{"id":238440,"date":"2025-09-19T08:05:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T08:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/238440\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T08:05:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T08:05:15","slug":"are-soda-and-artificial-sweeteners-unhealthy-an-epidemiologists-review-of-the-latest-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/238440\/","title":{"rendered":"Are soda and artificial sweeteners unhealthy? An epidemiologist\u2019s review of the latest study."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

Society has a remarkable love-hate relationship with artificial sweeteners. Originally marketed as a miracle\u2014enjoy your favorite foods without the nasty sugar!\u2014they\u2019re now the target of wellness influencers across the internet. It\u2019s not just health \u201ccoaches\u201d and homesteading moms leading the charge: This year\u2019s deeply problematic Make America Healthy Again report<\/a> singles out artificial sweeteners as one of the major issues with American food.<\/p>\n

Recent headlines seem to support this belief. According to dozens of articles, artificial sweeteners<\/a> are harming our cognitive health<\/a>. The news sounds scary for those of us who enjoy the occasional artificially sweetened soda<\/a>, let alone the (many) people who consider a can of Diet Coke to be a personal accessory<\/a>. What if these chemicals really are destroying our neurons?<\/p>\n

Fortunately for those of you who, like me, enjoy a regular can of Pepsi Zero Sugar, the data is extremely weak. Artificial sweeteners are probably fine for your brain.<\/p>\n

These alarmist headlines are based on a new study<\/a> that analyzes a medium-sized cohort of Brazilian public servants. People were asked once about the foods that they ate and then followed up with for about a decade, and then the authors looked at the association between various sweeteners and later cognitive health. Basically, they looked to see if the people who ate more sweeteners had worse brain function over time.<\/p>\n

The results were pretty unimpressive. In the entire sample of people, there was no significant relationship between the sweeteners in the study and cognitive health. For people under 60, there were some declines in memory associated with more sweeteners, but no such findings for people over 60. There were also very mixed results: Two measures of cognitive decline showed some associations with sweeteners, but another test had different results.<\/p>\n

In addition, the reductions in cognitive health for the under-60 group were mostly very small. People who ate the most sweeteners\u2014which in this case was up to 200 times as much as people who ate the least\u2014lost about half a point more on a 30-point scale over the decade of the study. That\u2019s not nothing, but with such a huge difference in intake, it\u2019s remarkable that the difference in cognitive issues was so small. (Would you rather: Give up Diet Coke, or forget, say, your college roommate\u2019s stepdad\u2019s name 10 years down the line?)<\/p>\n

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    Scientists Tested the Link Between Artificial Sweetener and Cognitive Decline. Here\u2019s What You Need to Know.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This study was also observational, which regular readers know<\/a> introduces all sorts of issues. In this case, that means that the authors were just testing correlations rather than looking at whether one thing caused another. There are all sorts of issues that could have messed up the results that an observational study can\u2019t control for. It\u2019s not easy to remember what you ate for lunch last Wednesday, and there\u2019s really only so much you can do with an analysis looking at what foods people say they eat. People are notoriously terrible at answering this sort of questionnaire, and often get large parts of them wrong.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s also very hard to take a food-frequency questionnaire and identify specific additives in people\u2019s diets. You have to make some sort of estimate based on what you think the products that they eat are likely to contain, but those guesses are always going to have holes. (Brazilian commenters online have noted that tagatose, one of the sweeteners included in the study, is actually a type of sugar and is also not used at all in Brazil<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

    Perhaps most importantly, the idea that this blend of sweeteners is harming cognitive health is hard to understand. The list of sweeteners that the study analyzed together includes vastly different chemicals<\/a>, all of which break down into different things inside our body. These likely wouldn\u2019t all impact cognitive health in the same way.<\/p>\n

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    \"\"<\/p>\n

    \n Isobel Whitcomb
    \n They Had a Mysterious Illness. Someone Finally Told Them It Was Real\u2014and There Was a Cure. They Got Something Very Different.
    \n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    It\u2019s easy to see why these headlines draw us in: There\u2019s so much conflicting information out there about what\u2019s \u201chealthy\u201d and what isn\u2019t. Nutritional epidemiology has had some very interesting findings, but there is very little that this sort of study can really tell us about what you should have in your diet. If I\u2019m being generous, it\u2019s an interesting prompt for further research. More realistically, it\u2019s just a distraction.<\/p>\n

    We already knew that people who drink and eat artificial sweeteners are generally worse off than people who don\u2019t. That\u2019s no surprise\u2014the main reason we use these additives is to lose weight. Generally, people who want to lose weight are a bit less healthy than people who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

    My verdict: There\u2019s no good evidence that these sweeteners are harming your brain. My advice is always to drink water if you\u2019re really worried, but this new data certainly won\u2019t stop me from popping open a can of Pepsi Max.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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