This study seems to very clearly indicate Diet Coke/Coke Zero is much healthier than Coke.

There are tons of studies like this that concretely show how bad sugar is for you, while most studies show that artificial sweeteners have no (or minimal relative to sugar) adverse health effects.

Some years back there were press articles citing studies (of course you can't believe what you see in the headlines) that claimed artificial sweeteners don't have the same affect on satiety as real sugar, causing you to eat more.

That matches my one-person anecdotal observations, but perhaps that isn't much to go by. Find what works for you. I had much better luck with health and personal fitness by that vs. getting overly worried about what other people say works.

This doesn't invalid that hypothesis. A lot of people drink a mix of both. Artificial sweeteners can confuse your brain/hormone systems and you may consume more other calories (studies show this in mice).

We are more aware than mice though. Sugar is really bad for you .. really bad. Read up on keto diets (staying under 30g or sometimes under 10g of carbs per day .. limiting carb consumption to fruits with high fiber when you do eat them). I had a good friend who got on Ketro while he had cancer .. didn't tell his doctor, but within a few week a tumor shrunk by nearly a cm .. enough they could now operate.

Sugar is a powerful fuel source and modern humans don't need very much of it at all. The findings of this study don't really surprise me. All that extra unneeded sugar can totally feed young cancer cells.

> Read up on keto diets

I politely decline. In 2017 and 2018 I lost 100 lbs in 18 months and the primary staple of my diet was pasta dishes. The low-carb thing is not for me.

Like I said, find what works for you and ignore what people say is supposed to work. Today it is quite trendy to demonize carbs, tomorrow it may be something else, meanwhile plenty of healthy people eat lots of demonized items, but a narrow focus and overemphasis on good/bad may cause you to lose the big picture.

Diet drinks seem to not affect cancer, but the jury is still out on heart disease.

I would agree that the jury is still out on diet drinks and heart disease, but it is pretty conclusive[1][2][3] that regular soda increases your risk of heart disease.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/daily-sugary-drink-linked-hear...

[2] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/aha-dsd03141...

[3] https://consumer.healthday.com/cardiovascular-health-informa...

Aspartame is bad for your in large quantities. The safe standard is 40mg/kg/day.

So my guess it is safer than sugar.

Claims that artificial sweetners are bad fall into the category of drinking litres of water in a short period of time.

Bad how? Please substantiate the claims. I remember the intake limit being based on some very conservative theory on handling excess uric acid.

Well I meant as bad as drinking too much water.

When your weight is 70kg you can safely consume 2800mg per day. And that's a lot!

I would drink Mexican coke over regular coke. This is sucrose vs high fructose corn syrup.

There is plenty of evidence that artificial sweeteners spike your insulin in the same way that sugars do[1], leading to adverse effects.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3772345/

Are you sure that's what it says? It seems to talk a lot about psychological pavlovian responses, but I see this:

> Artificial sweeteners alone do not stimulate insulin or incretin release in vivo

> Unlike caloric sweeteners, artificial sweeteners do not augment insulin or incretin release in response to meals

If you are just going to drink it once, there is no difference.

If you are going to drink them habitually then we need to know more about the contexts in which you drink them, how often, etc. If you were to only drink one per week for example and you are otherwise living a healthy life, then probably you would find something like “they are about dead even but maybe the Coke is ever so slightly healthier?”—this sort of thing gets dominated by the really little things like some people have phenylketonuria which means they shouldn’t consume proteins containing the amino acid phenylalanine, and aspartame is a really simple protein (only two amino acids, I think?) containing phenylalanine.

On the flip side, if you drink a lot of Coke or fruit juice, each dose is giving you about as much calories as a glass of beer or wine and a similar analysis results; a bunch of those calories in both cases need to be processed by your liver and your liver can get overworked and even if it doesn’t get overworked you are likely not hitting the gym once for each sugary drink and so the surplus energy increases your equilibrium weight until you start burning the extra calories by merely existing.

By contrast the research on artificial sweeteners tends to not show negative effects here. There are some potential risks; I know a guy who is very DIY-health-ish who used to taste his urine because of some prediabetic condition where he would pee out sugars; he said that he would never drink Diet Coke again because it made his urine taste sweet (most of it passed through unharmed) but unnaturally foul (some of the aspartame was getting converted into something really nasty).

But the key thing is that most artificial sweeteners are thousands or tens of thousands of times more sweet than sugar, so there's actually surprisingly few molecules in the drink that are artificial, so you tend to get an unusually low dose of any toxicity. This is also why artificial sweeteners have a huge problem matching the natural taste of sugar—amplification of a weak signal always makes it really hard to replicate a target signal.

If you just rely on the news media, you'd be convinced that drinking anything but purified water would kill you. Even though there's a lot of news stories about diet sodas, doesn't mean there's solid evidence they're bad for you [1]. A lot of journals won't even publish articles that have negative results (e.g. do not show a link), so you can't rely on the number of studies backing one way or another.

So, if diet soda isn't bad for you, is a surgary drink worse. Since the difference between the two is sugar vs. artificial sweetener, the question can be changed to "is sugar worse for you than artificial sweeteners". Again you probably won't find any definitive evidence one way or another. The actual settled science would just boil down to whether you're consuming too many calories.

[1] https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20170505/diet-soda-health-ri...

> The consumption of sugary drinks was significantly associated with the risk of overall cancer... The consumption of artificially sweetened beverages was not associated with the risk of cancer

According to the study, diet drinks are not associated with cancer

This study says: With respect to cancer, you’re better off with Diet.

It does not say whether you’re better off with Diet from non-cancer perspectives - such as diabetes, obesity, endocrine system disorders, osteoporosis, tooth cavities, and so forth.

Generally people say “healthier” to mean “will I die sooner”, so the study you should be looking for to answer “healthier” is likely a relative comparison of mortal causes and age of death between soda and diet drinkers.