Is Diet Soda Making Us Fat?

Sullivan's summary post.

My bet: not even worth taking seriously. I don't follow this issue. I know basically nothing about it. But we all have to do epistemic triage. And this is an issue I pass over, with little doubt that it will turn out to be nonsense, and disappear down the memory hole in a few years.
My paranoid food hypothesis, stated before: foods that are gauche by upper-middle-class sensibilities get targeted by the food puritans. First it was soda...and nutty hypotheses were born...  Fat+sugar is more deadly in combination than can be explained by the extreme deadliness of the two components....  Liquid sugar is more deadly than solid sugar...so soda is worse than candy... And so on...  But wait...diet soda is exempt, right? But diet soda is at least as gauche as soda soda...so...it turns out that diet soda is secretly just like soda soda but even worse!!!111...
I know, I know...in fact, I know full well... You can't really adopt this as an epistemic policy... But I'm cutting myself some slack on this one... I don't really believe it...but I don't really not believe it either...

Hey, kids, don't be like me! Just suspend judgment until the meta-studies come out!