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When I wrote about diet soda and and its health effects last week, I didn’t expect much of a reaction. I guess in the back of my mind, I was thinking, people still drink that stuff?

Well, they do — by the bucketful. Overall, U.S. soda consumption is declining slowly, but Americans still drink more soda than than anyone else on the planet, by a wide margin. According to one reckoning, the average American drinks 736 “eight-ounce servings” each year (though “eight-ounce serving” seems like a quaint notion in the age of the Big Gulp). I can’t find good figures on how much of that gusher is diet soda, but apparently it’s a lot. According to AdBrands.net, four of the top 10 leading U.S. soda brands are diet versions of big names like Coke and Pepsi.

It’s no wonder, either. This is an industry with upwards of $70 billion in annual U.S. sales, and a significant portion of those proceeds get invested in marketing. As anxiety about the health effects of consuming huge amounts high-calorie sweeteners ramps up, the industry peddles diet drinks as the benign alternative. In a culture as fixated on body image as it is on cheap-and-easy food, the lure of calorie-free cola — all of the addictive qualities and caffeine jolt of regular soda, none of the guilt! — is powerful indeed. (I didn’t even get into the twisted gender/body-image politics of Pepsi’s “skinny can” in my earlier piece.)