Who remembers what they had to eat yesterday? What about last week? What about over the course of 8 months, *literally years ago*? What, you don't remember how much soda you drank in 2020? That's weird. All 300 study participants here probably have better memories than you, I guess.
---------
Many very different things fall under the label of science, but not all of these things are the same. The confidence we can have of our models and understandings in particle physics is very different than the confidence and understanding we can have with vaccine trials is very different than the confidence and understanding we can have with nutritional epidemiology. Personally, I think the last falls outside the realm of science [1], and closer to "here's something I thought of. There's some data attached too. Misled yet?"
Aspartame has been exhaustively studied since the 1980s! The odds you _don't find_ correlations between consumption of a novel compound (that has the most explicit healthy-user bias you could imagine) and medical conditions is 0.
(A reminder that is _not_ a pro-aspartame comment. I don't drink diet soda (unless I get snipped by Diet Coke), or much regular soda for that matter. But a single, *non-randomized, retrospective, recall-based (!!!!) study* making it to the front page is really surprising to me.)
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Edit: even a cursory skim of the paper should totally disqualify this from the front page, IMO, *even from nutritional epidemiology standards.* The paper does not even attempt to account for "for maternal overweight/obesity and diabetes, maternal mental health, and other potential confounders in our study." The classic: let's imply a casual variable, ignore the rest of the other possible ones, simply b/c "no covariate data were available."