Research links aspartame to anxiety in mice | Hacker News Reader

Research links aspartame to anxiety in mice

news.fsu.edu

42 pointscachecrab44 comments

Florida State University College of Medicine researchers have linked aspartame, an artificial sweetener found in nearly 5,000 diet foods and drinks, to anxiety-like behavior IN MICE.

Everyone always gets hung up on this... but how else are you supposed to breach this sort of analysis? You start small, and if your findings deserve a deeper look you move up the chain.

Because the headlines without that caveat lead to unrealistic expectations. If everything found to work in mice also worked in humans, we'd have already solved aging, and be able to fly fighter jets from neural implants.

Mice are mentioned a in the article but it's not in the title. The title is as far as the vast majority of people will read or see shared on some social media site. The title without the correct clarification is incorrect.

What do you mean “hung up”? The comment you’re responding to is correcting the headline which is objectively incorrect. Nobody has said that the finding is irrelevant because it’s “only” mice, but of course it matters, and the incentive for the person who wrote this headline to leave that information out is as obvious as doing so is dishonest.

Because people and news organisations see these results and run with the idea that having equal in your coffee gives you anxiety. When the research is giving an animal that weighs 0.03 percent of an average human, 15 percent of our recommended maximum. Thats 8 cans of soft drink worth of sweetener to a 19-gram mouse. It needs to be emphasized that this is a proof-of-concept study and may not reflect the real world at all.

Annoying how headlines these days will always leave details like that out for clickbait. But, next sentence is very interesting:

"Along with producing anxiety in the mice who consumed aspartame, the effects extended up to two generations from the males exposed to the sweetener."

Ok, we've inmiced (but not INMICEd) the title above. Thanks!

I wish to say something. I consume between 2 and 3 liters of Coca-Cola(diet) per day, which uses Aspartame. I have done so since 2014, but moreso in the past 2 years.

This is without the additional Monster Energy diet which I may consume within the same day. I do hope it's only this and not something more sinister, like cancer.

As I understand it Cola based beverages containing phosphoric acid are linked to kidney disease. So regardless if this particular issue proves to be true I think it would be in your best health interest to cut back.

https://kidneystonesclinic.in/carbonated-beverages-may-be-hu... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433753/

Probably not great for your teeth, either.

From your link:

> Old fashioned, homemade lemonade is one of the healthier options for your body.

This is very bad advice. Old fashioned homemade lemonade is water plus lemon juice plus enough sugar to make it sweet. Lots of sugar.

Which I assume is why they said "healthier" and not "healthy".

Like smoking a cigarette with a filter tip is one of the healthier options for your body, compared to without it.

Like smoking half a pack is better than a pack a day, yeah.

I go nuts on Diet Coke, we all have our vices, but 2-3 liters a day plus monster ... bruh! Nothing - absolutely nothing - in this life is free. There is a cost for everything. This is undoubtedly having negative impacts on your health.

Still, the same amount of regular coke and monster would be worse.

A wise man once said: It's best if you drink water. If you drink one coke a week, then it's best you drink a regular one with sugar. But if it's more and you can't help yourself, then at least drink diet coke instead of regular coke.

What makes this man wise, when the effects of excess sugar and a blood sugar spike are well documented and aspartime in diet is one of the most heavily-researched sweetners with nothing more than questionable claims attached (and unlike some sweeteners does not have a GI load)?

I hope you have a very active lifestyle and good genes as this will probably wreck your liver.

I used to till around 2 years ago. But I am on track to my prior athletic performance.

Studies have been conducted about this, and many times have shown at best very mild correlations with confounding not controlled for (one French study is an example of this).

Regardless of the almost certain negative health effects, that's one hell of an expensive habit! You'd save money if you switched to smoking cigarettes!

I’ve done the same for roughly the past 20 years. No increase in anxiety beyond the level I already had before, though I can’t exclude the possibility that it would have gone down further without that consumption.

Never trusted aspartame/acesulfume and never will. I don't like the taste, and I hate that alternative sweeteners made it harder to find classic sugar drinks somehow.

I mean, just drink sugar in moderation, a few cokes a month never killed anyone and they actually taste good. It only becomes a problem when you start to chug down liters of this stuff every single day, and by then I think it's very unhealthy whether it contains sugar or not.

Diet coke tastes better and doesn't leave a sugary film on my teeth.

My point was more about diet coke having dubious health benefits (compared to regular coke), and that one can't use the lack of sugar as a justification to drink liters of diet coke daily.

Same boat. I stopped diet drinks entirely when Nutrasweet came out; drinking a few ounces of a drink with that in it would give me a rapid and severe headache. It made me suspicious of the whole business of artificial sweeteners. Besides, they all taste horrible.

Now do raw sugar. Let's see how that compares.

While you're at it, all of the other sugar substitutes please. Including stevia and xylitol.

I don't care im gonna drink maple syrup till i fucking die

No observable anxiety there. I assume you're drinking natural maple syrup.

To anyone that hasn't drank various types of maple syrup, I highly recommend it. Maple syrup can have a very different taste profile based on where the trees are, what year it is, animal diversity in the area, etc. As a species we have some vague idea of how these things interrelate with the syrup product, but the specifics are currently beyond comprehension.

Check out the official Canadian Maple Flavour Wheel to get an idea of the various flavors at hand: https://agriculture.canada.ca/sites/default/files/legacy/res... [pdf]

I recommend to seek out producers of syrup that sell their product directly and can confirm it is unmixed - A lot of grocery-scale distributors will mix together various batches of syrup to make it more uniform at scale which largely robs you of that magical uniqueness.

If you can sample it right off the distillator at a syrup farm - holy crap, you HAVE to. Absolutely divine.

And leave the artificial high fructose syrup at the grocery store!

This study [1] shows that a diet of 79g/kg of sucrose (table sugar) did not increase anxiety in rats when compared to a sugar-free diet. It also shows that a diet of 100g/kg of honey reduced anxiety. Anxiety was inferred by looking at behavior in an elevated plus maze. Rats were fed food composed to approximate the New Zealand diet and they were observed for a year.

1: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/50178822/j.physbeh.200... and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2009.03.001

Here's a study showing it has no effect on anxiety in rodents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22105...

Sure...PNAS is more prestigious, but I'd wait for this to get replicated before even considering any impact on humans. Aspartame's from the 70s, and has been seriously studied for decades.

> When consumed, aspartame becomes aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol, all of which can have potent effects on the central nervous system.

The dose makes the poison. So. How does a 2L bottle of Coke Zero compare to say a single apple? Or something similar. That's what this discussion should be about.

Remember that aspartame is 40000(! four zeros) times sweeter than sugar. Meaning you will drink just amazingly tiny amounts of it compared to similar sugary drinks.

I'm genuinely curious here: does anybody have a good, scientific overview of the studies of aspartame? I've heard a lot of studies about it, mostly brand new studies, but I haven't heard of a good summary of our understanding of it. I think it would help to put these sorts of articles into context for me.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=meta+analysis+aspartame...

Given enough cronyism and persistence, any toxic chemical can be made safe. I'm referring to Donald Rumsfeld (then CEO of Searle, creator of aspartame) and his friends at the FDA.

https://vtuhr.org/articles/10.21061/vtuhr.v4i0.33/

For anyone else wondering like I was: yes, same Donald Rumsfeld.

I like how meaningless the word “link” is

Could it be the other way around, perhaps anxious people drink more soda?

The study was performed in mice.

Perhaps anxious mice drink more soda?

i grew up drinking a lot of diet coke and had anxiety

Reply on news.ycombinator.com