Sugary drinks and cancer risk: results from NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

I'm down to about 1-2 Cokes every week. I will crumble and drink a 20 oz Coke about once a week and drink water or ice tea (either unsweetened or low-sweetened (90 calories)).

The irony is that an equivalent glass of milk has 2x the number of calories as Coke, but I'll drink a glass of milk a day for the calcium, etc.

You may or may not have tried cold turkey, but it’s worth a shot if your current taper doesn’t produce results. You could always stock up on oranges, and lemon slices for the water. Something to give you some sugar in food + flavour to the water. It’s hard to overdose on oranges, and it gets the sugar into a solid rather than a liquid form.

YMMV, but I’ve often found cold turkey a relief whenever I had long struggles with something before trying it. I’d marka piece of paper, and relax other responsibilities and focus on stuff like sleep and exercise etc during the period to cushion the blow.

...But between us and Virtue the gods have placed sweat: long and steep is the path that leads to her, and it is rough at the first; but when a man has reached the top, then is she easy to reach, though before that she was hard.

(Hesiod, Works and Days)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

"Natural" poison Ivy, sharks, and fire vs "unnatural" antibiotics, chemotherapy, insulin shots.

Sources: anything published by Dr. Robert Lustig @ UCSF

It's very difficult to eat 5 oranges in one go.

It's very easy to drink the same 5 oranges as a fresh squeezed drink.

So it's basically a question of quantity, eating it makes you full very quickly, unlike drinking it.

One key thing about squeezing your own juice is that typically you get more fiber in your diet and fiber usually has a negative impact on cancer, which I would strongly suspect would mitigate the impact of the sugars... in addition there is a health consciousness effect where you might notice that some man or woman who is that committed to fresh-squeezing fruit juice for themselves and their kids, probably has other healthy habits that would tend to discourage cancers.

Truly fresh, unpasteurized orange juice only lasts a few days.

In either case, you're drinking lots fructose that's been separated from fiber. Without fiber, there is nothing to slow digestion of that fructose, so you end up with a massive glycemic impact. Alongside that, fructose directly causes leptin resistance, resulting in overeating.

Also beware of eating too much fruit all at once. Fiber can only do so much, and a stomach full of oranges will also lead to the same result.

Milk sugars (lactose, glucose, galactose) don't affect leptin or ghrelin, so there's no risk of overeating as a result. (I also tend reduce my intake of these healthy milk sugars by using heavy whipping cream instead of whole milk.)