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“Diet drinks make you fat”, “Diet drink consumers put on more weight” and so on read the headlines in many of today’s papers. Interesting, I thought as I started reading on. Damning stat after damning stat were shouted out as I read on and on and then, just as I was getting to the end of the columns, I notice some little noises, whispers of important, but inconvenient truths thrown in the bottom, in a sigh to the notion of editorial balance. 

As a former broadcast journalist, I totally appreciate the need for newsrooms to produce big headlines and catchy content, but must this so often be done at the expense of the facts? And more to the point, is it really responsible to scare the public in this way?

Today’s headlines have come out of a diabetes conference in the States where two studies were presented. Study one looked at nearly 500 people over ten years and compared the weight of those who drank diet fizzy drinks with those who didn’t. They found that those who had consumed the drinks had bigger waistlines. But significantly, the study didn’t account for what any of these people had been eating all this time nor did it account for their lifestyle and exercise patterns – surely the most significant factors in comparing weight gain across people? If all those drinking diet fizzy drinks had simultaneously been munching three pizzas a day, while those avoiding the drinks had been eating small salads, the weight difference would have been noticeable, but totally unrelated to the drinks.

Study two was carried out on mice and linked the sweetener aspartame, used in some diet fizzy drinks, with damage in the pancreas that can occur in early diabetes. Using this data (the details of which fail to appear in any of the papers), researchers have suggested that artificial sweeteners could make us feel more hungry. But, as any scientist knows, experiments on mice are a far cry from advanced human trials and as Dr John Stevenson from Imperial College London points out “it takes a quantum leap to relate the effects of aspartame [sweetener] in diabetic-prone mice to humans”. In fact, at this stage the majority of credible studies have demonstrated that replacing sugary drinks with light versions (made with low calorie sweeteners) effectively cuts your calorie intake and contribute to weight loss.

Drinking light fizzy drinks isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to losing weight and their producers never make this claim. But they are enjoyed by millions of people around the world and articles like these, which lack context and credibility, are only going to terrify them unduly and damage manufacturers unfairly.