The first study’s conclusion (correct link: http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/163/4/336) was *not* that consuming fewer calories leads to less weight gain, as you blithely and inaccurately put it. It’s a reasonable hypothesis that in an otherwise controlled diet, children will eat more calories from other sources when one source of calories (e.g., soda) is eliminated. This is the main hypothesis they were testing. In the case of replacing soda with water, they found that the children’s diets didn’t change to make up the lost calories.

They also studied the effects of replacing soda with beverages other than water. Replacing soda with juice was found to have no effect, and replacing soda with milk was found to *increase* total calorie intake.

The second paper, well, it’s hard to judge what the true significance of the study was from a press release.

Is the vacuum isotropic? Is the Equivalence Principle true? Physics deeply postulates both. Both are untested for mass distribution geometry. If left and right shoes vacuum free fall non-identically all of physics is incomplete for a footnote, yet no prior observation (all with socks) is contradicted. Eötvös experiment apparatus is in constant use to no discovery as you read this, going back to Dicke in 1964 and Eötvös in 1888. Nature supplies self-similar macroscopic left- and right-handed atomic mass distributions: any substance crystallizing in enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 – quartz, or berlinite and analogues, or cinnabar, or tellurium, or selenium… Do solid spherical single crystals of left-handed and right-handed quartz violate the Equivalence Principle through a revealed massed sector anisotropic chiral vacuum background? Does a parity Eötvös experiment null? (Does post-Big Bang matter-antimatter discrimination have a testable origin?)

That is a good study in existing apparatus, using commercial materials, conducted through validated protocols. But it has no precedent! But it might fail (unlike 420+ years of prior EP testing Officially sanctioned as risk-free for having a guaranteed outcome – failure).