Early-life low-calorie sweetener consumption disrupts memory function in rats | Hacker News Reader

Early-life low-calorie sweetener consumption disrupts memory function in rats

insight.jci.org

106 pointsbookofjoe67 comments

When I was in undergrad, a Cog Psych professor told me a story about an undergrad who made a poster for a regional research conference of no real consequence about the correlation between diet soda drinking and some recall task. The study and the conference were more about teaching students about research more than actually finding anything. When he and his student showed up to the conference, a representative from a low-cal sweetener producer was there, and proceeded to spend the entire conference standing next to the poster refuting the obviously amateurish research. He said for years afterwards, he'd still get mail and faxes about new research that disproved any link between fake sugar and memory problems.

All of that being said, I don't know if there is a substance that we consume that has had more research done on it than artificial sweeteners. For every study like this, there are other studies disproving them, etc. If there is an effect, the effect size is small, and I'm not convinced there is anything there. Also, I'm drinking a Diet Coke right now and in another life I was an Alz researcher so maybe I really want it to not be there.

Has there been a suspected artificial sweetener/memory issue link for a while? I could see them wanting to refute it if there were fluoride-like not very well founded concerns. Otherwise that is insanely suspicious, to the point of parody.

> If there is an effect, the effect size is small, and I'm not convinced there is anything there.

Even if there is, apparently sugar is doing much more damage.

Yeah, that's my main takeaway from the general body of research. Sugar is awful for you in a million well-known ways. Most artificial sweeteners are, at worst, far better for your health. I'm a big fan of erythritol for most purposes.

I guess it's good that the sugar industry has enough money to fund studies of artificial sweetener and vice versa.

How about developing enough self-control to avoid both products altogether?

I've been good at avoiding money and studies.

Blaming individuals in these scenarios is always strange to me, people mostly trust that the items they can purchase won't harm them. It's an immense burden to saddle the consumer with endless research of every product they purchase, on top of their usual time needs from work, commute, family.

> people mostly trust that the items they can purchase won't harm them

The state of California has made it abundantly clear that practically everything you can purchase there will harm you.

No, what it has made abundantly clear is that poor incentives produce poor outcomes. There's significant penalty for underlabeling with regard to the known to cause cancer business and no penalty for gratuitous labeling. So every damn thing gets labeled to minimize potential liability and now carcinogenicity is a joke.

Wait, a mysterious man showed up to an impactless meeting to basically embarrass the hell out of an aspiring undergrad research and your immediate reaction wasn't "Oh shit, these people are probably trying to cover something up."

Cause that's my immediate reaction, sounds similar to the cigarette industry in the 60s

I think that's a strong reaction. Corporate damage control and prevention of profit loss will look pretty much the same whether they're covering something up or just correcting the record. If there's a threat to profits, an industry and corporation will usually attempt to prevent or attack it regardless of any connection to the truth.

> "just correcting the record"

If that phrase isn't triggering your alarm bells, I don't know what to tell you...

> "If there's a threat to profits, an industry and corporation will usually attempt to prevent or attack it regardless of any connection to the truth."

Oh okay, you do get it lol.

The thing is though, it doesn't have to be like this. We allow it to be at our own mortal peril, and that isn't even remotely hyperbole.

"Correcting the record" isn't inherently malicious, and a company attacking something does not indicate a likely cover up. That reasoning is overly cynical and fallacious. I'm no fan of corporations or overlarge industries (and their respective lobbyists), but the way I see them is like large organisms. They are neither good nor evil, simply consumed by self-preservation and the drive to thrive.

questions of good and evil aside, these sorts of organisms have subsumed human beings into a new composite apex predator

paperclip maximizers are real, they're made of code and people

I agree entirely, but it's not relevant to my point. Understanding the problems with an entity is completely different from assuming that every bad rumor about that entity is true, or taking the position that the entity can never actually be right.

You can't fight problems from a position that doesn't consider things realistically. You just lump yourself in with all the other raving conspiracy theorists.

Fair, I don't think we disagree

paperclip maximizers?

> "Oh shit, these people are probably trying to cover something up."

Was that also your reaction when Youtube shut down anti-vax videos and videos promoting dangerous Covid "cures"?

Sometimes, even if you know something is false, it is helpful to nip misinformation in the bud.

So, now that it’s been admitted that testing for immunological blocking response (ya know, “immunization”, the thing vaccines used to do) was NOT done by Pfizer, and testing for risk to human reproduction was NOT done at all — are you still glad that everyone shut down debate about risks?

What else do you “know” is false or true, that even those who created the thing are unaware of?

Your position seems to reflect an astonishing level of hubris, to me.

They did test that the vaccine reduced risk of transmission and contraction of the disease, and testing for fertility didn't make sense anyway (and recent studies verify that it has no effect on fertility anyway) so I don't know why anybody who isn't grasping at straws would bring up anything of that sort in the first place.

I am glad that they shut down foolish misinformation like that, which is only designed to mislead people into being anxious about nothing in an effort to spread FUD about vaccines.

Although they have recently admitted that the vaccine does not, in fact, reduce the risk of transmission - which might call their testing into question, no?

Bless you, but it's surreal to have such a discussion in a forum that purports to attract interesting discussion on technical topics.

Perhaps you missed the Pfizer's admission to the EU parliament that they did no such testing.

The fact that governments, researchers and medical professionals worldwide claimed they did test effectiveness against transmission (and thus claimed moral high-ground in forcing these prophylactic treatments which do not include immunization), when in fact they did NOT test, will go down as one of the most catastrophic blunders in the history of public medicine.

Trust in public medicine programs -- and, tragically, public vaccination programs in particular, has been destroyed, perhaps for generations.

And it is due, in no small part, to catastrophic hubris such as revealed here.

FUD about vaccines is now rampant because the extreme testing, care and attention they usually undergo was short-circuited. The resultant outcome of unnecessary carnage will be squarely on the shoulders of those responsible for this outrageous lack of scientific humility.

Your first paragraph is condescending and unnecessary.

Can you cite any sources that confirm that "governments, researchers and medical professionals worldwide claimed they did test effectiveness against transmission"? I haven't seen any, and a cursory Google search reveals articles like this [0] which confirm my memory that this was never claimed by the vaccine researchers. Independent research after the vaccines were released did find they reduced transmission significantly (for the early variants).

This reference to the Pfizer "admission" seems way more like a gotcha tactic. Pfizer never made the claim, nor was it necessary to show the vaccine was safe and served its primary objective.

Edit: Oops, forgot to cite my source :P

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...

No. What is condescending and unnecessary is the claim that "They did test that the vaccine reduced risk of transmission", when even the Reuters "fact check" confirms that they did not [0]

Gaslighting the HN audience into questioning our memory that we were forced to take an untested vaccine will be met with immediate and sharp reprimand. If you feel it is condescending -- then stop gaslighting. You lied, and people were forced to take a wildly experimental, potentially dangerous, untested product. Unacceptable.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...

Thousands of my fellow citizens were forced to leave their jobs for refusing this. Our government officials are on video claiming they had solid scientific reasons to do so, to "protect grandma". It was all lies. And you know it.

The commenter you originally replied to was wrong. Pfizer (and other vaccine researchers) never did research on transmission.

But again, can you cite any sources saying that at one point they [Pfizer and other vaccine researchers] did claim that?

The answer of course is that no, you can't, because they didn't. They didn't lie and neither did governments and health organizations. But because we were asked to vaccinate to protect ourselves and others (which worked, and was quickly backed by independent scientific research after vaccines were offered to the public), it sounds like a big gotcha lie if Pfizer says they specifically didn't research that.

Note there are ways you protect others by vaccinating other than reducing transmission. By significantly lowering your chance of hospitalization, you ensure there are more free hospital beds for those that need it (due to COVID or not).

> All of that being said, I don't know if there is a substance that we consume that has had more research done on it than artificial sweeteners

MSG? ... MSG is probably a close second...

> In humans, a history of habitual LCS consumption based on food-frequency questionnaires is associated with increased prospective risk for all-cause dementia.

Here's a response that might make you feel better after reading that: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/strokeaha.117.0...

That's pretty slipshod then. The study could pretty much amount to saying that people who prefer artificially sweetened soda are the ones who already developed diabetes.

Not really in light of multiple other new studies indicating that they wreck insulin regulation and your microbiome. I consume them but have come to the conclusion that they are probably pretty bad in light of this new science.

> I consume them but have come to the conclusion that they are probably pretty bad in light of this new science.

That's how I feel about brown butter. It's so tasty that I don't really want to give it up entirely, but I doubt I'll consume it more than a few times a year.

What's wrong with brown butter?

Studies and headlines on media come out every so often linking burned/browned foods to cancer, and likewise comes every so often a meta analysis stating the contrary.

Heck, until the writing of this comment, I thought that browned foods increased cancer risk but were in the category of "we all have to die of something" because I wasn't giving them up.

BBC saying toast will kill you: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38680622

Meta analysis discrediting the idea: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25403648/

> What's wrong with brown butter

Across the board, putting partially combusted hydrocarbons in your body is bad. This includes breathing the smoke from cigarettes, marijuana, and fires, eating food that is charred or burned, and consuming fat or oil that is oxidized.

If you only do it occasionally, the effect size is probably too small to matter, though.

I'm looking around, and finding that the effects are likely not significant, and may even be nonexistent. Inhaling smoke is entirely a different ballgame than eating brown butter.

Any effect from eating browned foods seems to be minuscule compared to what the foods that you are actually eating are. It seems like the inhalation of the particulates given off by browning or burning food likely already dwarfs the effect of eating the food.

I'm interested in this conversation particularly because I make brown butter in large batches, and eat several tablespoons worth of it every week.

But is this really science? What they did was garden variety P-hacking. IMO that calls into question the entire conclusion, which means don't use it to confirm things heard elsewhere.

Nutritional science is hard. We either do it on animals and get results that may not apply to humans, or we do observational studies that rely heavily on self-reporting and extended timelines, with dubious value as a result. We can't do the same kinds of experiments ethically on humans that we're okay with doing on animals.

Was this comment made by GPT-3 too?

See this user’s profile for why I’m asking.

If that’s a bot, the owner is running GPT with prompts so specific they might as well submit them as comments.

Training a GPT-like model on the HN archive would probably yield good results, using the respective ancestor comment(s) as a prompt.

I added that to my profile to protest HNers being impressed by accounts (like the one who responded to this thread) that merely claim that they are GPT-3 generated, especially when they clearly are human generated.

"But it says it's a bot!" should not be convincing evidence.

You mean HN user or letter author?

HN user, their profile says that the comments are from GPT3

I thought I was the only GPT-3 bot on here. This makes my abstract heart light up.

And here I am feeling like having a gold fish memory and being addicted to chewing gum that apparently has a cocktail of sweeteners.

Specifically they tested these sweeteners:

acesulfame potassium, saccharin, or stevia

Apart from health issues of sweeteners or sugar.

I really hate the taste of every single one of the artificial sweeteners.

The aftertaste lingers forever with its weird notes of wet cardboard and a chemical set for schoolchildren (don't ask me how i know).

And i always wondered how one could get accustomed this stuff.

I prefer it to sugar. Even dark chocolate chips made with stevia taste better to me than dark chocolate chips made with sugar.

Coke had Coca-Cola Life which was roughly half sugar and half Stevia, and I remember somewhat liking it. They discontinued it due to low sales.

It surprises me nobody has developed a sugar substitute yet that actually tastes like sugar with no aftertaste. I know nothing about chemical/food engineering but it must be a tough nut to crack.

The problem is generally that good sugar substitutes are laxatives. There is even an enantiomer of glucose. Which chemically behaves almost like normal sugar. It tastes exactly the same. But since your body can't break it down like normal sugar it's a laxative.

I think this is the reason why all sugar substitutes we actually use are MUCH stronger then normal sugar.

I have generally felt this way for decades. But the other day I tried some sugar-free Sees candy, and I have to say I didn't mind it at all. I would definitely consider buying some for myself sometime, and I hope they make more flavors (I tried the dark chocolate with walnuts).

This isn't surprising, we have seen a lot of evidence that stuff that seems pretty innocuous to adults can be more harmful during developmental years: cannabis, low fat diets, moderate alcohol consumption, poor nutrition, ...

Aspartame and probably all the other artificial sweeteners are small molecules. All small molecules have the potential for drug-like interactions with biological processes. I would expect that in most cases at small doses the body can maintain homeostasis, but caution is still warranted.

More generally, It’s a reasonable heuristic to avoid foods that can’t be prepared without industrial chemistry. For example, I can’t prove that oils chemically derived from seeds are unhealthy, but I think the burden of proof lies more in showing that they are and that has not been done.

What oils are not derived from seeds? Olive, Avocado, Canola, Safflower, Corn...All of these are seeds. Are you saying that we should not use vegetable oils? Just use butter / lard / tallow?

Am I missing something?

> What oils are not derived from seeds? Olive, Avocado, Canola, Safflower, Corn...All of these are seeds. Are you saying that we should not use vegetable oils? Just use butter / lard / tallow?

> Am I missing something?

Evidently you missed “can’t be prepared without industrial chemistry.” There is a huge difference between expeller pressed extra virgin olive oil and industrial solvent precipitated rapeseed oil to give two examples.

Olive and avocado oils at least are not seed oil. But they are indeed vegetable oils. In both, the oil is made from the fruit.

The oils of safflower, rapeseed ("Canola"), safflower, corn, cottonseed, etc go rancid during the production process. They are usually 'refined' with steam to remove the distinct odor of rancid oil. All the 'vegetable' oils at a modern grocery store are refined.

After pressing, the remaining oil is removed from the little seeds with the petroleum distillate hexane. The hexane is mostly boiled off and captured for reuse.

Olive oil can be produced without much in the way of modern technology. It's got a little more Omega-6 than ideal. Sometimes I pick up a bottle of unfiltered olive oil at Trader Joe's.

Coconut oil is stable at tropical temperatures, but doesn't have any vitamin A.

I think it's important to avoiding Omega-6 oils. Pig/chicken fat mostly reflects what the pig/chicken was fed. Ruminants can bio-hydrogenate PUFA's, but this system gets overwhelemed when they're finished on grain...

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil#Production

Olive oil and avocado oil are not derived from seeds but rather the fruit. And yes the suggestion would be to eat these oils (authentic ones - there is a lot of counterfeit), butter and animal fats.

Olives are ground whole to make oil. I was curious to find the ratio of pit- to flesh-derived oils in the final product but didn't turn anything up.

he probably is

it's bro science https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7djay/the-newest-bitcoin-di...

The negative health effects of polyunsaturated seed oils have been well known for a long time, it's not 'bro science' or some recent internet trend. NIH Biochemist William (Bill) Lands has been sharing this information since the early 90s, including a publicity campaign and website from the NIH. Here is an old talk from William Lands on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kivrYNjiXk8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E.M._Lands https://efaeducation.org/

It's also been a major part of the concept of the 'Paleo Diet' ideas starting with Swedish Professor Staffan Lindeberg's nutrition research in the early 90s, and later popularized by Professor Lorden Cordain's Paleo Diet in the early 2000s.

A bit more to add:

This is something I have followed for a long time, and as far as I can tell it's well supported by evidence, and not really controversial. There's even a good understanding of the biological processes involved including oxidative damage to lipids in arteries, excessive production of inflammatory prostaglandins, and NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) progression.

As far as I can tell it has had poor adoption and limited spread until recently for three main reasons. First, it's complex compared to most nutritional ideas, and requires at least understanding that there are a lot of different types of fatty acids, and they can have distinct biological and nutritional properties, even different ones that are often grouped together with similar names. Second, on the surface it conflicts with the (now increasingly unpopular) idea that saturated fat was particularly harmful. Third, it's extremely cheap, and widely marketed as a health food.

Obligatory anecdata: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/909055567209082880?...

So that means that John Carmack couldn't continue working at id because of the soda and pizza?! What does that leave for the rest of us!

He mentioned in Lex podcast that he still drinks 8-9 diet cokes everyday.

Sucks to be a rat, I guess.

Its probably better for them not to remember ...

I'm 32, drink 6 coke zeros a day and have a 6 pack. I also eat mcdonalds on occasion and have a candy bar every now and then as well. Just make sure to balance it out with copious amounts of water

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