Comment by vanilla-almond | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanilla-almond | Hacker News Reader

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This was a frustrating read. The article freely used the term "sweeteners" but without making the distinction between artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame) and natural-derived sweeteners (stevia, xylitol). Later in the article, the term "artificial sweeteners" imply that all sweeteners are problematic (including natural-derived sweeteners).

There are more natural-derived sweeteners now available, although they may be heavily processed. Examples of natural-derived sweeteners: stevia, xylitol, inulin, erythritol, monk fruit extract.

The following paragraph from the article is sloppy:

> "A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege."

The linked study (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6...) does not mention stevia at all. The linked study refers to "sugar-sweetened beverages". But misleadingly the article author start with stevia (a natural-derived sweetener) then switches to the term "artificially sweetened" and links to the study. The reader is left the implication is that all sweeteners cause toothache.

There is zero inherent difference between natural vs artificial chemicals. It’s only a question of what effect each chemical has have on the body as “natural” chemicals run the full range from mandatory to lethal in minute quantities.

One import distinction is that artificial chemicals were not part of the environment our bodies evolved in, whereas some of the natural chemicals were. Furthermore, most of the natural chemicals would be more closely related to other chemicals we did evolve in contact with. The ones that are less novel to our bodies are less likely (in a very general sense!) to cause trouble.

For example, cyanide is otherwise lethal but widely present in plants, so our bodies are actually pretty good at dealing with it.

So along that axis you could probably lump stevia and aspartame closer together, while sorbitol (which is very much naturally occurring) would be much closer to sucrose.

The problem showed up because we where concentrating chemicals found in plants in the first place. We aren’t adapted to large quantities of refined sugar and repeating the same process with some other sweeteners runs into the same issue. Evolution adapts to specific environments not every single chemical your ancestors encountered even a minuscule quantity of.

I can see why you might find it comforting but it’s really just a just so story. Evolution is really slow and needs significant pressure to result in adaptation, just look at how slowly humanity has been adapting to lactose.

Finding an obscure chemical that humans find sweet and then concentrating or manufacturing massive quantities of it isn’t inherently safe even if trace amounts of it are in some plant.

You're correct that concentration is important. "The dose makes the poison", as they say.

But it's not about being "comforting", it's about having a heuristic to make decisions when you don't have enough hard data. So in general, I try to avoid novel chemicals. It's not a guarantee of anything, but it's good enough for first-pass decision-making.

I have a similar risk aversion for novel chemicals. I simply don’t make an acceptation for organic compounds.

The thing is, we may have evolved to deal with chemicals that killed us and/or caused serious harm, but there's no evolutionary mechanism that selects for good health - surviving and reproducing are all that matters.

You're alive today, so surely you know better than to go around eating random mushrooms even though those mushrooms are natural. Natural is in no conceivable way a usable heuristic for nontoxic. Trying to actually use that heuristic is a one-way ticket to Pain Town.

There are some relevant differences regarding byproducts, contaminants, etc. No production process is entirely clean.

The same is true of refining products from organic sources. You don’t directly get 1lb of table sugar from planting a sugar beet, you need to separate the sugar. At scale this involves adding bleaching agents etc which end up in the final product along with whatever contaminates show up.

Run a chemical analysis on several brands of natural sugars and your going to find stuff like sulphur dioxide used as a preservative and trace amounts of industrial lubricants etc.

Yes it is true that any process will have degrees of contamination. I was just contesting that the distribution is “the same”, entirely process/substance dependent!

I agree it’s process dependent but it’s also processor dependent. In the end we can’t say highly refined organic chemicals are strictly better here.

>No production process is entirely clean.

Neither is extraction.

By how much?

That's what really matters.

I can assure you I would give you an equally unclean garbage product whether I extracted or synthesized.

Right. I wasn't really clear, I was referring to the degree of purity not the process or source.

Depends on the supplier not if it’s nominally a natural or artificial chemical.

Yeah, I wasn't clear, see reply to selectodude.

In an ideal world sure, but in a manufacturing world purity isn't as high people like.

My youngest daughter is highly allergic to mold, and has to avoid most sour candy just in case because citric acid is grown in mold based bioreactors.

You're implicitly assuming natural compounds are better than artificial ones. That's not necessarily true. It is maybe more likely to be true, since we may have evolved with exposure to the natural chemical, and our bodies may handle it better. But that's equivalent to saying men are more likely to earn more than women. True on the whole, but nearly completely useless when looking at a particular individual. You really have to examine each compound on its own merits.

> You really have to examine each compound on its own merits.

Isn't this the crux of the issue, that lacking clear predictive models of side-effects (short, mid, and long term) it is better to err on the side of caution with this heuristic. If we can definitively assert outcome, then yes, go with the science.

Also, disagreement regarding equating a cultural phenomena (demographics & earnings) with a biological one. This is an error which leads to false analogies and conclusions.

We're not lacking information though. There are huge amounts of studies available for every FDA approved artificial sweetener. There is more information lacking for some of the less common natural ones.

Also disagree about your disagreement on principle without a structurally valid argument.

And yet another linked study does mention stevia.

In case you missed the link and discussion in the article, here you are:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35987213/

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