Another avenue for investigation…

From today’s NYTimes:

Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure.

Because metabolic syndrome is such a catch-all, lots and lots of Americans have it.  You don’t even have to be wildly overweight, you just have to not exercise, eat poorly, and have some genetic disposition to one of the above diseases.  It runs in my family, so as I follow the research around it, I came across this little tidbit.  The important part to realize is that what they’ve found is correlative so far, and not causal.  So it would be incorrect to say diet soda indicates a higher level of metabolic syndrome.  For all we know people who had been told they needed to lose weight and eat better had taken up diet soda and other factors had pushed them into metabolic syndrome anyway.

But it is interesting.