Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation | Hacker News Reader

Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

248 pointspilingual298 comments

From the abstract this study does not bear any resemblance to the headline and makes very little sense to me.

They reevaluated tumors from a 15 year old study in rodents, to prove that the original work was correct and that there wasn't any traces of mycoplasma. And so, I presume, they argue that the cancers were caused by aspartame.

But that in itself does not prove whether or not the original study was flawed, and well there is mountains of evidence showing very little carcinogenicity from aspartame.

If you were to argue for the carcinogenicity of aspartame, then I suggest running a new study as a first step at least. And then explain why you see something most other studies have failed to see.

Mice tend to be so inbred they all die of cancer. They should redo the study on a different animal that has less incidence of cancer normally... like Rabbits.

Isn't a control group used to negate this?

Assuming both your parent and your comment are correct (and no other controls), then the experiment tells us the effects of the substance on populations that are disproportionately predisposed to cancer. Surely, not very infourmative in a cancer study.

Note, I don't know whether these assumptions actually hold. Just taking it on its face.

I believe he's referring to the hypothesis (I think tested) touted by Bret Weinstein that lab mice breeding has led to strains with extremely long telomeres, a feature that makes them resilient to all sorts of cellular damage, but makes them also susceptible to cancer; Bret's point being that they aren't good for either cancer nor non-cancer research. Lab mice breeders may have responded to this idea, but he alleges it's been swept under the carpet, too many studies at stake. Or something like that.

That's deliberate. Cancer usually hits humans on a timeframe that is longer than the normal lifespan of mice, so an exact 1:1 experiment is likely to never see anything, not to mention too long to be a reasonable experiment to risk in either direction. Science per day is not cheap.

There are a lot of different lines of mice used in the lab. Generally the incidence rate of cancer is pretty consistent in the lines used for cancer research. In addition, most cancer studies test for whether there is an increase in cancer rates from the baseline for the mice. For example, you'd purchase 100 mice all from a specific breeding line. You'd randomly choose 50 of those mice to expose to experimental conditions. The remaining 50 would be treated in exactly the same way except for the variable being tested. This is the control group.

For example, sticking with aspartame. You'd take 100 mice and randomly select 50 to be exposed to aspartame. All 100 mice would be kept in the same type of cage, receive the same amount of the same food and water from the same source, but the 50 experimental group mice would have aspartame added to the water. Even better would be if there was a way to have them consume the aspartame in controlled amounts and monitor food and water intake to track whether they eat and drink more or less in response to the aspartame, as that could also potentially effect the cancer rate.

It's not as simple as mice and rats are prone to cancer. They are. The people running these experiments are well-aware of that and go to great pains to ensure that that is not what's being measured.

*affect the cancer rate. Not effect. Still waking up here.

One of the lowest effort healthy lifestyle changes you can make is to wean your body off of craving sweets. Artificial sweeteners still make you crave sweets.

Replace sweetened drinks with unsweetened tea (there are hundreds of varieties, you will find something that you like).

Replace desserts with your favorite fruit or berries.

Your body, mind, and teeth will thank you.

> Artificial sweeteners still make you crave sweets.

How do you know that this is true?

I think there is evidence that this is true for some sweeteners, such as Ace K, but I don't think this is the case with aspartame.

Anecdotally people who do keto have documented increased insulin levels from artificial sweeteners.

I believe that's true, that you'll see an insulin response from anything that tastes sweet, but that doesn't automatically entail that you'll crave sweet.

An insulin increase without carb intake results in lowered blood sugar, thus hunger.

This is the simplest sort of biochemistry.

You haven't quantified the magnitude of the insulin response just from tasting something sweet, which is relevant to how much of an impact it will have on behavior, nor does a lowered blood sugar necessarily entail you crave sweets. Simple biochemistry does not capture human behaviour.

Insulin response to sweets is probably subject to operant conditioning, so path dependent.

Frequent exposure to sweetness makes your taste receptors accustomed to it, like building up a tolerance.

It's obvious by a simple experiment: cut out everything sweet (at the very least candy, sweets and desserts) for a couple of weeks, then try eating a candy bar or a thickly-frosted cupcake. It will taste almost unbearably sweet.

Make sweets something you only enjoy as a rare treat, and you'll find that you'll eat much less of them, because the sweetness will simply be too much.

I question the same thing, and would like to know how accurate it is.

Is there any peer reviewed literature that supports this?

I've read that sweeteners still affect insulin levels even though they're not metabolised.

Aspartame does not increase insulin levels. People have heard that Sucralose does and group all artificial sweeteners together.

> The sweet taste of artificial sweeteners triggers cephalic phase insulin release, causing a small rise in insulin levels.

I'm gonna bet it does. Even our autonomic systems are pavlovian in conjunction, for good reason evolutionarily (hyper efficiency somewhere in the past).

You can bet whatever you wish, insulin levels are quantifiable. Studies have looked at exactly this question and have been unable to show an increase with Aspartame specifically.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29982723/

In diabetic adults aspartame does (and probably stevia, sucralose in everyone iirc), which is only a subset of sweeteners. More than that, the studies are being done regarding apparent insulin resistance developed by the guy bacteria after prolonged usage, which causes the body to have to produce more. So it does sometimes and usually, depending on composition. I'll double down on that.

Good luck with whatever.

>In diabetic adults aspartame does

Since you're stating this definitively in a response to Someone posting evidence debunking your previous claim, can you link a study backing it up?

Artificial sweeteners, from the time that they enter your mouth and encounter your taste buds, cause the release of insulin.

This insulin lowers your blood sugar. Because artificial sweeteners provide only the sensation of sweetness and not the energy content of an actual sugar, your blood sugar falls low enough that your unconscious brain is compelled to eat.

People who drink diet soda consistently eat more calories than they would have eaten if they had drunk a regular soda--even if you include the calories from the soda.

Studies have not shown any link between aspartame and insulin levels. Artificial sweeteners have shown an increase in blood sugar over long periods of time in mice, but not humans.

Studies haven't found a causal relationship between diet soda and weight gain.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-b...

https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-sodas-and-weight-ga...

Ah, yes, replace 'sweets' with 'fruits' which are about 50-75% sugar by non-water mass.

Eg strawberries - 100 g is 7.7g of carbohydrates (4.9g sugar), 0.7g protein, 0.3g fat. 56% sugar.

Or oranges - 165 g without membrane or peel is 20.7g carbs (14g sugar), 1.5g protein, 0.2g fat. 63% sugar.

As opposed to, say, a snickers bar. 9.1g carbohydrates (7.6g sugar), 1.1g protein, 3.6g fat. 55% sugar.

Or a kitkat. 27.1g carbs (20.4g sugar), 2.7g protein, 10.4g fat. 50% sugar.

Granted, the fruits have way way more water content so by mass are substantially lower fractions of sugar. It can be (but is not necessarily) more satisifying to eat the increased mass and volume of fruit, or to eat the same total mass/volume but ingest substantially fewer calories (about tenfold, by mass).

But really this advice is just 'swap sweets for smaller quantities of sweets'.

https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices...

https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5461/2

https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5418/2

It's not just the sugar, it's the sugar in combination with other ingredients. Even the example you gave the fat is 10x as high and obviously has no fibre.

The nutrient density of fruits is magnitudes higher than sweets.

And water mass matters as it contributes to satiety vs grams of food consumed.

OP didn't say anything about reducing fat intake. Aspartame is a sugar substitute, OP talked about switching from sweetened beverage to unsweetened beverage neither of which has any fat. OP also said "your teeth will thank you" which again is an association between sugar and tooth decay, of which fat plays no part. Fat is a nonsequitur here; the linked article is about a sugar substitute.

The nutrient density of desserts is magnitudes higher. Carbohydrates, protein, and fat are the primary nutrients. You must mean micronutrients, i.e. individual amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. Of these, the snickers bar does quite well with amino acids thanks to the peanuts, but yes, a serving of strawberries will give you vitamin c which the snickers won't.

However, that single vitamin is the only real difference in micronutrient quality!

The fruit and candy are both negligible 2-10% amounts for the remainder. They're also very similar on mineral content, with the candy providing 8-10% dv on 5 minerals, while the fruit provides 7% and 29% of two minerals, the rest negligible in both, averaging 5.6% dv for the fruit or 7.6% dv for the candy across the ten minerals.

I already addressed water mass and caloric density, but for completeness I will say again that you're getting these very comparable amounts of micronutrients for a tenfold caloric difference.

Notice how the parent didn't say to wean yourself off 'sugar', but sweets. It he had said sugar, most of the advice about fruits would be contradictory. 'Sweets' generally refers to processed junk food, generally high in sugar and fat. I think following up the conversation by saying fruits are better than sweets because they have water, fiber, and micronutrients, and none of the bad fats most sweets have, is perfectly reasonable.

I believe in that theory too, non processed foods have a lot of stuff beside sugar, fibers will change your gut processing and the metabolic impact can be different. Also you rarely binge on strawberries, you get sick way faster than on kitkats.

I think the issue isn't just the pure carb content. 100g of strawberries is a lot of strawberries. 100 g of Snickers bars is... two bars. I can easily eat two and then crave another one right away. After 100 g of strawberries, I'm pretty much done for a while. Same with say, apples.

I think one thing that is usually overlooked in these discussions is the "feeling" part of it, for lack of a better term. Some things make you want to keep on eating, while others are satiating. Of course, if you're able to only eat one Snickers bar a day while the cupboard is full of them, then that's great! I know I can't, so I avoid them altogether.

Carb content (calories, actually) isn't important per se, what matters is the total consumed quantity, and usually calorie-dense foods have a tendency to incite overconsumption.

> make you want to keep on eating

Junk food recipes are a/b tested and statistically evaluated just like in ad tech.

I remember an ad I once saw on TV about some snack, and the tagline was something like "you can't eat only one". I can't remember the product, though...

One example I have in mind about products being made like this is Nestlé's Extreme ice cream cones. They're fairly sugary throughout, but right at the end there's a small "chocolate bomb", super sweet, that just gives you that "I have to have another one" craving.

Yeah this is what a lot of “food science” is these days.

Not to mention all the effort that goes into studying how different food constituents affect human consciousness and behavior, which results in products that are habit-forming and increase impulsive buying.

I’ve often wondered how many secondary impulse buys are made because someone makes an extra trip to the store to satisfy their primary craving for tobacco, coffee, energy drinks or just sugar.

In retailing those are known as magnet products and are more promoted within the store.

I think it's more the opposite, no? You go to the store for something you need, but then on your way out you pick up a bag of chips or a chocolate bar or whatever. I suspect that's why they often put them on display in the check-out line.

At least with my young single male peers, trips to the store are primarily for beer or tobacco or sugar. The 1 & 2 of video game junk food cross sponsorship has messed up a lot of their bodies

Lay's Potato Chips. I remember that one. Pringles was Once you pop, you can't stop.

Most useless invention: resealable bag of potato chips.

To be fair, so is all of our fruit these days. Just through a couple thousand years of selective breeding.

Our fruit is tested for many things other than simply, "can we get you to eat more of this." One of the most common being, "does is stay shiny while we ship it," as opposed to, "does this taste good?"

I don't disagree. But much like the sugary (or "sugary") treats I'd say it's one of the highest priorities.

At this point, most of our fruit is much more recent vintage than a few thousand years.

Strawberries, as we know them, only came into being in the 18th century.

Also, fruit is being actively manipulated to fit consumer's tastes and producer's profitability. The Honeycrisp apple is one of the biggest recent success stories.

> calorie-dense foods have a tendency to incite overconsumption

Key quote that refutes GP's perspective.

To your point, I bought a food dehydrator recently and made a batch of dried apples. I was watching a movie and midway through realized that in my snacking while watching I had eaten 9 whole apples. That water content really prevents a lot of abuse.

Fruit is fructose + water + fibre + natural flavouring.

Confectionery is sucrose + other carbs + filler + appetite enhancers.

While you can over eat fruit, the water and fibre make it very difficult.

With confectionery, it's literally designed to be easy.

Eating only one snickers isn't impossible - I do this. It is mostly habit. I'm used to eating about a half of a candy bar at a time, but I'm also basically just having a bit of candy when I want a bit.

While I don’t disagree with you in general, I disagree on strawberries. 100g of them is a very small amount and a snickers bar (or in my case, some artificially sweetened protein bar) is far more filling.

100g of strawberries is 33 calories. 1 cliff bar is 240.

You can eat a pound of strawberries and feel full for an hour. Try that with a candy bar.

Volume and digestability is key to eating less.

> a snickers bar (or in my case, some artificially sweetened protein bar) is far more filling.

Come on, this is just incomparable. Protein is satiating.

A protein bar is a very different experience from a Snickers

100 grams of strawberries looks to be about 8-10 large strawberries

http://www.wholefoodsplantbasedhealth.com.au/wp-content/uplo...

100g of strawberries really isn't that much strawberries. I eat 400g of berries each morning with breakfast and would gladly eat more if calories didn't exist and that already weren't too much fruit at once.

Yeah, no.

100g is half a cup. It's about 5 large strawberries. See https://findanyanswer.com/how-many-grams-are-3-strawberries for more numbers.

I buy strawberries in 500g boxes, and let me tell 1/5 isn't all that filling (definitely less than a Snickers bar).

Everyone says this but it misses the point. Fruit in it's natural state is a complete package of nutrients, fiber, and unrefined sugar. It has less of an impact on blood sugar than processed food with the same amount of sugar.

Why? Why is “processed” automatically bad?

It’s not automatic, but the processing is guided by whatever processing scales (both in manufacturing and delivery of the “food”) and has been honed by a/b testing and statistically evaluated to be addictive.

Maintaining the complex structure of the unprocessed ingredients isn’t even on the radar.

Fiber slows down the absorption, so there's less spike in blood sugars as when eating candy which is all easy to digest refined sugar.

Processing is by definition used to extra more of something (usually calories) than would otherwise be present. It doesn't have to be bad, but it's definitely something that doesn't occur naturally and so we may not be well adapted to it. Thus, the chance of it being "worse", health-wise, than the natural thing is higher.

Processing almost invariably means taking out and throwing away the fiber. But the fiber plays an absolutely vital role. Leaving the fiber in is so anomalous they have to note it in big print on the label, e.g. "whole grain".

There are very serious reasons to treat the fiber as deeply precious, and removing it as deeply harmful.

Is this actually evidence backed? I adore fruit. When I wanted to lose weight I had to go off fruit and substitute with diet cola. It worked really well.

Ultimately, all the evidence I see points to the fact that most people can’t eat large amounts of fruit. I can, though. I’m like 170 lbs (77 kg) and I can easily devour pounds of apples or strawberries or mangoes in a sitting and eat more tomorrow. So the pro fruit argument usually ends up on CICO which I am willing to accept.

So I stay away from fruit when I know I need to control weight.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...

I’m sympathize and want to believe but this is stating a whole bunch of correlative “why fruits are good for you” not a difference in the mechanism between added sugar and sugar in fruits.

Nobody is saying it's impossible to eat enough fruit to be fattening.

We've arguably evolved to do exactly that, since fruits are seasonal crops with brief periods of availability before rotting and vanishing until next season. We binge when they're available (and love sweets accordingly), storing some energy for the coming period of scarcity.

But it's true that intact fruits include soluble dietary fiber. The soluble fiber interferes somewhat with the small intestine's access to the sugars locked up in the goop as it passes through, to become flatulence via your guests living in the colon.

Just look at an insulin index including fruits to see how they compare, there's a small example on wikipedia @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index#Explanation_of_I...

Right. That makes sense and is what I am familiar with. Is it evidence-backed as a causative mechanism?

I like the Insulin Index page. That seems like reasonable evidence.

> Is it evidence-backed as a causative mechanism?

My understanding of the role soluble fiber plays in fruit digestion comes entirely from talks by ucsf professor of pediatrics Robert Lustig. There's a bunch of his stuff on youtube, you may have heard of the famous one Sugar: The Bitter Truth. In some talks he goes more into the role of soluble fiber, but I don't recall which, and it's a bit of a rabbithole to go digging through again. Plus it's been years since I spelunked this particular hole, it's presumably even deeper now.

I'm sure if you do some digging you could find reliable info on the subject. It's not my impression that we're breaking new ground here, pretty sure dietary fiber's effects on digestion are at least partially understood scientifically at this point.

Unfortunately you'll still encounter a lot of folks fixating on "the physics" and calories in vs. calories out, which ignores the fact that your body is full of living organisms. The composition of your food largely determines how much of its calories get taken up by your body vs. your guests vs. simply pass through.

Oooh. Thanks for the Lustig recommendations! Much appreciated.

I have recently started appreciating the gut flora stuff after discovering that there’s a whole class of artificial sweeteners that not only gives me the runs (easy to handle) but also wrecks my mood (harder to detect since it borks my detection mechanism).

On the bright side, if I’m willing to accept the pain, weight loss is trivial. Smash the Nick’s and Halo Top for a week, compensate for mood with a Barry’s Bootcamp every day, come out the other side stronger and lighter.

When I visited a small island in Belize, I went out on a tiny sailboat with a middle aged local and his teenage son. At lunch time, he grabbed his gut and proclaimed that he ate too many bananas, and then promptly diced up a pineapple for everyone.

> easily devour pounds

The real problem—don't do that. Eat a salad beforehand and then keep the fruit to a serving or two. Zero doesn't work in the long term, there is no need for deprivation that squeezes out the fun in life.

Well, right, but that’s just CICO in the end. It’s not a sugar thing. That’s fully understandable. It’s the added sucrose vs fructose in fruit discussion that’s interesting.

Need to keep high-glycemic foods to a minimum to keep a moderate blood sugar level.

How many obese/overweight people are so because they eat too many apples? I can't imagine many.

> is a complete package of nutrients

You'll die of malnutrition on a fruit-only diet. It lacks fat, for example, which is essential.

I don't mean complete as in, its all that you need, just that food is more than simply tallying sugar content.

People seem to think fruit == candy since both contain lots of sugar. It's a lot more complicated than that.

It is also simply difficult to eat enough fruit to cause problems. For example, I've never gotten a sugar rush from eating fruit, but just one cookie will do it.

P.S. I'm not talking about juicing fruit, I mean chewing and eating fruit in its natural state.

Can you explain what you mean by a sugar rush? I thought that was a myth

It's hard to describe, but I can feel it when my blood sugar levels spike.

As I understand it, the body's self-regulation systems maintain blood sugar within a range that doesn't typically permit a 'sugar high'.

If you regularly experience a 'sugar-high', I wonder if it might be indicative of problems with your body's blood sugar regulation.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324896#Acute-sugar...

> You'll die of malnutrition on a fruit-only diet. It lacks fat, for example, which is essential.

Ever heard of Avocado?

"Fruitarians" also include nuts in their "fruit" diet.

https://www.byrdie.com/fruitarian-diet

You can get fats from nuts.

"Anyone following a fruit diet may be missing out on vital nutrients, including: iron calcium vitamin D zinc omega-3 fatty acids B vitamins, including B-12"

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/fruit-diet

If they allow any "botanical" fruits, wouldn't that also include grains and legumes? In which case it's basically just a vegan diet.

I always throw my hands up when people mention refined vs unrefined sugar, there is practically no difference between the two except one has been extracted from the other, and the body readily reacts the same to both.

There is a massive difference: sugar with fiber is digested completely differently from sugar without fiber.

Without, it all goes straight into the bloodstream, and has to be processed immediately. If there is too much, the fructose gets processed to fat in the liver. Fructose has to be processed by the same pathway as alcohol, because the rest of the body doesn't know what it is. American children are getting cirrhosis like alcoholics now. The appetite system doesn't know about fructose: eating any amount fails to make you less hungry.

With, much of it gets to the lower intestine, where it feeds gut bacteria, instead. They need it. We need them. What gets absorbed takes longer, resulting in much smaller swings of concentration of various blood chemicals.

Fruits contain dietary fiber and potassium. Both are nutrients Americans tend to consume not quite enough of [1,2]. Both help to mitigate the physiologic disorders (hypertension [3], diabetes [4]) associated with sugar consumption [5]. In addition, fruit contains vitamin C, which reduces uric acid [6]; the detrimental effect of fructose on hypertension is thought to be mediated by uric acid [5]. Consumption of fruits, even moderate amounts of juices, is associated with reduced risk of CVD [7].

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221226721...

2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6181280/

3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11906-011-0197-8

4: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200005113421903

5: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/86/4/899/4649308?login...

6: https://www.jrheum.org/content/35/9/1853.short

7: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

Fruit also contains fiber, which most sweets do not.

No matter what they say, nobody likes fruit enough to get fat off of it.

Can't say that about candy bars.

Seasonal strawberries and peaches I can eat all day.

They taste better than any candy bar I’ve ever had, and come without the guilt.

> Ah, yes, replace 'sweets' with 'fruits' which are about 50-75% sugar by non-water mass.

What constitutes the rest of the non-water mass matters quite a bit (especially if l, as much of it is with many whole fruits, it is fiber, which is demonstrated to mitigate Type 2 diabetes risk and severity.) Sugar + fiber is much less bad for you than sugar alone.

Your numbers for the Snickers bar seem too small - a 44g candy bar has 11g fat, 20g sugar.

If you meant some smaller bar, then you are comparing a very small candy bar against 100g or 165g or fruit; not very fair.

They are using numbers for a fucking fun size snickers, ie the tiny ones people give out at Halloween that are a single bite.

Gotta love the internet, where you can find people trying to convince themselves that a candy bar is healthier to eat than fruit by posting the nutritional contents of a Snickers bite sized mini. The confirmation bias is strong with this one.

I can't even tell if the comments here are serious or trolling any more.

Fruits contain micronutrients in addition to the regular nutrients they have. There's no comparison that just about any fruit would be a healthier choice than a candy bar. I thought it would also go without saying that it is essential to have a diverse diet because a person needs a lot of different nutrients, not just one.

The comment was arguing that fruits are also bad since they have a very high sugar content. It was in no way stating that candy is good.

Many diets forbid fruits on account of the simple carbs.

Hasn’t it been proven many times that fruits are healthy, period? Let alone comparing fruits to processed/refined sugars?

I never understand these claims of fruits being unhealthy — or an unhealthy substitute for processed/refined sugars — yet there are many sources stating that fruits are fine/healthy [1].

There’s more to the story than just comparing the amount of “sugar” from nutritional facts between fruits and candy.

Yes, juices aren’t great. But be clear that whole fruits and fruit juices are vastly different, and shouldn’t be thought of as equally unhealthy.

[1] https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2016/08/natural-...

>Hasn’t it been proven many times that fruits are healthy, period?

Fruits are healthy in the same sense that dihydrogen monoxide is. Infinitesimal amounts have no health consequence, moderate amounts are healthy, amounts that exclude other foods will cause nutritional deficiencies, and excessive enough amounts will result in suffocation.

Sure, but if you eat a kilo of apples a day you'll get sick of apples and eat a light lunch worth of calories. Eat a kilo of chocolate and you're eating double your daily calories. Nobody got obese because of their 10kg-a-day apple habit.

I think you've sort of lost something in your study of macros there. As an anecdote, I can eat and enjoy an orange, or a banana but typically no more. I can absolutely crush a package of oreos though. I've got a rule about junk food, that the total size of a container needs to be an appropriate single serving.. because no matter how big it is, one package has consistently been 'one serving'. I won't speculate because I don't know why, but I've consistently noticed that fruit, while appealing and satisfying, are more difficult to unthinkingly binge than processed sweets.

Basically, I think you're losing something when you compare the macros of a pear to a snickers bar.

Except cherry, cherry is definitely bingeable.

But other than that it's a very good analysis.

Is it because fruit sugar is fructose and not saccharose?

Most fruits approximate 50% fructose and 50% glucose, like sucrose or "high-fructose corn syrup". Pears and, particularly, mangos have a much larger fraction of fructose.

The important difference is that they all (except grapes!) have enough fiber to modulate absorption. Juice, any juice, is as bad as candy. Amount matters. Rate matters.

Regular corn syrup and corn sugar are just glucose, so relatively harmless. You can't find corn sugar at a supermarket, but can online: "Homebrew" sells it for $2/lb, nominally for home beer brewers to boost carbonation, but it is good for anywhere you would use cane sugar. (Sometimes a pinch of the latter may still be needed, e.g. in hot cocoa.)

Fruits have fiber which moderate the glucose release, so they are generally a healthy alternative to sugar. A simple sugar content comparison does not tell the full story.

Fruit juices or any sort of fruit product where the fiber is removed, however, is just as bad as sugar.

First, the snark in the first sentence is unnecessary to try to make your point.

Second, the presence of fibers is the differentiator here, meaning that the same amount of sugar in fruits will bring a lot more satiety.

Motivated reasoning, much? You're comparing a 15 g "fun size" snickers or a 42 g kit kat to 100 and 165 g of fruit. And non-water mass is a strange calculation to make - we don't live in a freeze-dried society. Snickers and kit do have higher fat percentages than fruit, what's your point?

Wean off sweets with less sweet things, which do have other nutritionally redemptive qualities.

It's not just about sugar though. Salt can make you hungry, and more likely to eat more than you should.

According to Google, Snickers has 189 mg of salt per 100 grams. Strawberries have 0.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/25/sa...

Anecdotally, I have noticed I can basically eat an entire large pizza and still want more. Once we switched to making our own pizza from dough at trader Joe's, I'm stuffed after about 2 slices. I think the difference is that we don't add a ton of salt and cheese like a pizza place does.

what about carrots ? I find them great fillers, low cal, just enough sweetness inside (only side effect is skin tone if done too much)

Aspartame makes me crave more aspartame, not sugar. I am addicted to Diet Coke, but I can’t even finish a single can of regular coke.

I think it’s a combination of flavor and dopamine from drinking it. A lot of Diet Coke drinkers would rather drink water than Diet Pepsi. Not that it taste “bad”, it’s just not what they’re craving.

My wife stopped drinking Diet Coke for a month, and then decided she preferred life with that vice and started drinking it again.

I’ve done the same thing.

I don’t/borderline can’t drink coffee. I’ve made a lot of dietary and activity chnages in the past couple years but the mainstay has been diet or Pepsi max.

I’ve straight told people it’s just gonna have to be my vice. I can eat salads and peanut butter sandwiches all day and night. But i haven’t found a way to wean myself from caffeine.

I definitely don’t like when I drink too much (see coffee comment). But I can’t just cold turkey it either.

> Artificial sweeteners still make you crave sweets.

That's not my experience at all. My sweet cravings after having actual sugar are much more intense, and they remind me of what a real craving feels like. My daily consumption of sweeteners doesn't make me crave any sweets, and I normally don't.

Note that it is in rodent. Aspartame hadn't been confirmed as a carcinogenic agent in humans.

That said, I don't think it's a good idea to subject to ourselves to drinking diet soda as a daily habit. It costs money, may or may not interfere with your blood sugar and the health of your gut microbiomes.

As a goal, I limit my intake of any sweet and/or artifically sweetened drinks.

Instead of being a chronic diet coke drinker, I instead became a chronic drinker of water. Two or three cups of water is typically what I drink in a daily meal.

not only is it rodent the amount of Aspartame / kilogram is huge even at their lowest value (20mg/kg). Coke no sugar has ~87 mg of Aspartame in it, you need to do drink ~20 cans of it to meet the same Aspartame level in a 90kg human.

A 90kg human is above the US national average, though about on target for US men. 81kg is the US average body weight with women around 73kg. So for women, that means the quantity they'd need to consume to reach that level is around 16 cans. 16 cans translates to 192 oz, or about 1.5 gallons.

That is indeed quite a bit, but about twice what's recommended by volume for water consumption for women.

> 16 cans translates to 192 oz, or about 1.5 gallons.

About 5.5 liters for non USA people.

Artificial sweeteners are in more than just sodas.

The number of food products that traditionally didn't have sweetners in, that now have aspartame is increasing. That is concerning for me.

I once had a limonade that had sugar and aspartame in it, probably to bring down the amount of sugar.

H2O all the way. I used to drink a ton of coke everyday. I started carrying a water bottle everywhere (and I do mean everywhere), and I take small sips very often. It's a surprisingly easy habit to kick - grab a bottle and stick with it.

Unflavored seltzer (i.e. no sugar, no sodium, no caffeine) is also as healthy as water and some people like myself find it significantly easier to drink than water.

Beware, however, that the carbon dioxide in fizzy drinks causes the water to become acidic, which is bad for the enamel on your teeth.

Yep, carbonic acid.

If it tastes great, there's usually a catch somewhere!

To be sure, the jury is still out on this, but there is at least reason to be concerned about aspartame’s like to certain neurological problems as well: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23280025/

Also, it still spikes your insulin. Better to just avoid it and sugar altogether as much as possible.

Considering how widespread Aspartame on a societal level, you'd think there'd be epidemiologic evidence of increasing cancer rates over that time. Maybe there is some literature on it, but I hadn't heard.

The problem is that we have introduced so many new chemicals recently and have seen so many unexplained changes to health. Its virtually impossible to work out which thing did what. I'm not going to stress over aspartame though. Plastics, PFOA, PTFE, processed meats, and air pollution are way above on my concern scale.

If I was concerned about cancer from aspartame, I would never touch any form of alcohol again.

O? What’s alcohol got to do with aspartame?

Scientists think that up to 50% of cancer might come from alcohol consumptions, but it’s apparently quite hard to study.

I remember watching Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia, or maybe just an interview with Hamilton Morris, anyway he usually studies psychedelics and barbiturates and all the weird fringe drugs, and someone asks his opinion on alcohol and he says it’s a really crappy drug because you have to consume massive quantities of it for the desired effect, like most drugs that change your brain up are measured in milli/micrograms, but if you want to get trashed your poisoning yourself with, like, a liter of straight alcohol, it’s a lot of work for your body to deal with compared to smaller dose drugs.

Poisoning aside I guess you need to suggest a mechanism where DNA gets interfered with, is our body just as good at error-free mitosis when we’re sleeping off a rough night?

I went effectively teetotal around 2007 (I got spectaculary blackout drunk - woke up nearly a day later and couldn't remember getting home or much of the 8hrs prior to that - decided that was a silly way to live and quit).

Honestly not something I miss, I raise a glass of whiskey every xmas in remembrance of my grandfathers (Irish one side, Scottish the other).

Otherwise never, it's fun when the doc/nurse asks "How any units do you drink?" "About one per year" it's such a massive in-grained part of our culture (I'm British) still.

Though the youngsters coming up now drink way less than I did at 18 in 1998 - partly cost and partly a greater awareness of the damage (plus there is just so much more for the average teenager to do now).

The evidence on alcohol and pariculary mouth/oesphagal problems is pretty compelling but I'm not a doctor.

> Though the youngsters coming up now drink way less than I did at 18 in 1998

I've noticed this too (also British). I'm very close in age to you and remember the news stories regarding University drinking challenges and deaths in the late 90's.

I'm almost teetotal these days too, partly because I have young kids but also because I just don't seem to have the taste for it that I once had.

Also, I'm a little concerned about the potential longer term (yet to be discovered) health implications regarding the level of drinking our generation did at the time.

Its that there are so many thing we _know_ cause cancer in high rates that we still consume. So I wouldn't waste mental energy on something that maybe might cause it before cutting out everything we know causes it first.

PTFE? It’s so non-reactive that it is commonly used in medical implants, precisely because of its high biocompatibility. I don’t think that there are any connections at all between PTFE and cancer.

"While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).[58] Over 400 °C (752 °F) pyrolysis occurs and more decomposition becomes significantly more rapid. The main decomposition products are tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) and difluorocarbene radicals (RCF2).[58] The degradation by-products can be lethal to birds,[59] and can cause flu-like symptoms[60] in humans—see polymer fume fever."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Safety

> However these cases of polymer fume fever were mostly present in people who had cooked at 390 °C (734 °F) for ≥4 hours.

My oven goes up to 250 °C, though I never use it above 220. What cooking processes go to each of these thresholds?

Frying.

I thought oil boiled at 300 °C, how do you get up to 390 °C?

You don't, at least not on purpose. At 390 C you're filling your kitchen with smoke, and if you're cooking on gas you probably already have a grease fire on your stove.

However, it is shockingly easy to get a pan this hot by accident, with no more than a few minutes of inattention. I've seen people burn the non-stick coating off their pans on a couple of occasions after getting distracted by the phone.

It's risky to use nonstick cookware the same way you use bare metal pans, by heating the pan up to searing temperature before adding oil and food. I tell people to treat nonstick as though the food is already in the pan before they turn the heat on: don't turn the heat up high enough to burn the food, and the coating will stay safe.

It's worth pointing out that there isn't really any good evidence that fumes from burning PTFE cause permanent damage. There have been very few cases of verifiable PTFE "fume fever", in spite of the fact that lots of people burn up their nonstick cookware, and lasting effects haven't been obvious as far as I know.

Given what I originally quoted said it only happens after four hours of exposure, your final paragraph does not surprise me.

there are many pet horror stories of bird deaths from PTFE pans, typically from accidents, but occasionally from normal use. one may assume that it happens quite often without a canary in the kitchen so to speak, and thus goes unnoticed.

also, damaging the coating is known to lower the temperature at which PTFE will pyrolize. anecdotally i don’t think i’ve seen a single teflon pan in anyone’s home that didn’t have some damage unless it was nearly new.

most situations that people are exposed to PTFE fumes are certainly below the level that triggers acute illness, but i wouldn’t be surprised if it was very common to get enough exposure to contribute to cancer, but it would be very hard to verify or test for that specific cause.

The bird thing has attained mythological status, but I'm not convinced. The story appears to have been popularized by the 2003 "Canaries in the Kitchen" article from the Environmental Working Group. It should be noted that every one of the citations in this article is an anecdotal story. Nowhere do they cite any research showing that sub-pyrolytic heating of PTFE can kill birds in realistic environments.

One problem with the anecdata here is that birds can be killed by all kinds of other fumes and smoke, including ordinary cooking fumes, which makes it impossible to isolate the variables in a non-laboratory setting. Shit, you can kill birds with just the natural gas from your stove, or with the vaporized mineral oil burned off a new toaster.

As for burning up a nonstick pan, sure, I don't think anyone doubts that's lethal to birds. But I don't believe birds are harmed by nonstick cookware under normal conditions. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

> damaging the coating is known to lower the temperature at which PTFE will pyrolize

Overheating can definitely impair the coating's adhesion to the cooking surface, which makes it more vulnerable to flaking in the future, but the breakdown temperatures of the coating system components aren't changed. They are what they are.

I have many well-used nonstick pans, some nearly a decade old, and on the inside they're flawless like the day I bought them. Except the one I gouged with an immersion blender. I use silicone, nylon, and wood utensils, and I don't overheat them.

> it would be very hard to verify or test for that specific cause.

It's not that hard to get good retrospective data. There are many thousands of workers who have spent years working in the fluorinated chemical industry, and as far as I know there's no evidence of higher cancer rates among that population.

A broiler typically goes to or above 260°C. A pizza oven can pretty easily get above 400°C.

Not sure why anyone would use nonstick cookware in a pizza oven, but people make bad decisions frequently enough.

It seems like a burner left on a dry pot or pan could easily do that.

Grills with PTFE coated utensils.

Commercial kitchens using specialized ovens and PTFE lined pans could be constantly putting out fumes.

Our propane pizza oven gets up to about 400C on the stone, and hotter at the flames. I don't think there's ever any PTFE near it, though. There do exist "non-stick" pizza peels, though, so someone could do that. The thing with peels on pizza stones is that their edges tend to grind down. I probably eat a miniscule amount of aluminum each time we make pizza.

Yes, it becomes toxic at high temperatures, same as many other commonly used materials, eg. wood. Should we also be concerned about widespread use of woods because it becomes toxic when burned?

If wood was sold as cookware designed to get to high temperatures. Yes.

Cookware is not designed to go to temperatures as high as those that cause decomposition of PTFE. But, there is plenty of wood cookware in common use. Spatulas, pot handles, etc.

Aspartame was approved by the fda in 1981... no spike in cancer rates AFAICT:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-the...

Doesn't mean it doesn't cause cancer... but even if it does, it must not be a very significant cause.

Death rate from cancer is not really comparable, since there has been significant progress in early diagnosis and treatment. Not accusing or defending aspartame, just pointing it out.

As this study points out, however, most tumors manifest very late in life. 1981 is only 40 years ago.

There seems to be an increase of people with a range of neurodevelopmental conditions like repetitive patterns of behavior and a perturbed sense of identity.

Drinking five diet Cokes a day is probably healthier than drinking 5 regular cokes a day. Sugar is linked to diabetes and other ailments.

And smoking light cigarettes are probably healthier for you too…

What harm does repeating Big Sugar lies do to your body?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

[2] - https://www.smh.com.au/technology/sydney-university-study-cl...

They very probably are. Still, you're exposing your taste buds to sweetness all day, which can mess with your perception of taste.

Plus, it just tastes worse. I'd much rather have a single sugar-containing soda on the weekend, or after finishing some hard physical labor, than liters of diet soda every day.

I like the burn of carbonated soda so I bought a soda stream and I just carbonate water or homemade tea whenever I want a treat. It's definitely the way to go for your day to day if you have a bit of an addtiction!

If they ever find out that carbonated water is carcinogenic I will probably keel over dead the next day. I measure my LaCroix habit in packs per day.

Ever read the label on a LaCroix can? Can you tell me what the “natural” flavors are made from? The lack of transparency scares me, will the way thru process “natural flavor” cause cancer?

I happen to do beverage production for a living now. I know exactly where they come from and how many are made. There’s nothing to be scared of.

The FDA has a list of things you can call “natural flavor”. They are essentially all extracts, mostly refined through distillations.

I’ll give you an example: blueberry. Industrial juice is typically concentrated by vacuum distillation. It had to be shipped frozen, and that’s very expensive, so it’s cheaper to remove the water.

The first stuff that comes off of that is called essence and has a delightful blueberry flavor. It doesnt taste exactly like blueberry but it’s recognizable and highly potent.

A couple drops of that flavor your entire can.

You can actually buy them directly from a couple flavor houses (most are wholesale only but not all) in small quantities. Check out Silver Cloud Flavors. I have carbonated water on draft and just add them in rather than buying cans anymore.

Thanks for demystifying this topic for me. Gonna look into these flavors to try!

Same. The only times I drink sugary drinks are on the weekends. Otherwise it’s water for me.

Unfortunately moderation is lost on most people.

It it isnt lost on people.

Many try and fail to moderate due to mental health issues.

For some substitution is the answer. For other strict elimination.

Different strokes for different folks.

Also note that this particular research lab seems to be the only one that can find any link between aspartame and cancer, with many others finding none. Additionally, this is not new data but a reanalysis of existing data, and the rats in question were exposed to a quite high dose.

Best too drink water atleast 30 minutes before or after the meal because it dilutes the stomach digestive acids

That can lead to other problems :D. We humans are so complicated :).

If you need something a bit more exciting than water there's also always club soda and plain seltzer.

The strain of rat used in these experiments, the Sprague Dawley, is commonly used to study cancer because it has a higher baseline incidence of cancer and grows solid tumors faster than other strains [1].

Interestingly, it’s the same strain that was used in the now-discredited study purportedly showing that RoundUp causes cancer [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_rat#Sprague_Dawley_...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Séralini_affair

Aspartame isn't just widely consumed, it's practically universally consumed. If it was carcinogenic in humans, wouldn't there be obvious epidemiological evidence to back that up?

It's not unreasonable to assume that the current rate of disease in our populations might be able to be lower since we weren't tracking the association of the introduction of products to safety in years past as well as we do today.

A better question is, suppose it was known that it did create a small but measurable in lifetime cancer risk, would you actually want to keep consuming it?

EDIT: Also aspartame is hardly universal - it's biggest use is in diet soda. Those of us who essentially never consume it (it's been...over 2 years for me) would almost never be exposed to it.

I don't know, like everybody else, I eat things with substantial amounts of acrylamide, which is a carcinogen we actually know is problematic, unlike aspartame.

You're commenting on a story that suggests that even small exposures to aspartame might be dangerous. And you stopped drinking diet soda only recently. I think you might have a hard time finding an American (for instance) that hadn't consumed a substantial amount of aspartame.

Exactly. Anyone worried about aspartame but still consuming fried/grilled/brazed food (basically anything besides blanching) is kinda missing the point.

Is aspartame commonly used in products that aren't labeled as containing it, or that one might be surprised about? I never buy any food or drink labeled "sugar free" or "contains NutraSweet (or similar)". So I had assumed I wasn't consuming chemical sweeteners. Is it as common as you say because it is widely used in little-known places, or just because most people eat/drink sugar-free products?

Asking out of idle curiosity/surprise. I'm not afraid of aspartame, I just don't care for the taste much.

There's an interesting hypothesis that the pathway to cancer for aspartame (if it exists) might involve creating formaldehyde in the same way that's done when drinking ethanol, and so actually, drinking alcohol is _protective_ as it blocks the aspartame cancer effect -- in a similar way that ethanol is a treatment for methanol poisoning.

I don't really worry about aspartame cancer risk though, it doesn't seem like a big deal if it exists at all. I do buy the idea that diet sodas kill good gut bacteria and avoid them for that reason, but I don't remember a single thing about where I got that idea. It just "feels" right, and I don't mind the lack.

Formaldehyde is not a byproduct of ethanol metabolism. Acetaldehyde is the chemical 'equivalent' metabolic byproduct in the pathway that eliminates ethanol. In common alcohol/liquor for drinking there may be trace amounts of methanol (less true than historically, but still occurs), and that may be what you're thinking.

Depends how much I was drinking (that varies substantially across the population) but cancer risk usually doesn't track exactly with total exposure compared to ongoing exposure - i.e. when you quit smoking your lung cancer risk decreases the longer you stay quit, until after 5-7 years it tends to level out at about the normal population level.

We barely understand the causes of most cancers; how would we separate out that aspartame is the cause of a bump in rates among so many other carcinogenic influences in our lives?

You start with the null hypothesis. If consumption of substance X increases significantly but there is almost no evidence of a significant increase in the cancer rate over that time period then you have a large hill to climb out of in terms of proving causality. Cancer rates over the past 100 years have been mostly dropping. If aspartame really was what some claim then I would expect to see a bump like the one you see in lung cancer starting in the late 40s and climbing hard and fast up until the late-80s/early-90s whereupon it the rate turns negative and starts dropping fast.

There is a lot of cancer in the western world. Without looking it up, I assume many cancers are even correlated with Aspartame consumption, for instance the US will have a lot of both.

Maybe there’s the evidence.

No, the correlation evidence apparently goes the other way with aspartame.

Cured meats probably have a wider base of consumption and are carcinogenic, but only somewhat recently were categorized as such by the WHO. It certainly wasn't folk knowledge when I was a kid that they would be cancer-causing. Bad for the heart, sure, but nothing to do with cancer. And yet it is now established.

That being said, this is a rodent study. Really not a good input to guide human behavior. And human cohort studies have only found associations with cancer after really long periods, like decades. Might be nothing there.

“Established” is a loaded word in something that can’t be tested with a controlled trial. It was once established that eating fat made you fat, eating eggs raised your cholesterol, etc.

True, I consider those things to be established to this day.

Regarding cholesterol and dietary levels to serum levels, it's curvilinear. If you have a low baseline, dietary input has a strong impact on serum output. If you are eating a standard American diet that has a relatively high baseline cholesterol level, the relationship weakens to being statistically insignificant.

And sure, you can get fat without eating fat, and you can create high fat diets that don't increase visible body fat, but those aren't healthy diets.

Meat is associated with cancer. We see this in Americans with the increase in colon cancer that is correlated with the increase of meat consumption. Also hot drinks is a suspected carcinogen. Alcohol is a known carcinogen and even if you don’t consume it, it is present in fruit and can also be produced in your gut.

People worry about suspected carcinogens but they are everywhere. Overall cancer rates are at record low levels except colon cancer and skin cancer. Skin cancer is a weird one since Americans spend less time in the sun and use sunblock.

"Americans use sunblock" seems like quite a generalisation. Is that universally true? Spending less time in the sun could easily lead to less natural protection from melanin leading the more extreme exposure when it does occur.

Decades from now everyone will laugh at us for using the sunblock formulations we currently use. It is as if they are designed to cause cancer when used as directed.

I don't know if the consensus on this will stand very long:

https://www.dietdoctor.com/red-meat-is-not-associated-with-h...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YG81VK6co8

I used to work on DNA dyes. Typically when you see a 6 carbon ring with a chain of carbons attached, there is high probability of that molecule interfering with DNA replication.

Basically the mechanism works because the hexagon ring slides between the base pairs and this leads to a lowest energy state due to a phenomenon call pi orbital stacking resulting in the molecule getting stuck there. The carbon chain is mostly valuable in the sense that it distances the rest of molecule from interfering with the stacking process.

Take a look at ethidium bromide or pretty much any other intercalating dna stain and you’ll see similar characteristics. It’s also extremely carcinogenic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-Stacking_(chemistry)

It’s analogous to getting some cloth stuck in your zipper. Sometimes you can zip and unzip easily enough but sometimes it’ll get stuck. My understanding is that really DNA replication issues tend to be the root cause of some, possibly many cancers but really that’s outside my expertise.

So I would say that it is internally consistent with my limited knowledge of biochemistry that aspartame is carcinogenic.

I would strongly caveat this with saying that these structures occur in pretty high frequency across many forms of plant and animal life. Chemists in my lab used to joke about how potatoes contain 17 or so know carcinogenic compounds so why buy organic. My point is, if you go looking for correlations with cancer in many forms of food, you will find them.

I think for most people, aspartame is not likely to be major risk factor unless you are consuming it in extreme quantities and otherwise live a very healthy life.

The biochemist I raised and who is sitting next to me drinking beers I paid for so that he would not drink all my expensive whiskey says that ethidium bromide doesn't even pass the Ames test except with liver homogenates, and its actual carcinogenicity is unproven. Your body produces similar carbon rings --- phenylalanines --- constantly. You can't simply derive carcinogencity axiomatically.

(I'm butchering this and mostly just having fun with it.)

Edit

He is correcting me and saying that at the moment he is technically working as a veterinary immunologist. But the point about 6-carbon thingies stands.

> The biochemist I raised and who is sitting next to me drinking beers I paid for so that he would not drink all my expensive whiskey

Ah, the joys of having young-adult offspring! I was recently surprised and delighted when the high-school history teacher that I raised brought home a bottle of the not-expensive whisky that we drink (Famous Grouse) to replace the bottle that magically empties so much faster since he started coming over for dinner now and then. He hasn't brought whiskey yet (Jameson's Port Cask) because we don't drink that up as quickly ....

If that hypothesis were true, it would implicate not just phenylalanine, but dopamine, epinephrine, diphenhydramine, ibuprofen, paracetamol, limonene, vanillin, cinnamaldehyde, and literally thousands of other different molecules, natural and synthetic, we constantly interact with. Heck, most polyphenols have pi-conjugation, and those are widely thought to have antioxidant and anticancer effects. Oh and I completely forgot about the indole moiety (tryptophan).

Intercalation is way more complicated than just some flat pi-bonded moieties. If that's all it took, we'd see everyone getting cancer like...rats...oooohhhh, I wonder...

Maybe rodents (especially Sprague rats) are way more vulnerable to intercalation? That would explain why so many things cause cancer - weak recovery mechanisms for DNA replication errors. I need to look into this further.

Anyway... the pattern I see across known intercalators is large, multi-ring (3 or more) fused flat structures. Like PAHs.

It’s not really a comprehensive interpretation of intercalation but I think a geometric interpretation can help some non-chemists understand how intercalating molecules bind to dna.

From the purely geometric model, some of the molecules you proposed have pretty large functional groups adjacent to rings which I think may make the intercalation process less efficient. That being said, if you took those molecules and gave massive doses to rats, some may comeback as carcinogenic.

I think that your multi-ring point is fair. The multi ring structure to me suggests that the more the pi orbitals are able to delocalize their electrons the higher the binding efficiency. I have tested 1-2 molecules where non-fused rings showed some affinity but not near the potency of fused ring structures. I would also say two rings with a carbon-carbon link seem to be potent binding as well. I presume that it’s also related to delocalizing pi orbitals and extra degrees of freedom in the intercalation process but I suppose that’s just speculative.

> some of the molecules you proposed have pretty large functional groups adjacent to rings

And many more do not.

> if you took those molecules and gave massive doses to rats, some may comeback as carcinogenic.

Luckily we don't have to guess. For example, look at the hundreds of terpenoids that saturate traditional diets, many of which and are widely believed to prevent cancer. If you have any actual evidence, put it up.

> The multi ring structure to me suggests...

All this is interesting, but it has exactly nothing to do with in vivo carcinogenicity. You don't have to look far to see this is true. Healthy diets are chock full of polyphenols that exhibit significant DNA binding affinity, but lack evidence of carcinogenicity. And it's not for lack of looking.

You appear to have some specialized knowledge, but when you try to extrapolate it to a wider field where you're out of your depth, these hand-waving guesses can easily turn into fearmongering.

I want to apologize, I definitely don’t intend to fear monger and most definitely not want to imply that I have expertise. Roughly my level of understanding is mostly that of a low level undergrad and you should treat my naiveness as such.

I recognize that what I’m engaging in is entirely wild speculation based on limited experience and data, likely very error prone and that really I’m just having fun without considering how it may impact other readers.

I understand that for many this an important issue of health and research. I did not intend to detract from these more legitimate forms of discussion.

Bah! It was a fun argument to read and you clearly seem to have been participating in good faith.

I doubt there are many graduate students who would readily understand what you wrote about fused rings. It's going to take me some time to digest it.

> I think a geometric interpretation can help some non-chemists understand how intercalating molecules bind to dna.

Absolutely, geometry of electric fields is the primary factor in biochemical interactions. "The electron is where its at" as my o-chem teacher always said.

But that's exactly why aspartame is totally different than intercalators like EthBr, doxorubicin, and PAHs. That phenyl moeity has a rotational degree of freedom, and the whole peptide backbone is floppy. EthBr has a Ph but it's stabilized in-plane by the tri-ring. Intercalators typically have 300-500 daltons worth in a "planar greasy brick" regime, with very little in the way of bulky or floppy steric groups. On paper, aspartame looks pretty flat, but you gotta think about thermal molecules in solution.

E: just noticed this

> I would also say two rings with a carbon-carbon link seem to be potent binding as well.

Oh yeah, like biphenylyl, -Ph-Ph? So that's actually much more planar than a single Ph. The conjugation (any time you see carbon chains with alternating double bonds) of the pi-orbitals stabilizes the rings in-plane. Also it's rather unnatural, there's not a lot of reactions which forge a sigma bond between two aromatics like that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphenyl

While you're here... what is a Ph ring with an O substituted, and an N opposite it, called?

If it's fully unsaturated, 1,4-oxazinane. If it's 2 double bonds, 1,4-oxazine, or more commonly oxazinone if it's part of a larger fused structure (eg nile red). If you fully aromatize it, it becomes oxazinium. That's a weird one, probably unstable. I think there are some peroxo species with a 1,4-oxazin-1-ium but it's a bit wacky.

The meta (1,3) oxazinium is more stable, but it still needs 3 big electron-withdrawing groups to stabilize it in the case of 2,4,6-Triphenyl-1,3-oxazine-1-ium.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxazines

https://chemdrawdirect.perkinelmer.cloud/js/sample/index.htm...

Thank you. I was looking at a vermicide that had what looked like a complicated nitrogen cage, empty, with a pair of those hanging off, and I realized I had no idea what to call them.

> Take a look at ethidium bromide or pretty much any other intercalating dna stain and you’ll see similar characteristics. It’s also extremely carcinogenic.

This is a myth. This is actually a good example of a plausible biological effect that doesn't apply to living organisms:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/04/18/th...

This is absolutely false. It's not universal in the least. I can't consume asparatame because even a tiny amount will give me terrible gastrointestinal pains. I haven't consumed asparatame in over 25 years now and don't even think about it.

> practically universally consumed

I take issue with this, frankly. Aspartame seems to be particularly popular in the USA (diet sodas), and less popular the further away you go.

It's used in other stuff, sure, but most products outside of the USA just use sugar or corn-syrup-based sweeteners. I don't think anyone in my circle of family or friends has had a diet soda in decades, save for exactly one individual who drinks a lot of diet drinks.

> Aspartame seems to be particularly popular in the USA (diet sodas), and less popular the further away you go.

At least in Germany, it’s very similar. Most diet sodas here are aspartame sweetened.

Right, but how popular is diet soda? Anecdotally, there's huge differences between soda consumption in USA and Europe.

If that were true, it makes the epidemiological case for an aspartame link clearer, because you'd simply be able to compare cancer incidence between countries by aspartame consumption and see the evidence. It's the most studied additive in the history of the food industry, and that link has not been found.

It turns out measuring aspartame consumption by country is not simple and that there aren't good sets of equivalent studies across regions to draw from. I browsed some papers in the National Library of Medicine[0] and it seems like, at least as recent as a decade ago, it's generally accepted the USA has a higher intake than the rest of the globe, by 15-25% per capita, but it's hard to know for sure.

I agree there should be an epidemiological case for a link, but alternatively maybe the link is that there is no strong link to cancer.

Everything in moderation, as they say.

0: search "aspartame intake", I can't easily cite anything right now.

Well, cancer is a leading cause of death so it may not be easy to tease that one out.

Regardless, where did you get the idea it's "practically universally" consumed?

Taking soda for example, people typically either do or don't drink diet soda, and in much of the beverage chillers I've seen "diet" is stocked in the minority (with limited regional variation). Bear in mind diet itself is fractured into aspartame and stevia and various others.

Similarly, aspartame or sorbitol or other artificial sweeteners are presented as an option for most hot drinks, alongside sugar - in my experience it's the sugar constantly being replaced on the table.

Looking at packaged foods, I can find few products containing it, and again, packaged foods are only a subsection of all foods out there.

Also there are those among us who consume predominantly (in many cases only) fresh vegetables, fruit, grains, legumes etc.

Look at India, China, Africa, and everywhere in between - this is well over half the worlds population and while many are exposed to at least a small selection of packaged foods, few can afford them, and many simply have no interest.

Just a cursory glance and very rough estimate showed 6000 metric tonnes of Nutrasweet produced in 2014. Divided into a population of 7.8 billion gives each person less than a gram per year.

Aside from the fact that like all products a chunk of that will go back to landfill unsold, there simply isn't nearly enough for it to be universally consumed.

People keep saying that it's hard to tease this out of the data, but consumption of aspartame skyrocketed suddenly in the 1980s. We ran the natural experiment. We have the before-after data. Does that data show a sharp rise in cancer correlated to aspartame consumption? No, it does not; it shows in fact (I believe) the opposite.

That's the argument I'm inviting you to rebut. There are ways to rebut it! But "the data is super subtle" is on its own not a powerful argument.

So if cancer went down, which could happen for all kinds of reasons, good luck finding any causal relationship that may yet still be there hidden beneath such noise.

As far as I'm concerned, if rats are shown to get cancer from something for which there are many alternatives, I'll steer clear of it.

In that case, here's a short list of other foods you'll want to avoid:

- All citrus fruits (due to the limonene content)

- Mint of any kind (limonene again)

- Red meat

- Excess protein

- Coffee (acrylamide)

- Chips and fries (acrylamide)

- Bread (often contains acrylamide)

- Dried fruits and nuts (another acrylamide risk)

- Arugula, beets, cabbage, celery, cilantro, endive, fennel, lettuce, parsley, rhubarb, spinach, and any other vegetables that are high in nitrates.

Also be sure to stay away from cell phones, WiFi, and microwave ovens.

This is just a short list off the top of my head. It's a dangerous world out there. For a lab rat.

Also ice cream and eye drops (carboxymethyl cellulose).

The same voodoo is applied to the supposed connection to dementia. Like the neurotransmitter toxicity nonsense that Mercola helped popularize, which isn't supported by clinical studies, and doesn't even really make sense physiologically.

That's not to say there isn't interesting stuff in these investigations. The recent studies the effect of sweeteners on gut biomes and the resulting effects on serum chemistry are fascinating to me, and I think these studies will be productive in other ways.

Occam's razor:

1) humans consume ~5000 tonnes of the stuff, which apparently causes multiple kinds of cancers in rodents, and it's also super bad for humans, but despite its ubiquity we haven't seen that signal because...?

2) rodents with a lifespan of 1-3 years get cancer super-duper easily

Rodent models are easy. Easy != simple.

Well if you google it the very first result shows that some studies have found a link in humans, others have not.

So in the case of mixed data, it's really up to the individual if they want to err on the side of cancer or not. Given the track record of underestimating the damage of things, I know where I stand. But it's your body.

If I google what?

"aspartame cancer"

> Increasing consumption of aspartame-containing beverages was not associated with the development of lymphoma, leukemia, or brain cancer (3). A 2013 review of epidemiologic evidence also found no consistent association between the use of aspartame and cancer risk (4).Aug 10, 2016 https://www.cancer.gov › risk › diet Artificial Sweeteners and Cancer - National Cancer Institute

I treat artificial sweeteners like I do mask wearing -- I'm not sure how much difference wearing a mask makes for my safety and safety of others, but I wear it anyway because it's a very minor inconvenience and it probably helps.

I avoid artificial sweeteners because I'm not sure if they have any detrimental effects, but I avoid them anyway because it's a minor inconvenience, and whether they are actually harmful or not, they are almost certainly not nutritious and good for me.

(of course the big difference is that wearing a mask almost certainly helps others more than myself)

Fun factoid they are a major migraine trigger for many.

Except mask wearing actually has scientific evidence for its effectiveness, and is why governments around the world recommend it. [1]

Your rationale is based on personal bias against "artificial" substances. The same kind of quack reasoning that drives anti vaxers and other nonsense movements.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536

Aren’t most “artificial” substances more likely to be carcinogenic or toxic than something occurring naturally? Or is that just my wacky personal bias talking?

There are plenty of "natural" carcinogens. Tobacco, for example, is perhaps the largest single cause of cancer in human history.

I know there are natural carcinogens. That wasn’t my question.

Tobacco is a plant. Cigarettes are a product made from tobacco with many “artificial” chemicals added. Cigarettes are the cause.

Tobacco is the cause. Raw tobacco usage straight off the plant is cancer-causing, there's no manipulation needed.

I will not disagree completely. But I will point out that nicotine by itself can actually have benefits that outweight the risks.

Search "benefits of nicotine", yields a wealth of articles supporting this such as: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1859921/

Absolutely, there are few weight loss / irritable bowel syndrome drugs more effective, though it is of course horribly addictive. But tobacco is a lot more than just pure nicotine, and that's where the problems come in.

> Tobacco is a plant.

That is full of carcinogens. And nicotine, which IIRC isn't a carcinogen itself but instead promotes tumor growth once they form.

> Cigarettes are the cause.

Chewing tobacco is a great way to get (a different set of kinds of) cancer, too.

I don't know if this addresses the root of the question though, which is - of things occurring naturally vs those man-made, is there a statistically significant difference in safety of ingesting those found in nature.

I'd imagine there is, or at the very least we'd have millions of years worth of evolution to learn to dislike the taste of naturally occurring things that are bad for us in the vast majority of cases.

Being insulting isn't going to change anyone's mind. In fact, it'll probably persuade people in the opposite direction.

Artificial sweeteners have even more evidence for the safety.

I agree with your second point but I generally take a lot more issue with the lack of skepticism put towards the alternatives rather than the skepticism towards science.

Evenly applied skepticism leads you to accept the thing which has the most evidence in support while also letting you change your mind if the evidence changes. The problem with the "alternative" medicine crowd is that evidence didn't lead them to their conclusion so evidence can't lead them out.

Where is the science showing that artificial sweeteners are actually good for me? Or even better than natural sugars?

Like I said, I don't know if artificial sweeteners are bad for me but I also don't know that they are good for me, so why use them?

I don't eschew everything that might be bad for me I still enjoy wine and even the occasional slice of cake (which even if it's loaded with all-natural sugar which I am sure is not "good" for me), but it's not like my quality of life is lessened by not having more aspartame or even stevia in my diet.

>Or even better than natural sugars?

lower calories?

I'm pretty sure the increased cancer rates and cardiovascular incidents caused by obesity far exceeds the the little aspartame-cancer causation studies have demonstrated so far.

Have diet drinks ever been successful at getting people to lose weight?

Yes, when the replace sugary drinks in the diet.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4786736/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4135487/

Why it wouldn't How replacing a high calorie drink by a low one does not create a decrease in caloric intake?

Because people who drink diet drinks tend to just eat more sugar from other sources.

I noticed switching from juice to artificially sweetened iced tea, that I was more tired.

What if they don't? The "sugar craving" from artificial sweeteners is way overblown.

Yes, fluid calories are the main reason for weight gains, sugary drinks, alcopops and lattes with more calories than a pizza. These enter the bloodstream very fast, cause blood sugar spikes, more hunger, and the average Joe has their glycogen stores pretty full at all times. 25 percent of the sugars, depending on genetics , are converted to fat in a caloric surplus state. The fats, if the glycogen stores are full, goes straight to the fat cells, there was a study where they laced food with radioactive substance traces to make it trackable. Lo and behold, the fat started to assimilate to the fat cell within minutes. Another important thing that most people are not aware of is that the body always metabolizes proteins, glucose and fats at the same time. The body likes to store glucose, but doesn't like to use it, unless it's hard physical work, like lifting weights. It defaults to using energy when sedatery, sleeping and in general.

This can be good and bad, the good is that the fat is used(external from food or internal from fat cells during a caloric deficit), the bad thing is, if you eat plenty of carbohydrates at all times and don't work out, most of the external fats consumed via meals will be stored as body fat.

Often people say but average Joe's can simply eat less. In theory, yes, but it's not practical, if your diet consists of 2000calories of beer and fries and you don't work out, you will not look the same as a person who eats 2000 calories, works out(or not, diet weighs more) and eats lean proteins , not too many carbs and a bit of fat.

The beer and fries guy will also suffer from hunger pangs non stop due to blood sugar volatility.

No, they stimulate insulin release and make people hungrier.

IF you could IN COMPLETE ISOLATION replace sugary drinks with sugar substitutes then it would lead to weight loss.

The number of people who can actual accomplish that is probably very small. The majority of people, particularly those with actual weight issues, are going to wind up hungrier and gaining weight through consumption of other calories. They are not diet drinks, they are ruin-your-diet-drinks.

Everybody can test this with a quick test and see for themselves, there is no insulin spike. Diabetics wouldn't be able to drink diet coke without insulin shots if it were different.

If you think that through, you will recognize it makes no sense at all.

Diabetics are uniquely free of risk of insulin spikes. (Except from accidental overdosing.)

I still tell myself stevia is better even though I'm not at all confident that it's true.

I usually avoid/minimize but those flavored water squirt things get me.

Edit: Mainly due to the effects of my body thinking it's getting sugar, no reason to think stevia causes cancer that I'm aware of.

Ideally you should be avoiding natural sweeteners as well.

I don't think either sweeteners are bad, but I agree, beware of marketing terms like natural, bio etc. The companies are in it for the money and well, heroin is kind of natural too.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ianmiell/status/13952925042081259...

I found aspartame triggers my skin condition, probably due to gut bacteria effects. Reading up I found it's got a lot of side effects which sound bad. Also, my gums are better since giving up coke zero.

"Increased incidence of malignant tumors was seen even in animals exposed to relatively low doses of aspartame – exposures close to the current Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) levels of 40 mg/Kg body weight in the European Union and 50 mg/Kg body weight in the United States."

Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi has the most aspartame, at 188mg/can (12 oz). So, for someone weighing 50kg, the currently allowed dose is 2000 mg/day. Or 10 cans/day.

For a few years around 2015, Pepsi tried switching from aspartame to sucralose. But that was unpopular.

One comment is that aspartame is the most studied artificial sweetener. Others may be worse but less studied.

I think the relevant question is not "does aspartame increase cancer risk" but "does aspartame cause more negative health effects than added sugar." Excessive sugar consumption itself has numerous well-known health risks, including increasing the risks of some types of cancer (mainly by driving obesity).

That's a false choice, though. I can avoid both sugar and aspartame.

To the fruit issue, it needs to be said that fructose can only be metabolized or stored in the liver, the capacity is about 25 grams for an adult, that would be one banana. Or two apples. It's not bad, but should be kept in mind. The same vitamins can are in vegetables, but of course veggies do not taste as good.

Aspartame is an amino acid right? Isn’t it going to be in all sorts of proteins then? Doesn’t that make it rather implausible that it is toxic?

> Aspartame is an amino acid right?

No, that's not right. It's a peptide (a unit composed of amino acids), not an amino acid.

> Isn’t it going to be in all sorts of proteins then?

Proteins are made of peptides but not all peptides are common in proteins, no.

> Doesn’t that make it rather implausible that it is toxic?

No, lots of proteins are toxic to particular organisms, too.

The amino acid in question is apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartic_acid, a chemical component of aspartame, and the origin of the latter's name, but not at all the same substance.

Even without the fundamental error of calling aspartame an amino acid, this argument is also similar to saying that chlorine and sodium can't be toxic since they are "in" sodium chloride, and salt is perfectly safe.

Betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of chemistry.

Thank you for taking the time to compose this condescending and useless analogy.

Useless? It explains the error you're making.

I think that there's some weird sort of moralization aspect to alternative sweeteners or just a 'too good to be true' attitude. In how many other areas would we spend so much time looking at such scant evidence and taking it seriously?

I've always thought they tasted terrible.

They taste different to cane sugar / corn syrup but good/bad is subjective and something you get used to. I used to not like it but now my taste adjusted it and now I don't like the "real sugar" flavor.

It's a big category. Aspartame has a really distinctive taste, but lots of sweeteners like sucralose and allulose not so much.

I can recommend tagatose.[1]

It tastes and feels indistinguishable from ordinary table sugar to me.

[1] - https://www.wired.com/2003/11/newsugar/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagatose

You get used to it after a while. I actually sometimes prefer a Coke Zero because of its unique taste (though I try to avoid soda altogether.)

Their taste is definitely odd. It’s sweet but not really, and often leaves a soapy aftertaste. The only way I can deal with it personally is if the food in question is flavorful enough to drown out the strangeness, in which case it probably didn’t need sweetening much anyway.

I agree, but maybe that’s because it gives me a headache.

At least, I think it does. I can never remember which sweeteners do - some do, some don’t. I don’t eat them enough to keep track.

I've seen lots of concern about preservatives, colors, and flavorings in foods as well, but sweeteners have a more pronounced role as replacements for sugar. This makes them far more visible in general.

Aspartame also rapidly "breaks down into residual components, including aspartic acid, phenylalanine, methanol, and further breakdown products including formaldehyde and formic acid" on ingestion. [1]

Even with no smoking gun for cancer, why would anyone tempt fate after reading that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame#Metabolites

Just love how you selectively quote that paragraph. The following sentence is: In some fruit juices, higher concentrations of methanol can be found than the amount produced from aspartame in beverages.

In other words, all of those compounds are fairly simple small molecules and will be found abundantly in nature. There is no indication that aspartame leads to the breakdown of larger quantities then many "natural" foods.

Damn bro your first comment got insta-killed, I wonder whose mad

Anyway, not everybody gets o-chem in their lives, but we all have an opinion on the news.

All I want to know is what does it say about my biology that aspartame tastes like shit to me.

That’s some weapons grade FUD you got there.

First the dose makes the poison and second, all of those compounds are naturally occurring in humans as part of our metabolism. The pathways responsible for metabolizing proteins and keeping us alive produce them.

You forgot the second half of the paragraph from your source:

> Human studies show that formic acid is excreted faster than it is formed after ingestion of aspartame. In some fruit juices, higher concentrations of methanol can be found than the amount produced from aspartame in beverages.

Also:

> Aspartame consists of two amino acids—aspartic acid and phenylalanine. When ingested, aspartame is broken down into these amino acids for use in protein synthesis and metabolism. In addition to aspartic acid and phenylalanine, aspartame digestion also yields a small amount of methanol, a compound that is naturally found in foods like fruits and vegetables and their juices. The amount of methanol resulting from consuming an aspartame-sweetened beverage is about five to six times less than that resulting from the same volume of tomato juice.[1]

[1] https://foodinsight.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-as...

Methanol basically comes from fermentation or digestion of pectin, so it’s in pretty much all fruits and fruit byproducts in small quantities. It’s really not a problem in small doses, in fact your breath will have a small but measurable amount of it at pretty much all times. You really have to try to get enough methanol to poison yourself.

Yep I earned those downvotes, thanks.

That's a useful website.

Since who drinks tomato juice, really, another way to put it is that you'd need about 20 large Diet Cokes (32 oz each, no ice) per day to get the same amount of methanol as from a diet rich in ripe fruits (1000 mg/day).

https://cot.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/cot/cotstatement...

Shouldn't we test this stuff before selling the stuff to millions of people?

As if the carbon and plastic pollution impacts of the bottled beverage industry weren't reason enough to switch to plain water.

I still need a small glass of Diet Coke every day in the afternoon. I need to cut the habit so I'm drinking right now Diet Coke without Caffeine.. It is like the last step before quitting for good. I like to drink sparkling water (San Pellegrino) when eating, I hope it will help me stop. Fresh sparkling water is good!

My bottle of 1 liter (33 oz I think in the US) lasts 4 or 5 days so I don't know if I'm at risk.

Health wise you'd probably be better off drinking a caffienated drink that wasn't coke. Perhaps kombucha or similar.

Wasn’t there a study in the last couple years showing evidence that diet soda causes cancer?

TL;DR:

> This immunohistochemical and morphological re-evaluation confirmed the original diagnoses of malignancy in 92.3% of cases. Six lesions originally diagnosed as lymphoma (8% of all HLTs) were reclassified: 3 to lymphoid hyperplasia, and 3 to chronic inflammation with fibrosis. There was no evidence of Mycoplasma infection.

Are there any other common food ingredients that have a high chance of causing cancer?

I was surprised to see a Prop 65 warning on the organic frozen spinach we get delivered by Amazon Fresh/Whole Foods. Apparently it's due to Cadmium.

It makes me wonder if the stuff you buy in-store doesn't have the same risk, or if they just don't label it as obviously as online.

You can find prop 65 warnings on basically anything heated to browning too. Coffee, cooked asparagus, bread, the list is gigantic: https://franzbakery.com/HTML/prop65

I’ve seen the prop65 warnings about reproductive health on Japanese canned coffee and tea, but I’ve never seen these warnings on any other canned drinks here in the US

Maybe they are imported through California? Most canned drinks probably come from Ohio or New Jersey or something.

The physical store likely has a warning saying they “contain chemicals known to cause cancer.” Because these warning signs are so ubiquitous in California you probably just miss it when you go to the brick & mortar.

Quite possibly, but it seems like if you can just have one big sign in front of the store, then you could just have one sign on the bottom of a website. Here there's a specific warning on the organic frozen spinach.

Brazil nuts are like that as well. The nuts themselves are ok but how they're grown causes them to contain too much selenium which can be toxic over time.

Mercury in fish is another doozy.

Acrylamides.

Yes. Trans fats and nitrates, for example.

I might be a paranoiac here, but I prefer to keep a somewhat-permeable whitelist instead of a blacklist. Make sure 2/3ish of my calories come from healthy animal proteins (I raise pigs and chickens and trade meat and eggs for beef, so I know exactly what's going into what's going into me), drink almost exclusively water (2-5 expressos a day are worth mentioning too), and then fill in the rest with whatever the hell I want.

Don't have to be careful with particular ingredients if you have a steady baseline of known-good, nutrient-dense, healthful calories. Also never have to waste on time on bullshit like this--oh, no, maybe aspartame ISN'T good for you! or, What did the NYTimes says about Splenda? or what the NIH researched about highly-processed factory-produced fake meat. Ignore it all, eat reasonable, old-school food.

In one kind of way it's kind of like that story you hear about Steve Jobs wearing the same black shirt and jeans every day--it actually is a consequential decision--what to eat vs. how to present yourself. But, if you can pre-set some defaults that get you to Good Enough (and in the case of my diet, apparently Better Than 95% of Americans), you save so much mental energy. It seems to me most "nutritional research" serves the purposes of large agribusiness and/or fad-nutrition industries. Why bother spending mental effort on that bullshit?

I agree. Flavor should follow function. Too many people prioritize building meals that taste good when they should first be optimizing for nutrition. Once you've configured genuinely healthy foods into some arrangement suitable for consumption, it's best to just keep building that same meal over and over. You'll get more efficient at making it and eating it, thus saving time and never having to worry if you're hitting your nutrition goals.

Save the creative meals for special occasions or social functions.

Processed meats and red meats are linked to colorectal cancer. I believe it's something like 70% of CRC cases can be traced back to red/processed meat consumption.

>In 2007, the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) stated that there is convincing evidence linking the consumption of red and processed meat with the development of colorectal cancer (CRC). The WCRF further stated that the public should limit their intake of red meat to below 500 g per week, and avoid processed meat entirely. A further update from the WCRF emphasized that no safe level of processed meat could confidently be attributed to a lack of risk.

Excerpt from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6893523/

I saw another study that showed only processed meats were linked to colon cancer recently. Variety and moderation, avoid processed foods. I don’t think red meat is the culprit people make it out to be /in a healthy and balanced diet/.

These studies are all incredibly weak, because they rely on surveys and pluck variables out for correlations. So besides the fact that people almost never remember or accurately report what they eat over many years, it's a dubious correlation that can't be relied on.

Red meat.

Those are all correlations and observational studies. There is no actual evidence of any meat increasing risk of cancer.

Except when it’s grilled/charred, but then I guess it’s not the meat that’s carcinogenic at that point

These are not common food ingredient, and they are not supposed to be injested. I was doing the dishes the other day, and like usually, doing a terrible job--trying to save water too. I was thinking what damage could soap residue do? I then noticed the Dawn Soap. From and center they listed all the ingredients. (So front and center it looks like a lawyer told them to place the ingredients front, and center?) Do I still love Dawn soap--yes, but not for my dishes anymore. (Machine shops use Dawn to clean parts, and it works great on oily birds.

My point is the amount of chemicals around us. An No--I'm not claiming anything bad about Dawn Soap.

WATER SODIUM LAURYL SULFATE surfactant SODIUM LAURETH SULFATE C10-16 ALKYLDIME-THYLAMINE OXIDE ALCOHOL DENAT. solvent PPG-26 SODIUM CHLORIDE SODIUM HYDROXIDEadjuster PEI-14 PEG-24/PPG-16 COPOLYMER cleaning PHENOXYETHANOL solvent solvent* stabilizes formula FRAGRANCES fragrance perfume adds scent to product METHYLISOTHIAZO-LINONE COLORANTS, BLUE 1,YELLOW 5, RED 33 colorant colorant C9-11 PARETH-8 STYRENE/ACRYLATES COPOLYMER TETRASODIUM GLUTAMATE DIACETATE CHLOROXYLENOL PHENOXY-ISOPROPANOL GLYCERIN SODIUM CUMENE-SULFONATE PROPYLENE GLYCOL solvent solvent* TERPINEOL solvent solvent

These are literally, literally, the same ingredients which are found in "natural" (animal-fat derived) soaps.

This is some "dihydrogen monoxide" grade FUD.

Soap is hydrophilic, it sticks to water, that’s what makes it good at washing things away. I never had trouble with soap residue, I figure I would taste it if any was left behind.

Edit: I do buy the colorless and scent free soap cause I don’t see why dyes should be in soap tho

Get ready to be surprised at the ingredients in a banana!: INGREDIENTS: WATER (75%), SUGARS (12%) (GLUCOSE (48%), FRUCTOSE (40%), SUCROSE (2%), MALTOSE (<1%)), STARCH (5%), FIBRE (3%) (E460, E461, E462, E464, E466, E467) AMINO ACIDS (GLUTAMIC ACID (19%), ASPARTIC ACID (16%), HISTIDINE (11%), LEUCINE (7%), LYSINE (5%), PHENYLALANINE (4%), ARGININE (4%), VALINE (4%), ALANINE (4%), SERINE (4%), GLYCINE (3%), THREONINE (3%), ISOLEUCINE (3%), PROLINE (3%), TRYPTOPHAN (1%), CYSTINE (1%), TYROSINE (1%), METHIONINE (1%)), FATTY ACIDS (1%) (PALMITIC ACID (30%), OMEGA-6 FATTY ACID: LINOLEIC ACID (14%), OMEGA-3 FATTY ACID: LINOLENIC ACID (8%), OLEIC ACID (7%), PALMITOLEIC ACID (3%), STEARIC ACID (2%), LAURIC ACID (1%), MYRISTIC ACID (1%), CAPRIC ACID (<1%)), ASH (<1%), PHYTOSTEROLS, E515, OXALIC ACID, E300, E306 (TOCOPHEROL), PHYLLOQUINONE, THIAMIN, COLOURS (YELLOW-ORANGE E101 (RIBOFLAVIN), YELLOW-BROWN E160a), FLAVOURS (ETHYL HEXANOATE, ETHYL BUTANOATE, 3-METHYLBUT-1-YL ETHANOATE, PENTYL ACETATE), E1510, NATURAL RIPENING AGENT (ETHENE GAS).

Alcohol would be the big one.

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