...to escape from the laboratory too soon.
Consider, for example, the purported connection between fizzy drinks and heart disease.
As released to the public, it's worthy of a politician, not a scientist. Politicians love to point fingers at, e.g., fizzy drinks for contributing to childhood obesity, while failing to note that fruit juice has a sugar content on par with sugary soda pop... nope, that's irrelevant, it's the fizz that makes the kids swell up! Fruit juice is good for you; soda is bad!
Well, this new study supposedly shows bad metabolic effects from both sugary and non-sugary soda. What seems to be lacking, though, is any sort of breakdown by type of soda, beyond sugar/no-sugar. This makes it impossible to identify common factors beyond the basics.
The class of "soda pop" has two ingredients in common: water and carbon dioxide. The human body requires water, so that's presumably not it. I rather doubt it's the carbon dioxide, either, as the body constantly produces the stuff, and has an effective means of disposing of it. (Remember, every time you exhale, you make a little flower happy. Making Al Gore cry is a bonus.)
So... is it some other commonly-used ingredient?
Or... is it the water, after all? Near the bottom of the linked article, there's speculation that drinking any sort of liquids with a meal leads to increased eating later. A discovery that drinking water with meals causes metabolic disorders would seem to run contrary to conventional wisdom, but wouldn't make for good politics. Ya just can't accuse the municipal water-monger of contributing to obesity and heart disease....
Afterthought: D'oh! Correlation, as they say, is not causation. What if the headline has it backwards? What if "metabolic syndrome" causes people to be thirsty at mealtimes, and soda pop is what's handy?
Further commentary may be found, under a suitable title and amusing choice of category names, here. Read the comments, too.
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