Diet Coke fans warned as more evidence shows it could increase the risk of ‘silent killer’
This "new study" is garbage. No attempt at allowing for demographic confounds was made. It's probably just another proof that poor people have worse health. I append the original journal article below
The new study, published in the Diabetes Journal, found people who consumed artificial sweeteners were more at risk to type 2 diabetes compared with those who didn't.
“The findings strengthen evidence that these additives may not be safe sugar alternatives,” the researchers wrote.
“[It also] provides important insights in the context of ongoing worldwide re-evaluation of artificial sweeteners by health authorities.”
The French scientists analysed the diets and health of 105,588 people for nine years.
By the end of the study, 972 participants had developed type 2 diabetes.
The experts found those who consumed between 16 and 18mg of artificial sweeteners per day had a 69 per cent higher chance of developing the condition than those who ate less.
While those who ate and drank aspartame-containing products specifically had a 63 per cent higher chance of developing the disease.
Artificial Sweeteners and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in the Prospective NutriNet-Santé Cohort
Charlotte Debras et al.
OBJECTIVE
To study the relationships between artificial sweeteners, accounting for all dietary sources(total and by type of artificial sweetener) and risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D), in a large-scale prospective cohort.
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
The analyses included 105,588 participants from the web-based NutriNet-Santé study (France, 2009–2022; mean age 42.5 ± 14.6 years, 79.2% women). Repeated 24-h dietary records, including brands and commercial names of industrial products, merged with qualitative and quantitative food additive composition data, enabled artificial sweetener intakes to be accurately assessed from all dietary sources. Associations between artificial sweeteners (total, aspartame, acesulfame potassium [K], and sucralose) and T2D were investigated using Cox proportional hazard models adjusted for potential confounders, including weight variation during follow-up.
RESULTS
During a median follow-up of 9.1 years (946,650 person-years, 972 incident T2D), compared with nonconsumers, higher consumers of artificial sweeteners (i.e., above the sex-specific medians of 16.4 mg/day in men and 18.5 mg/day in women) had higher risks of developing T2D (hazard ratio [HR] 1.69; 95% CI 1.45–1.97; P-trend <0.001). Positive associations were also observed for individual artificial sweeteners: aspartame (HR 1.63 [95% CI 1.38–1.93], P-trend <0.001), acesulfame-K (HR 1.70 [1.42–2.04], P-trend <0.001), and sucralose (HR 1.34 [1.07–1.69], P-trend = 0.013).
CONCLUSIONS
Potential for reverse causality cannot be eliminated; however, many sensitivity analyses were computed to limit this and other potential biases. These findings of positive associations between artificial sweetener intakes and increased T2D risk strengthen the evidence that these additives may not be safe sugar alternatives. This study provides important insights in the context of on-going reevaluation of artificial sweeteners by health authorities worldwide.
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Cutting off your thumbs to spite your country
This is an important article from Australia, grounded in the classics. It notes the constant nagging attacks on our society from the Left and asks will those criticisms cause young people to think our country is not worth defending? That is clearly a possibility
The truth is that our country is a great triumph of civilization but no media will say that. They would be condemned as "racist" if they did.
The Trump phenomenon shows that at least half of the American population have not bought the negative view of their country preached by the media. One can only hope that there are similar large numbers of unblinded people in Australia
Wallace Breem’s 1970 novel Eagle in the Snow is a really excellent read that I couldn’t recommend more highly, and the work upon which the 2000 film Gladiator was loosely based. This Maximus, a Roman general holding the Rhine before the barbarian migrations of the late fourth century, must shoulder the heavy duty of protecting a civilisation that has lost any conception of itself. He faces young men who have cut off their thumbs to avoid conscription, middle-aged bureaucrats who impede him at every turn seeking to enrich themselves, and old priests who extol the brotherhood of man. ‘Cross the river,’ says Maximus, ‘and find out what your brothers are like.’ I won’t spoil the ending for you; pick it up if you can.
The image of young men severing their own thumbs, rendering themselves incapable of wielding gladius or pilum, left a lasting impression on me, one that was brought recently to mind by an apocryphal story regarding the Ukrainian ambassador. This worthy was asking local high school students who would join the Australian military, should the need arise, and was disappointed by the spattering of hands that appeared. It would seem his concern is well documented: the ADF report that they are struggling to gain recruits and retain soldiers. This is not unique to us down under, as the United States army expects to be twenty thousand recruits short next year. There’s something in these sorts of stories, apocryphal or otherwise, as there are in all the stories we tell ourselves, and we ought to be perhaps a little careful what those stories are. We might consider a little more Thucydides and a little less, well, whatever you receive when you tune in to what our culture presently manufactures.
None of this should cause any eyebrows to rise among those who’ve been paying attention. The schools are the right place to start asking questions and investigating stories, not because the young have any special claim to wisdom – they absolutely do not – but because if you want to know what Australia will look like in the future, that’s where you should look. Those who aren’t here today, as Mark Steyn said, won’t be here tomorrow. Those that are here today are manifestly very different from those who made up the schools even thirty years ago, courtesy of our ill-thought-out and entirely flippant leap into multiculturalism. And as all multiculturalism is premised on the belief, now all but mandatory, that the state of affairs that pre-existed it was irredeemably evil, it’s unsurprising that few want to fight for it, and fewer still want to die for it. Those who do are typically Anglo-Celtic males, whose very existence appears a little problematic according to certain narratives presently in vogue.
We, a nation increasingly propositional in ideation and multicultural in composition, don’t tell the right stories to make the hands fly skyward. All that’s left to love, for the everyman, is ease of living and money to be made, and it doesn’t seem like those are a given anymore, either. On the other hand, the only Australia our elites seem to think matters is the Australia that doesn’t exist yet, an Australia severed from the past and couched in banal progressive sentiments, the Australia imagined by the most fervent university professor, ABC journalist, or member for the Greens. It’s an Australia that could never be born, and even if it could be created, wouldn’t be one worth dying for. The young know this, and this is why their hands do not shoot upwards when asked – why they have, in equivalent terms, cut off their thumbs.
As we tend to address collapsing birthrates, shortfalls in labour or consumption, and the ever-upward valuation of property via opening the valves of endless migration, it’s not unfair to assume answers to our military problems might come from the same source; hence a recent proposal to reimport kanakas, with Austeyr rifles instead of machetes, despite how poorly that went down last time. Hoping for a reimagined version of the foederati – those tribes that were bound to defend Rome but weren’t citizens – to fight our wars might seem a sound plan. After all, Stilicho was a barbarian, and Honorius a Roman. Many Australians from various backgrounds fought bravely in the past, like Billy Sing in Gallipoli, to name only one. But we live in different times now, and the age of the citizen-soldier is gone. The difference then was not merely numbers, but that we gave those characters – as Rome gave Stilicho, even in those darkening days – something to love and aspire to. The ‘citizen’ part of the equation is important, and robust citizenship cannot spring from contempt for a nation’s past.
The truth is that we think we can hold onto the status quo, a status quo that has been predicated on the Anglosphere’s overwhelming advantages, without being prepared to make sacrifices. The fate of those who espouse naive principles in the face of power is that of the Melians in the Peloponnesian War, who badly needed their Dorian brothers across the sea rather than a ‘great mass of words nobody would believe’. That is no argument against principles; rather, an exhortation that we ought to be careful our body politic is composed of strong ones, and not prey to bad ones.
The funeral oration by Pericles, where Thucydides relates that the men of Athens meet danger with a light heart but laborious training, has been thrown about as the best defence of democracy from the ancient world. If one thing could be said of the Athenians, it was that they loved their flawed city-state, and were unselfconscious about it. Even the metics, for whom they threw open their city, were expected to serve, if they could never be citizens by simple matter of course, nor form the mainstay of the trireme crew or the hoplite phalanx. The franchise was alive, and mattered, and we take the word ‘idiot’ from the Ancient Greek for he who was willing to let politics wash over him.
The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words, as Pericles exhorted; and we must wonder if our modern spirit, a motley collection of bad principles with no purchase among the young, is worth anything at all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/cutting-off-your-thumbs-to-spite-your-country/
**************************************************NAACP Finally Gets Crime?
For decades, crime in America had been declining. Our cities became safer as murder, theft, and all manner of other crimes happened less frequently — all while, we might add, private gun ownership and concealed carry permits skyrocketed. That wasn’t coincidence.
Then George Floyd died under the knee of white Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin and all hell broke loose. The summer of rage saw many American cities literally lit on fire by angry and violent mobs bent on demanding justice or something. Murder drastically increased, especially black-on-black in our inner cities, and black neighborhoods were generally hit hardest by the violence and mayhem.
Chauvin was convicted of murder less than a year later, but it almost didn’t matter to the mob.
The Left launched an insane new “social justice” cry: Defund the police. Months later, after launching a record surge in crime, Democrats could no longer ignore the destruction wrought by anti-police policies and Black Lives Matter mobs, so they pretended they never had anything to do with defunding the police, even blaming Republicans for it.
Now we get this from Newsweek:
Authorities in Oakland, California, are being urged to “declare a state of emergency” by the local branch of a leading civil rights group, in response to a surge in crime that “overwhelming impacts minority communities.”
The call was made by the Oakland branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in a statement that hit out at “failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police” and what they claimed was the local District Attorney’s failure to “prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes.” Speaking to Newsweek Cynthia Adams, president of the Oakland NAACP, said: “We need the police!”
We quote that to highlight the language used by both the NAACP and the Leftmedia.
First, let’s marvel at the semantics. Newsweek tells us what NAACP stands for — “the Advancement of Colored People.” Just a couple of weeks ago, however, a Republican in Congress was denounced as a racist for using the term “colored people” instead of the Left’s new and approved formulation “people of color.”
You can’t put the adjective BEFORE the noun, you bigot! It has to go AFTER the noun!
We admit to finding that amusing. But far more important than such word games is the acknowledgement from NAACP leaders that “We need the police!” We welcome them to the side of Rule of Law.
“Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities,” the Oakland NAACP added. “Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis.”
Despite the fact that the NAACP’s statement is a lengthy denunciation of crime and the policies that led to its increase, it strangely never mentions the word “Democrat.”
Who runs California, again? Oh, that’s right — it’s a one-party state ruled up and down the line by Democrats. That’s doubly so in Oakland. Like gun ownership and reduced crime, Democrat leadership and increased crime also isn’t a coincidence. Yet the NAACP has been at the forefront of the Democrat strategy for decades.
Call us crazy, but that doesn’t seem like a good way to achieve the “Advancement of Colored People.”
California Democrats have made it declared policy that policing crimes like shoplifting just isn’t worth their time. The predictable result is not only more shoplifting but a rise in other related crimes as lawlessness becomes a way of life for more people. Cops are leaving police departments and new recruits are harder to come by. Law-abiding conservatives have fled California in droves, leaving the state to the leftists who destroyed it.
Newsweek is ever the propaganda organ for the Democrat Party, however, so the magazine couched the NAACP’s statement with the patronizing phrase “what they claimed.” These are not random claims but provable facts. Thanks to an army of George Soros-backed district attorneys dedicated to not prosecuting crimes in the name of “social justice,” cities like Oakland and neighboring San Francisco have become cesspools of humanity where businesses have no choice but to leave.
The NAACP is right to be outraged by this and to demand accountability from city leaders. The statement says numerous right things. Then again, the national NAACP just issued a “formal travel advisory for the state of Florida.” Not California. Florida. Why? Because Governor Ron DeSantis is supposedly making “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.” Good grief, what a bunch of lies.
Until inner-city residents including blacks are willing to sever their blind allegiance to the Democrat Party and work to restore mom-and-dad-headed families as the building block of society, and until the national NAACP gives up mindless attacks on Republicans, the Oakland NAACP can send all the outraged letters it wants and nothing will change.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/99283-naacp-finally-gets-crime-2023-07-31
***********************************************Diversity Isn’t ‘America’s Greatest Strength’
Last week, Joe Biden commemorated an important American anniversary. And then he defiled it.
“Seventy-five years ago today,” his statement began, “President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, ending the unconscionable racial segregation of our Armed Forces and bringing our nation closer to our founding values. This landmark Order, issued more than a decade before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, directed the military to ensure the ‘equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.’”
All well and good. But then he stopped talking about racial equality and started talking about racial discrimination: “It is critical that the full diversity and strength of our force is reflected at every level of the Department of Defense, including at the highest levels of leadership.”
When a leftist starts talking about diversity, what he’s really talking about is quotas and race-based promotion.
To make his point, Biden trotted out one of the Left’s most infernal lies: “America’s greatest strength has always been our diversity, and there is no greater testament to this than the success of our military.”
Always? What the heck are Joe Biden and his speechwriters talking about?
How “diverse” were our fighting forces at Lexington and Concord? At Saratoga? At Yorktown? At New Orleans? At Chancellorsville? At Gettysburg? At Belleau Wood? At Midway? At Guadalcanal? At Normandy? At Bastogne? At Iwo Jima? At Okinawa?
These battles, and dozens of others equally successful though not as well known, represent our nation’s finest hours in combat. And none of these victorious units was “diverse.”
But nor were the Tuskegee Airmen diverse, and their valor and their exploits and their expertise were equally glorious. Nor was the legendary 442nd Infantry Regiment diverse, and yet this World War II unit made up almost entirely of Japanese Americans became the most decorated regiment in American military history.
To say that our military has “always” been great because of its diversity is either a purposeful lie or a lazy, ridiculous, demonstrably ignorant falsehood.
Diversity doesn’t make great fighting forces. Courage and cohesion and indomitable spirit make great fighting forces. And above all, great fighters make great fighting forces — from private to general, from seaman to admiral.
And, no, we’re not calling for a return to our long-ago racially segregated military. Far from it. What we are calling for is a return to a military that promotes its warriors based on merit rather than skin color or any other irrelevancy. Or does someone out there honestly believe Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, given his well-known weaknesses and failures, was the best man for the job?
What about Air Force General Charles Brown, Biden’s racially aggrieved nominee to succeed Mark “White Rage” Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Is Brown the right man for the job at this perilous time of international threats, low troop morale, and terrible recruitment numbers, or is there something about the color of his skin that made him stand out among a crowd of well-qualified warfighters?
For that matter, is Admiral Lisa Franchetti the best person Joe Biden could find to be the Navy’s Joint Chiefs chairperson? Or was she selected because she, like Lloyd Austin and C.Q. Brown, checked one of those irrelevant boxes? In other words, was she simply the best woman Joe Biden could find for that crucial role?
As for those irrelevancies, Biden rattled off a lengthy list of them: “Let us continue to break down barriers so that all qualified servicemembers, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or religious background, are treated with dignity and respect, can reach their full potential and have their contributions valued,” he said. “That is how we will ensure the United States Armed Forces remains the greatest fighting force in the history of the world.”
Everyone got that? Biden’s statement in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the integration of our Armed Forces couldn’t be simply that. It couldn’t be simply a celebration of black Americans and white Americans fighting together, side by side. No, he had to diminish racial equality by conflating it with gender cultism.
According to the commander-in-chief, then, our only hope of remaining history’s greatest fighting force is to have military-wide stand-downs to talk about white supremacy, to actively recruit soldiers with two moms, to show our Marine Corps “Pride” with rainbow-colored rounds, to name Navy ships after gay activists, and to use taxpayer funds to pay for active-duty warriors to have sex-change operations.
All this wokeness comes at a cost. As defense analyst Frank Gaffney observes: “What especially imperils our national security now is the fact that the subversive legacy of the previous Obama-Biden terms is becoming manifest in the U.S. military, as well. It is, arguably, the last national institution to undergo the Marxist makeover Barack Obama set in motion. But, thanks to officers aggressively promoted during his 1.0 and 2.0 presidencies becoming senior commanders, it is perilously devastating morale, retention, recruitment and readiness.”
That Marxist makeover no doubt has the Russians and the Chinese laughing at us. And if we had to guess, we’d imagine some of our allies are laughing, too, albeit nervously. They’re wondering what the heck happened to the once-proud U.S. military.
Joe Biden happened. And before him, Barack Obama happened. That’s what happened to the U.S. military.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/99261-diversity-isnt-americas-greatest-strength-2023-07-31
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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