Low quality article. The only takeaway is that NSS does not result in long term weight loss by itself. That's it. NSS does not spike insulin response in humans. Stop reading studies involving rats when the same studies involving humans exist.
There is a correlation between NSS consumption and negative health outcomes, this is true. However, read how this article states this:
>WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults.
A layman will obviously read this as a statement that NSS is a direct cause of harm, not as the correlation that it actually is.
The correlation is simply explained: NSS is heavily consumed by people who have diabetes and/or who are obese. These people are naturally going to have far more health issues than non-diabetics, and non-obese people. They even acknowledge this in the article:
>the connection between consuming NSS and disease outcomes might be subjectively determined due to “baseline characteristics” of those taking part in the study
If you have a choice of drinking regular soda and diet, the diet is without a doubt leagues better for you. I think the most convincing evidence that NSS is safe is this: It's obvious that diabetics and obese people consume NSS significantly more than the general population. Diabetics and obese people are naturally prone to high levels of health issues. Yet why is it that they never just filter these people out to get a good baseline? What are the chances that these university educated people can't filter out obese/diabetics, or that they did not anticipate needing to do this and thus did not collect sufficient data? That they didn't read decades of prior studies who failed to do this, including the studies that specifically mentioned the dirty baseline issue? Is our higher education system this bad? Are researchers just this stupid? Not likely.
The more likely explanations are these:
1 The study was funded by corn growers that are threatened by NSS (a huge number of the studies I read through fall into this category).
2 The researchers have a bias for "natural" products.
3 The researchers dislike the taste of NSS and are afraid that NSS proliferation will reduce the supply of the flavors that they enjoy.
They've tried to prove NSS is harmful for way too long. Sure, that's not proof that NSS is completely safe, but if it is harmful, it must be so minimally harmful that 4+ decades of intense research can't definitively prove it.