[rant] If you're going to claim that your strong opinions are facts, please treat them as such and give citations or back them up yourself. [/rant]
Ruby is not my favorite language anymore, but I still use it and see evidence that there is a huge place it fills in the dev community and ecosystem. I have never used a more expressive language. I'm stating this as a fact from what I have experienced, and I'm giving points that back it up. There are dozens of actively maintained Ruby projects, some of which are the most popular repos on GitHub. I don't see any evidence that the Ruby ecosystem is on a downward trend of activity and is "dying", so I have no reason to think otherwise.
This kind of stuff reminds me why I take breaks from HackerNews every once in a while -_- Yuck.
I love this game. It starts out simple, but as your country's relations with other countries change, the rules for letting people in and the amount of security in place changes.
I agree that calories can have different impacts on people. We all require a certain intake of calories to achieve a certain weight or build. There are a lot of different variables that make this happen, such as exercise, lifestyle, genetics, and so on.
But where is the evidence that a calorie-free beverage can have an impact on your metabolism? You're eliminating the idea of calories entirely with diet soda, so I don't see how your argument stands any ground.
Er, this whole topic can be a little misleading. I haven't found a single reputable study that claims diet soda itself causes weight gain. Rather, just as the reasoning in this article suggests, the only scientific fact they present is that the consumption of diet soda itself does not encourage weight loss.
Side note: Do any brands really advertise drinking their diet soda as a method of (actual) weight loss? I can't think of any that actually present it this way.
It goes on to say that substituting sugary soda for diet soda isn't enough for most people to stop gaining weight. This is probably because you're likely to substitue the calories and sugars for something else, since your body notices its getting less of something and will crave it.
Yet you have things like this:
"One large study found that people who drank artificially sweetened soda were more likely to experience weight gain than those who drank non-diet soda"
This again is a correlation with the typical behavior of a diet soda drinker. They're not drinking diet soda because they want to lose weight. Rather, they're drinking it because they don't want to gain weight. They could have a terrible diet overall and this alone does nothing but move the problem over into, say, consuming two scoops of ice scream after dinner everyday. All because the soda they had during lunch didn't satisfy their bodily craving of refined sugars.
So this is a case of correlation not being causation. These types of articles do nothing but encourage this error to propagate. Perhaps the term "diet soda" is misleading in itself, but perhaps telling people that drinking a calorie-free drink will make them gain weight is just as silly as telling people it will make them lose weight.
Very misleading. In fact, the author of this study is a behavioral neurologist, hence studying human behavior relating to diet drinks rather than diet drinks themselves. Drink as much diet soda as you like, if the rest of your diet is healthy then you're fine. This article is just typical fear-mongering against artificial sweeteners, I'm surprised it got up voted here.
Yes, because being sceptical of substances that get approved after some hasty testing, with big push from a few large multinationals is "batshit insane".
The sceptic thing is to thing scientists are above human and infallible. And to ignore tons of precedents of BS substances and drugs being brough to the market, only to be recalled a few years or even a few decades later.
Because "science" is a magic word, that somehow overcomes systemic problems in how burecreacies work, how people (including whole teams) react to money, and how judgements can be wrong. To suggest otherwise is "batshit insane".
After all, those doing the safety testing can take their sweet time to study long term results, aren't ever lured by money, and understand all possible effects of the substances they approve equally well as the collective scientific community understands non artificial substances used for centuries or millenia, right?
>Very misleading. In fact, the author of this study is a behavioral neurologist, hence studying human behavior relating to diet drinks rather than diet drinks themselves. Drink as much diet soda as you like, if the rest of your diet is healthy then you're fine.
Only people are not Vulcans -- to seperate such things as easy as you put it. For example, who told you that, from a behavioral standpoint, drinking diet soda and having a healthy diet are compatible?
If anything, the "behavioral neurologist" suggests otherwise.
Your idea that diet soda is totally OK (which btw, needs a citation), is based on the premise that people can easily do the healthy diet and still consume diet soda. Which might be true for some, but clearly does not work for most -- not because it is physically impossible, but because other factors (e.g behavioral, psychological, etc) are also into play. Dismissing those as irrelevant does a huge disservice to studying the matter.
"Diet" and "weight loss" are often used interchangeably, sure, but can you think of any instances in which diet Pepsi or diet Coke has been advertised as actually causing weight loss (ie; the product itself is a weight loss supplement)?
I think the name "diet soda" needs to go, as it really is misleading, but (and I could be wrong about this) I don't think these companies have ever claimed their products make you shed pounds by simply drinking them.
Diet definition 3 from Merriam Webster: "the kind and amount of food prescribed for a person or animal for a special reason"
(by the way: who the hell thought it was good idea to put on your dictionary site a ad for wallmart with sound, and REALLY LOUD sound, that plays automatically?)
Diet products were intended, and advertised, as sugar-free stuff, for people that need sugar-free dietary needs (ie: diabetics mostly)
It was the weight loss desperate people that figured that it might result in weight loss and generated lots of confusion.
Here in Brazil the government even passed a law, that to market anything as "diet" the requeriment is that it has 0% sugar, for safety of diabetics. And whoever decides to sue a company because their "diet" product has more calories or more fat for example, is their problem, because "diet" was not meant for that.
>Diet products were intended, and advertised, as sugar-free stuff, for people that need sugar-free dietary needs (ie: diabetics mostly)
Nope, they were advertised as the "healthy" choices for people that care about their sillouette. This is obvious from their advertising (not to mention that they also say it explicitly in ads).
Oh, and diet coke in Europe is code "coca cola LIGHT".
So much for the dietary connotation.
(And, yes, people do NOT know the meaning of diet. The majority understands it only in the sense of "weight loss diet").
