Kidneys do not like those chip and diet soda lunches

Chained to your computer by a job that must be done, the traditional snack of the programmer is some chips and a diet soda. It gets you through the day.

It may not get you through the night, however, and may hasten that long, long night to come.

Yes, we're talking about your kidneys.

Julie Lin (right) of Brigham and Women's in Boston looked at data in the famous Nurses Health Study, going through 3,000 records, collected over time, for evidence on kidney health, matching that data to the consumption of sodas and sodium.

Linn and Gary Curhan published two separate studies, one of which found a correlation between high sodium intake and kidney function decline (that's the chips), the other of which found a correlation between artificial sweetener intake and kidney function loss (that's the diet soda.)

There was no such correlation between regular sugar and kidney function (although there was a separate study from Colorado linking fructose and hypertension -- modern American sodas are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup).

All this was offered at the annual Renal Week event in San Diego, run by the American Society of Nephrology.

There is a difference between the correlation found here and the headline "diet soda drinkers suffer kidney problems." A correlation is not a certainty. And all they were studying were aging nurses. They weren't studying male computer programmers who like Sarah Palin, or young video game players -- it's not a general population study.

But Lin and Curhan did account for extraneous factors within the study, like age, smoking, obesity, and heart disease, before coming to their conclusion.

I'd say take it with a grain of salt, but that might be bad for you.