'ages 65 and older' 'belly-fat gain was most pronounced in people who were already overweight.' Yh, so at my 21.5 bmi I'm at so much risk, I think I'm ok. I would also like to note how this article mentioned a control of people who didn't drink soda, then people who drank diet and non-diet soda. But then the results in the article (the 3.2 inch waist gain etc) only compared DIET to NONE. There was no comparison given involving the full-sugar soda. For this reason I took a look at the study itself. 70% of the people who didn't drink diet soda were overweight at the start of the study, their mean age was just under 70. 80% of the people that had 'less than one' per day were overweight, and 87% of those that drank more than one were overweight. They said the effect was most pronounced in people who were already overweight. They measured waist circumference, and the groups that drank more got fatter and fatter. They didn't really have a non-diet soda control group, so the trends may have been the same for them, just these trends weren't as focused on. This is because the daily sodas drank by people that only had normal soda was far less (mean 0.3) than the amount of diet soda that was drank (mean >1.5 for the daily drinkers of diet soda). I can't help but feel that this study may be confusing correlation and cause, with the addition of the fact that the article you linked did little to mention that the study seems to indicate diet soda was bad for everyone, when the study only focused on people age 65 or older. In conclusion the study seems to have some flawed logic but may still be valid, but is nowhere near indicative that diet drinks are universally bad, and the article seemed especially biased against diet drinks, giving no leeway and almost condemning them throughout, with the sole exception of one paragraph that mentioned that they can help due to their lack of calories. There have been a LOT of studies on artificial sweeteners, to the point where aspartame is the one of the most thoroughly tested chemical in our diets today. The reason why it has so much controversy was due to a conspiracy theory in which people claimed it caused: multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus, methanol toxicity, blindness, spasms, shooting pains, seizures, headaches, depression, anxiety, memory loss, birth defects and death.