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"Teresa Heinz Kerry continues to improve and remains in fair condition at Massachusetts General Hospital, while doctors seek the cause of seizure-like symptoms she experienced on Sunday," State Department spokesman Glen Johnson says in a statement sent to reporters Tuesday afternoon.

In the most extensive comments so far about her condition, Johnson also says that:

"As evaluations continue, she, Secretary of State John Kerry, and their family are deeply grateful that physicians have ruled out a variety of possible triggers or other ailments, including heart attack, stroke, or a brain tumor."

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It may seem counterintuitive, but there's a body of evidence to suggest that the millions of Americans with a diet soda habit may not be doing their waistlines — or their blood sugar — any favors.

As the consumption of diet drinks made with artificial sweeteners continues to rise, researchers are beginning to make some uncomfortable associations with weight gain and other diseases.

For instance, as researcher Susan Swithers writes in a new opinion piece published in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, "accumulating evidence suggests that frequent consumers of these sugar substitutes (such as aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin) may also be at increased risk of ... metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease."

If you listen to my conversation on Here & Now, you'll hear that there are two schools of thought here. Not everyone is convinced that diet soda is so bad.

For instance, a study I reported on last year by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital found that overweight teens did well when they switched from sugar-laden drinks to zero-calorie options such as diet soda.

But it's also hard to ignore the gathering body of evidence that points to potentially bad outcomes associated with a diet soda habit.

One example: the findings of the San Antonio Heart Study, which pointed to a strong link between diet soda consumption and weight gain over time.

"On average, for each diet soft drink our participants drank per day, they were 65 percent more likely to become overweight during the next seven to eight years" said Sharon Fowler, in a release announcing the findings several years back.

Another bit of evidence: A multi-ethnic study, which included some 5,000 men and women, found that diet soda consumption was linked to a significantly increased risk of both type-2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

So, what gives? How could consuming less sugar set the stage for more weight gain and an increased risk of disease?

Well, since being overweight is a major contributor to the development of type 2 diabetes, it's possible that some diet-soda drinkers suffer from a mindset problem: They justify eating lots of high-calorie foods because their drinks are calorie-free.

It's the "hey, I'll go ahead and have those fries and a cheeseburger, since I'm having a Diet Coke" mentality.

It's also possible that something much more complicated and nuanced is happening in the bodies and brains of diet soda drinkers.

As Swithers points out, "Frequent consumption of high-intensity [artificial] sweeteners may have the counterintuitive effect of inducing metabolic derangements."

Say what? Metabolic derangements?

One theory is that diet soda may throw off the metabolism by blunting the body's responses to sugar.

You see, from the moment sugar touches our lips, our bodies start to release hormones to begin processing the sugar. It's part of a feedback loop that helps the body predict what's coming.

But if we develop a habit of consuming artificial sugar, our bodies may get confused. And it might not respond the same when we consume real sugar. "We may no longer release the hormones" needed to process sugar — or at least, not as much of them as before, Swithers told me during an interview.

And researchers think this change in hormone levels could contribute to increases in how much we eat, says Swithers, "as well as to bigger spikes in our blood sugar, which may be related to things like diabetes."

Now, Swithers says much more research is needed to nail down what's happening when people consume artificial sweeteners.

What is clear is that diet soda consumption continues to rise. Women tend to lead the way, and increasingly, children are popping open the calorie-free sodas that mom and dad are drinking.

Update: After we published our post, we received this statement from the American Beverage Association:

"Low-calorie sweeteners are some of the most studied and reviewed ingredients in the food supply today. They are safe and an effective tool in weight loss and weight management, according to decades of scientific research and regulatory agencies around the globe."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Ender's Game author and anti-gay activist Orson Scott Card responded to boycotts threats against the upcoming film adaptation starring Harrison Ford. The queer geek group Geeks OUT is organizing boycotts and "Skip Ender's Game" events in several U.S. cities because of Card's views on homosexuality. He wrote in 2008 that "marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down." Card responded to the backlash in a statement to Entertainment Weekly: "With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. ... Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute."

A few weeks after a historic collection of black history books was discovered in a dumpster outside a school in Highland Park, Mich., protests continue and a school board member has resigned. City Emergency Manager Donald Weatherspoon said the collection had been thrown away by accident but noted that the city didn't have the resources to maintain it, according to The Detroit Free Press. Residents pulled about a thousand books on black culture and history from the trash. The collection was started after the civil rights movement, when demand began to grow for a school curriculum that included black history.

Amazon announced Tuesday that it will launch a comics and graphic novels imprint called Jet City Comics. One of their first publications will be a comic adaptation of George R.R. Martin's short story "Meathouse Man," which Martin says is "one of my strangest, darkest, and most twisted short stories."

GOP Colorado Senate candidate Jaxine Bubis was recently revealed to be Jaxine Daniels, author of steamy erotic novels. Bubis joins a list of porn-dabbling politicians, including Scooter Libby and his 2005 novel The Apprentice.

Rejoice, unhappy spinsters of America — the "Princeton mom" is writing a self-help book to help you "avoid an unwanted life of spinsterhood with cats."

Reed Johnson writes about the enigmatic "Voynich manuscript," a medieval text written in an unbroken code, noting "the perverse sway that the book has over its would-be conquerors." He writes: "But as much as each of us strives to be the one to crack the code, I think few of us would truly like to see it solved ... the book's resistance to being read is what sets it apart. Undeciphered, the manuscript exists in a sort of quantum indeterminacy — one that collapses into a single meaning the moment the text is finally measured and understood. And no matter how thrilling such a text might be, it will remain a disappointment for being closed off, completed — for being, in the end, no longer a mystery."

According to The Mumbai Mirror, Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of the newly-merged Penguin Random House, has asked the author Vikram Seth to return a $1.7 million advance for failing to turn in his manuscript for A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his hugely successful (and, at about 1,400 pages, huge) novel A Suitable Boy. Seth's agent told The Mirror by phone that "Vikram has been known to take his time with his books. Our aim is to settle this new date with Hamish. If we can't, then Vikram will decide what he wants to do next."