At the peak of its popularity in 2005, 3 billion cases of diet soda were sold in one year. This beverage has since fallen out of favor, falling by 27 percent (or 834 million cases) as of 2016. Still, diet soda still makes up 25 percent of the carbonated beverages sold in the U.S.1 (by volume), which means many Americans are still partaking — undoubtedly many of them because they believe they're making a healthier choice than regular soda.

This — the idea that diet soda is in any way healthy — is one of the biggest prevailing myths in the nutrition realm today. If you're one of the nearly half of U.S. adults who consume artificial sweeteners, mostly in the form of diet soda, daily (even one-quarter of kids do so as well),2 it's important you're let in on the truth: If you drink a lot of diet soda, you're putting your health at risk.

What Are the Health Risks of Diet Soda?

A number of studies have been published recently that cast serious doubt on the safety of drinking diet soda. The health risks revealed include:

Stroke and Dementia

Drinking one artificially sweetened beverage a day may increase your risk of stroke and dementia by three-fold compared to drinking less than one a week.3 Even drinking one to six artificially sweetened beverages a week was linked to a 2.6 greater risk of stroke compared to not drinking any.

A 2012 study similarly found that people who drank diet soft drinks daily were 43 percent more likely to have suffered a vascular event, including a stroke.4 This significant association persisted even after controlling for other factors that could increase the risk, such as smoking, physical activity levels, alcohol consumption, diabetes, heart disease, dietary factors and more.

A brain-mapping AI could soon be used to identify infants most at risk of developing autism, before the symptoms even appear.

New research published in the journal Science Translational Medicine found that "autism imaging," a scan that can pinpoint signs of the condition in the brain, may one day lead to diagnoses in children as young as six months.

"The more we understand about the brain before symptoms appear, the better prepared we will be to help children and their families,"said senior author Joseph Piven, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

During the study, sleeping babies were placed in an MRI machine where their neural activity was monitored across more than 200 regions of the brain. Researchers then used the MRI data to map brain pathways thought to facilitate core skills and behaviors autism is known to affect - namely language, repetitive actions and social behavior.

Using this map, Piven and his team created an AI capable of narrowing down the neural connections central to the development of autism in children between six months and age 2.

For the past six decades, saturated fats and cholesterol have been wrongly vilified as the central culprit of heart disease, stroke and peripheral vascular disease. However, research has demonstrated that it's actually sugar, refined carbohydrates, trans fats and processed vegetable oils found in many processed foods that are the real enemy.

In the decades saturated fats were demonized, the food industry responded by replacing saturated fats with more shelf-stable trans fats and a new market of low-fat (high-sugar) foods was born.

Americans' health has plummeted ever since, and millions have been prematurely killed by this mistake. Making matters worse, genetically engineered soy oil, which is a major source of trans fat, can oxidize inside your body, thereby causing damage to both your heart and your brain.

One of the first articles published exonerating saturated fats was in 1957 by Dr. Fred Kummerow,¹ who has now spent eight decades absorbed in the science of lipids and heart disease. In 2013, Kummerow sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for not withdrawing trans fats from the market.² It was Kummerow's lifetime work that revealed the dangers of trans fat and oxidized cholesterol and the relationship to heart disease.

Not surprisingly, trans fat is also linked to dementia as the arterial changes that occur in the heart muscle also occur in the brain, triggering neurological damage. Recent research has once again demonstrated the dangers to health and a great financial burden that eating a diet with trans fat has placed on the American public.

When it comes to vaccine safety, a complaint that I've frequently expressed is the lack of credible studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

At best, we've had vaccination surveys¹ based on self-reported data,² and while that evidence strongly suggested unvaccinated children experience better health and fewer health problems, they were dismissed by most public health officials as unimportant. There are also published studies showing annual influenza vaccination takes its toll on your health, ^3,4,5,6 and may do more harm than good in the long term.

Now, two pilot studies led by Anthony Mawson,⁷ an interdisciplinary epidemiologist and social scientist with a doctorate in public health, have helped to shed some light on the topic.

The gold standard in scientific research is replication and, while the conclusions of these studies need to be replicated using other data sources, they are another piece of evidence showing there are negative health outcomes for vaccinated children, and that unvaccinated children are actually healthier. It's a good start, and it's important to know these studies exist.

Regulating blood sugar levels is a key feature of any health-promoting diet ^{[15, 20]} . High blood sugar levels after eating are a major stimulator of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which are chemically reactive molecules that have important roles in cell signaling (the complex communication between and within cells) and in homeostasis (maintenance of a stable environment inside and outside the cell). But ROS are also potent signals for inflammation and stimulate the production of proinflammatory cytokines (chemical messengers), and also injure cells and tissue. As a result, chronic high blood sugar levels can cause serious damage throughout the body, including to blood vessels and vital organs. This is why diabetes (chronical hyperglycemia) is associated with higher risk of stroke, cardiovascular disease, vision problems, kidney disease, and nerve damage.

When we consume carbohydrates, blood sugar increases. In response to the rise in blood sugar, the pancreas releases the hormone insulin, which facilitates the transport of glucose into the cells of the body and signals to the liver to convert glucose into glycogen and triglycerides for storage.

Using a wide array of enzymes, liver cells (called hepatocytes) first convert excess glucose into glycogen (which is stored in the liver and in muscle tissue) for short-term storage. When needed, the glycogen is rapidly converted back into glucose and released into the blood to maintain normal blood sugar levels and provide energy for the body's cells between meals. There is also a maximum glycogen storage capacity in the muscle tissue and liver, so whatever glucose is consumed beyond that amount is converted into triglycerides (molecules composed of three fatty acids and a glycerol) for longer-term storage in adipocytes (fat-storage cells). This process is also stimulated by insulin. Triglycerides are released by the liver into the blood to circulate to adipose tissues (fat deposits), where they are taken up by adipocytes. So when we eat a high-carbohydrate meal, blood glucose and blood triglycerides are increased.

A 31-year-old man died after he went swimming in the Gulf of Mexico and his tattoo became infected with flesh-eating bacteria that live in ocean water, according to a new report.

The man had recently gotten a tattoo on his right calf. Despite the common advice to avoid swimming for a few weeks after getting a new tattoo, the man went for a swim in the ocean just five days after he received the tattoo, according to the report, published May 27 in the journal BMJ Case Reports.

A few days later, he developed a fever and chills, and his skin became red over his tattoo and on other parts of his legs. Soon after the man arrived at the hospital, the red, painful lesions on his legs turned purple, and he developed large blisters filled with fluid.

In the Australian state of Victoria, a state program kicked in at the beginning of 2017 to mandate that children as young as 12 should see a doctor in school at least once a week, to receive drugs and medical treatment without parental consent.

According to the Herald Sun:

A recently published book by investigative journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin reveals that the back pain industry may be more crooked than you think. In her book, Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery, Ramin exposes the motive behind frightening diagnoses and the influence of pharmaceutical companies. In addition, she shatters assumptions about surgery, chiropractic methods and spinal injections.

It is estimated that about 62 million American adults suffer from some type of back pain. The back pain industry is worth about $100 billion dollars per year. Nevertheless, most treatments and therapies are ineffective and sometimes even dangerous.

The Secrets of the Back Pain Industry

Ramin spent six years traveling around the world talking with patients, health-care professionals, and therapists. She conducted over 600 interviews. In addition, she had spent many years and thousands of dollars treating her chronic back pain. In the end, Ramin found that a big problem exists when it comes to spine medicine.

Next Avenue interviewed Ramin about her research. Here are some of the most important highlights from the book.

If you want to find something "bad" about something "good," you just have to search hard enough on the Internet. While there will always be an opposing opinion, or study, it's important to consider all sides. This is particularly true for trends.

You will find headlines that tell you what to eat, and what not to eat, every single day, sometimes even about the same food. Adaptogens have been on the good list as of late, but there's some information the trend-driven articles informing the masses are leaving out.

Adaptogens are herbs considered to help the body adapt to stress and to exert a normalizing effect upon bodily processes. Among the most well-known are ginseng, holy basil, and licorice root.

The wellness world has been buzzing with talk of these powders for some time now, recommending adding them to your daily smoothie to experience an array of health benefits. But like anything that the general population comes to learn about and love, everyone wants more. Maca, for instance, has been touted for its ability to improve sex drive. So should you add heaps of the powder to your recipe? No, and this is where people really need to pay attention.

As I discussed last month, depression is the yin to anxiety's yang. Between these two troublemakers, they've got dark clouds hanging over both the past and the future, making the present moment complicated at best (and for some people unbearable). Taken as a human composite, it's an unfortunate trade-off for being cognitively complex. As individuals, however, we naturally just want a solution.

The problem is, there's just so many confounding factors surrounding depression that it's hard to know where to start. Your mind is an infinitely complex latticework of moving parts; one which continues to baffle and divide the scientific community. How does a practitioner prescribe suitable treatments for a problem they don't fully comprehend? And, yet, medical science often (and perhaps inevitably) works with incomplete information.