That's the nature of nutritional science: We know little for sure, and what we do know is often questionable. Personally I grew up reading a new big-headline story about whether butter or margarine is healthier every few months in the local newspaper. The results were always in conflict with what you thought we knew and I still don't know.

> Participants completed questionnaires about diet at the start of the study, detailing what they ate and drank over the past year.

OMG as someone who once worked in the field of designing nutritional health questionnaires, for the love of god please don't ask people what they have been eating over the past year. They will misremember what they ate the past day.

So the upside is that this paper's role in life will be relegated to becoming another data point in a future meta-study; until such study comes out, there's no need to overly worry about the results based on this study alone. I mean come on, retrospective nutritional self-disclosure for twelve months. What did you eat in January 2024?

That said, there's recently been an increasing number of studies claiming that some sweeteners actually enhance appetite (not surprising when you know those are also used to fatten pigs) and others are bad for your cardiovascular health, but I cannot be sure I haven't seen the titles of those studies just because some small number of HN contributors like to post those stories.