is why carbs are an effective source of energy and why our bodies store fat compared to other dietary sources. Insulin lowers blood sugar levels. From that brief paragraph there's no refutation of the effect on insulin levels and references that studies show people consume more calories when drinking artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners don't raise your blood sugar level, but there's evidence to suggest the pancreas secretes insulin as if the blood sugar content is higher. If I remember correctly it has something to do with how the body breaks down the artificial sweeteners. When I'm back in my office Monday I'll check our reference database where I read the study that showed this. I might be misremembering Also, the WebMD article doesn't seem to link the study it mentions, or at least I can't find it on mobile, so I can't offer my thoughts on it.

Artificial sweeteners having correlation to weight gain is mostly pinned on people treating it as a get out of jail free card as opposed to a tool for losing weight. Literally your own source didn't back you up on this point, it only said people treat artificial sweeteners poorly and ignore the other factors surrounding them that can contribute to poor eating.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23633524 Compared with the control condition, sucralose ingestion caused 1) a greater incremental increase in peak plasma glucose concentrations (4.2 ± 0.2 vs. 4.8 ± 0.3 mmol/L; P = 0.03), 2) a 20 ± 8% greater incremental increase in insulin area under the curve (AUC) (P < 0.03), 3) a 22 ± 7% greater peak insulin secretion rate (P < 0.02), 4) a 7 ± 4% decrease in insulin clearance (P = 0.04), and 5) a 23 ± 20% decrease in SI (P = 0.01). These data demonstrate that sucralose affects the glycemic and insulin responses to an oral glucose load in obese people who do not normally consume NNS. Sucralose is Splenda by the way. Slightly related is glucose intolerance, which is hyperglycemia as seen in conditions like pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and type II https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25231862 Here we demonstrate that consumption of commonly used NAS {non-nutritive sweeteners, aka artificial sweeteners} formulations drives the development of glucose intolerance through induction of compositional and functional alterations to the intestinal microbiota. These NAS-mediated deleterious metabolic effects are abrogated by antibiotic treatment, and are fully transferrable to germ-free mice upon faecal transplantation of microbiota configurations from NAS-consuming mice, or of microbiota anaerobically incubated in the presence of NAS. We identify NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage. I'll see if I can get a copy of the edition of Nature this study was published in. Right now research on the effects of artificial sweeteners is in it's infancy. But my original point, at least the one I intended to express, is that artificial sweeteners have complex effects on the body and we're not exactly positive on the definitive reason why there are correlations with weight gain and diet soda, but to discount it as an excuse to eat more calories belittles the potential effect these sweeteners have on the body as simply a lack of will. Artificial sweeteners are not and should not be promoted as a less sugar alternative (like the image showed) because it misleads the public into thinking it's okay to drink them in excess because the harmful "sugar" isn't present.

Boiling foodstuffs not meant for boiling makes them unappetizing. Who knew

"It's fine in moderation"