Also the concentration of aspartame in diet coke is way less than the amount of sugar in regular Coke

Neither Coke nor Diet Coke are nutritious. Whether one or the other is a risk is specific to a person, and aspartame as well as other sweeteners aren’t fully understood in terms of risk.

I think these kind of simplistic statements serve to stoke fears around food than actually help people understand them. Added / excess sugar is associated to health risks but ultimately people need to understand their own health as individuals.

Here’s a Healthline article (by no means an authority but still fairly informative) to help expand.

https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/sugar-facts-scientific#8.-Going-on-a-low--or-no-sugar-diet-will-help-you-lose-weight.-

20 diet cokes a day is healthier* than 1 regular coke a day. Sugary drinks are that bad for you.

*ignoring the possible bad effects of drinking 20 cans of any carbonated water.

Bad in what respect?

It's in more food products than just coke

With the amount of aspartame I drink, I'd like the process to hurry up already, please.

The WHO said aspartame is safe to consume within a daily limit of 40 milligrams per kilogram of a person’s body weight.

An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks.

Holy shit you weren’t kidding. And here I was worried that my 2-3 cans a month might be catching up to me!

Read this article and decide if you think the risk is actually that serious. The WHO is almost certainly blowing this way out of proportion and overstating the risks.

To be fair the vast majority of scientists will take other factors into account. If you thought of "this could also be because of that" then you can be sure that the scientists and the ones reviewing the publication also thought about it and addressed it. There are exceptions, sure, but don't just assume everyone is bad at their job.

It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

You say this based on what exactly? Because that's a trivial thing to correct for in an observational study.

Do you have data suggesting overweight people are more likely to drink sugar free sodas? You could just as easily intuit that health conscious folks drink less calories.

Everything is a carcinogen pretty much though.

Eat meat? Better boil or steam everything because any bit of char on meat is a carcinogen. Especially avoid all red meat and sandwiches in general.

Don’t heat potatoes or a lot of other vegetables too high either. They can produce acrylamide, another carcinogen that’s also found in tobacco smoke.

Never drink alcohol either because it’s a carcinogen.

Don’t fry anything. Causes cancer.

Peanuts and peanut butter are laced with aflatoxins that are carcinogenic.

Literally everyone gets cancer several times in life. Most of the time your body kills it off. It’s only when that fails that we catch it. The longer we live and the more we minimize other factors, the bigger cancer will become as a cause of death.

Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.

The thing is that the study with the mice was seriously flawed. There's been more research since then, which is why we're getting this announcement now (even though the announcement itself is little more than "oh hey there might be something to this? We definitely need more research before we can know for sure.")

Aspartame insulted my mother and kicked my dog

Let's be clear, sugary sodas are causing health problems right now.

The almost certainly aren't. Typically the quantities used in these tests are absurd if scaled up to a human. It also very well may not have the same effect in a human.

As long as you aren't shoveling aspertame into your mouth, it's almost certainly less than the equivalent amount they tested on these mice.

Quote from the article: "An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda such as Diet Coke daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks"

Aka, you're fine.

Does reading this comment count as me doing my own research?