Diet soda.
Why is it so bad for you? How does it make your chances of becoming obese greater, even greater than regular soda?

Flavored water.
Is flavored water any better than diet soda, since they both have artificial sweetners?

Everyone I know wants to understand these questions. It would be great if someone could find scientific evidence on this topic.

Anoop, I think this would be a great topic for the actual page too.

I don’t think diet soda really contributes to obesity.

Or I don’t think artificial flavors have been shown to cause cancer or whatever. I would write on article oneday on these.

That’s what I was thinking. It doesn’t make sense. How does something with 0 cals lead to obesity?
I saw some sites say the risk was 40% higher with every diet soda. I thought this was hard to believe.

the sites are probably not telling you the whole truth

for example, check out anoop’s excellent article on relative and absolute % increase on the web site
and I’m not sure about this, but I remember some epidemiological studies being done with aspartame that show
an increase in risk of obesity with diet soda
a very casual association, not enough to draw conclusions from
if I also remember correctly, there were a number of study flaws

There is some talk about how artificial sweeteners can increase overconsumption of other calorie dense food. This could be due to a physiological mechanism which increase the desire for sweet food and/or calorie dense foods or people just think they can gorge on other foods since they saved some calories by having a diet soda. None of these hypothesis have been really proven. So they are probably using correlational evidence in talking about risk. So it is not a direct causal erelation.

And did you see if the 40% was relative or absolute risk? Usually when you see this big increase in risk increase or reduction in news, it is expressed in relative risk to scare/impress people.