[Silock]

Originally Posted by Just Passin' By

Again, you're making arguments countering claims that weren't made, and you're obviously not open to new research since some new research has shown weight gain potentially attributable to artificial sweeteneres and you dismissed that out of hand, so you can shove your finger up your ass.

No, you posted an article that doesn't contain "new research." The research in your article is from 2008, and is severely flawed. I'll later post two research reviews from 2012, and an earlier, more controlled study that show this "new research" to be a crock.

I dismissed nothing out of hand. I explained exactly why I dismissed your two links. Rats aren't humans, and there are significant differences in carbohydrate metabolism that make them a poor substitute for human studies. The conclusion of the "new research" was basically "Well, this study doesn't give us any kind of conclusion, because it could go in any number of directions." That is basically the scientific equivalent of

Scientist 1: "Hey, I might have seen Sasquatch . . . but it also could have been a butterfly."

Scientist 2: "Well, we mostly definitely didn't see a Sasquatch, and we also saw a ton of other evidence that Sasquatch doesn't even exist."

Scientist 1: "Well . . . there MIGHT be a Sasquatch."

Scientist 2: "There's no Sasquatch."

But, for a better understanding of why the research in your linked article is fatally flawed, I point to the response letter written to the publisher of said research.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1....2008.623/full

You can read it for yourself, but I'll highlight the really important bits.

[T]he baseline nutritional data collection was carried out in two phases, which spanned the time periods, 1979–1982 for Cohort 1 and 1984–1988 for Cohort 2. Until the mid-1980s, the main artificial sweetener used in foods and low calorie carbonated beverages (the primary AS application) was saccharine. Aspartame was not even approved for use in any food until July 1981, and its use in beverages was not approved until 1983. Thus, AS use by the whole of Cohort 1, and likely some subjects in Cohort 2, included little to no aspartame. The only data presented in the article, which actually involved aspartame, are depicted in Figure 2b. The remaining data presented in the article presumably represents a mix of various sweeteners, each of which is completely different in its chemical structure and metabolism.

We also wish to call to your attention a 2006 meta-analysis of clinical trails of aspartame use for weight control, which found no increase in BMI (2).

Those studies can be found here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...564.x/abstract

and here:

http://www.ncbi..nih.gov/pubmed/17828671

You haven't shown me any actual evidence diet soda makes you fat. I can, and have, pointed you to an actual meta-study showing the complete opposite, but here's another one, anyway. It's a bit older, but the point still stands.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/51/6/963

"To examine whether artificial sweeteners aid in the control of long-term food intake and body weight, we gave free-living, normal-weight subjects 1150 g soda sweetened with aspartame (APM) or high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) per day. Relative to when no soda was given, drinking APM-sweetened soda for 3 wk significantly reduced calorie intake of both females (n = 9) and males (n = 21) and decreased the body weight of males but not of females.
*my note: Although female weight reduction was not statistically significant, it was still a loss of weight; definitely not a weight gain*
However, drinking HFCS-sweetened soda for 3 wk significantly increased the calorie intake and body weight of both sexes. Ingesting either type of soda reduced intake of sugar from the diet without affecting intake of other nutrients. Drinking large volumes of APM-sweetened soda, in contrast to drinking HFCS-sweetened soda, reduces sugar intake and thus may facilitate the control of calorie intake and body weight."

The major limitation of this study is that total caloric intake wasn't limited by the study's design (although, it was recorded and logged appropriately). But hey, that's kinda what you were asking for when you said this:

In real life, though, secondary impacts of things such as the impact of a particular food on overall diet actually matter.

So, what we are left with is actual scientific evidence that artificial sweeteners did not cause weight gain (along with a hefty amount of research reviews saying that there's no evidence that artificial sweeteners contribute to weight gain http://www.ncbi..nih.gov/pubmed/23037901 and http://jn.nutrition.org/content/142/6/1163s.abstract ), and then some SEVERELY FLAWED speculation that they *could.* Guess which one I'm going to base my opinion on.

You're free to do the same.