What are ya drinkin', ladies?

At least a couple of my lady neighbors drink Diet Pepsi first thing in the morning. If I ask them about it, they gesture to the cup o' joe I'm sporting and say, "It's no worse than coffee, fool!" These happen to be very self-assured, assertive women so I usually just bow my head and walk away, humbled and shamed. But thanks to a couple new studies, next time they're gonna get this:

"HOOOOONK!! Wrong answer, ladies!"

Then I'll throw down some science. A new study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology shows that woman who drink two or more diet sodas a day had a 30% drop in kidney function. From WebMD:

When the researchers compared kidney function of the women in 1989 and 2000, they found that 11.4% or 372 women had a kidney function decline of 30% or more. When they looked at the diet information, they found that the 30% decline in kidney function was associated with drinking two or more artificially sweetened sodas a day. This was true even after taking into account factors such as age, high blood pressure, diabetes, and physical activity.

Put another way: the women who drank two or more diet sodas a day had a decline in their glomerular filtration rate, a measure of kidney function, of 3 milliliters per minute per year. ''With natural aging, kidney function declines about 1 mL per minute per year after age 40," Lin says. No link was found with the other beverages. And less than two sodas a day didn't seem to hurt. "We didn't see any association up to two artificially sweetened beverages a day," Lin says.

Why this is happening is still unclear, but now that it's been identified, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Like I always say, if you can't trust a nephrologist to find the answer, who can you trust?

But wait, there's more! Another study out of Sweden shows that women who drink two or more cups of coffee a day reduce their risk of endometrial cancer. From Reuters:

Women dread a diagnosis of endometrial cancer, but those who drink at least two cups of caffeinated coffee a day may have a lower risk for this cancer of cells lining the uterus.

Coffee drinking seemed to particularly protect overweight and obese women, study co-author Dr. Emilie Friberg, at the Karolinska Intstituet in Stockholm, Sweden, told Reuters Health by email.

Friberg's team twice surveyed 60,634 Swedish women about their coffee intake - when they enrolled in the Swedish Mammography Cohort study between 1987 and 1990, and again in 1997.

In the overall study group, those who daily drank 2 or more cups were significantly less likely to develop endometrial cancer, compared with those who drank fewer cups of coffee.

After that, I'll hold my mug aloft and announce that not only are my kidneys healthier, so is my uterus! Then they'll point out that I'm a guy, therefore I have no uterus.

And again with the humbling and the shaming and the bowing of the head. I can't win.