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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Even if you can't cut out sugar from your diet entirely (which is really hard given how much added sugar there is in anything that hasn't been pulled directly out of the ground), giving up sugary drinks and candy will make a big difference, as they're the biggest offenders. Even if you switch from a sugary drink to the zero-calorie version of that drink, you'll be doing yourself a favor in the long run; the jury's out on how bad aspartame is for you, but we know very well how bad these quantities of sugar are for you.

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> Even if you switch from a sugary drink to the zero-calorie version of that drink, you'll be doing yourself a favor in the long run; the jury's out on how bad aspartame is for you, but we know very well how bad these quantities of sugar are for you.

this statement is logically incorrect - if the 'jury is out' on aspertame, when it 'reconvenes' it could discover that it is worse for you than HFCS, and so no, in fact, the prophylactic switching that you speak of would in fact be detrimental.

Anecdotally, I feel much worse on 0cal/diet beverages than HFCS equivalent - the 0cal/diet ones seem much more likely to trigger headaches/inflammation in me, though it could be that I don't "think" i need as much food so I actually let the diet drink facillitate bad nutrition which in turn triggers these things ... probably the real 'safe bet' is to switch away from both regular and diet soft drinks, since HFCS also is not good

While I am not trying to shill for artificial sweeteners (drink water, it's good!), this overstates the amount of uncertainty. Many studies have been done on aspartame and have concluded that it is a safe food additive. People have been guzzling aspartame in large quantities for thirty years now; if it had a large-scale effect that was worse than sugar, it would be pretty evident given all the attention that aspartame receives. What my cautious language is intended to couch is that you should not assume that aspartame has no health detriments; some studies have tried to link to aspartame to increased risk of cancer, while others have failed to replicate that result. But even if large-scale consumption of aspartame did lead to increased risk of cancer 30 years later, it would be less dangerous than the risk of diabetes (and its associated comorbidities) from the analogous sugar consumption over that 30 year period.

Good 0 cal drinks to try are: water, coffee, and tea.

If we go to the extreme, coffee is potentially carcinogenic (charred beans -> acrylamide, but research is inconclusive), and tea contains mercury, fluoride, and arsenic.

It's hard to say whether aspartame is worse or better than tea and coffee.

People have been drinking coffee and tea for over one thousand years, my friend.

People have been smoking for over seven thousand years and consuming alcohol for over nine thousand years. What is your point?

Probably that if there were bad side effects from coffee or tea, we’d know about it. Like we know about alcohol’s.

Precisely. And we knew about smoking's, centuries before scientific studies conclusively proved the harm.

zero-calorie versions sounds like a bandaid, just get on non sweet drinks entirely. Saying this as a water drinker.

The amount of water that goes into creating soda is ridiculous, too.

"[it takes] as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda" https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123483638138996305

If you do the math, a 2-liter bottle of soda = up to 250, 2-liter bottles of water

I would try to avoid taking I too much sweetener either. I am on a low sugar diet and whenever I eat a lot of stuff with sweetener I gain weight. I think the body starts acting on the sweetness signals it gets but because there is no actual sugar to process, things get out of whack.

Yes, I don't want to suggest that artificial sweetener is harmless, only that (as far as we can currently tell) it appears to be less harmful.

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