WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners
news.un.org
news.un.org
To use an analogy their argument is: Vaping is bad for you, don't do it. While ignoring that a ton of people quit smoking using vapes and that they're letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
Same thing with NSS. While NSS are a useful tool for sugar reduction, studies have shown that over the medium-long term, you'll want to reduce artificially sweat foods and even sweat food substitutes, to create a "new normal" or new baseline where an e.g. strawberry is sweat again. Which has been shown to be more sustainable.
The WHO aren't wrong, but everyone jumps on this with their own agenda. They are claiming that switching to NSS isn't a sustainable way to reduce BMI (and associated negative health outcomes) over the long term, hard to find data that disagrees with that. That's all they're claiming.
I'll likely still consume some NSS'es though that is more due to my preexisting condition.
I think a similar thing happens with "diet" "sugar-free" products. Almost all of the people who use these products neglect every other aspect of their health thinking they're really going to tackle obesity by swapping out processed sugar for sweeteners.
Anecdotally, I've never seen someone using copious amounts of these sweeteners look healthy. They continue on being obese and out of shape. I think if your goal is to be healthy then your mind set has got to change and using an option like artificial sweeteners is just a "have your cake and eat it too" position that won't result in making you healthier.
Source?
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
"What’s worse, says Blaha, many e-cigarette users get even more nicotine than they would from a combustible tobacco product: Users can buy extra-strength cartridges, which have a higher concentration of nicotine, or increase the e-cigarette’s voltage to get a greater hit of the substance."
Vape pods are highly concentrated and you can use them anywhere, any time. No more need to bother with sneaking out of the house or taking smoke breaks.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-nicotine-5075412
" There are many health risks and side effects associated with using nicotine. Some of the health risks include:
Nicotine contributes to the development of emphysema—a type of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease— in smokers.
It’s potentially carcinogenic. Chronic nicotine use is linked to lung, gastrointestinal, pancreatic, and breast cancer.
Nicotine use is associated with peptic ulcer disease (PUD) and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).
Nicotine use increases the risk of hypertension and cardiovascular diseases.
Nicotine use during pregnancy increases the likelihood of complications and adverse outcomes like miscarriages and stillbirth.9
Children exposed to nicotine in the womb are more predisposed to health problems throughout their lifetimes. These health problems affect their endocrine, reproductive, neurologic, respiratory, and cardiovascular systems.9
Nicotine use can cause cardiac arrhythmia—a cardiovascular condition characterized by an irregular heartbeat.10"I think the main problem with nicotine is its addictiveness and the fact that that will lead you to accept risks in administration via cigarettes, toxic fluid vapors, chew with fiberglass, etc.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
> Nicotine is the chemical that makes cigarettes addictive. But it is not responsible for the harmful effects of smoking, and nicotine does not cause cancer. People have safely used nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) to stop smoking for many years. Nicotine replacement therapy is prescribed by doctors or is available from pharmacies.
The risks for hypertension, etc is true for nicotine, because it's a stimulant, so same risks exist for coffee. There is very little conclusive evidence that nicotine (not talking about smoking or vaping) has any health effects that aren't also caused by coffee/stimulants.
The best thing you can say about vaping is that it's very understudied and long term effects are unknown, and likely has some long term effects that are bad for you.
Smokeless nicotine (swedish snus-variety) is considered very safe.
The problem is smoking and nicotine have been so intertwined for so long that when they say "Nicotine causes x" most of the time what they mean is "Smoking causes x" and maybe also "Vaping could potentially cause x"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ "In several in vitro experiments, it has been found that nicotine in concentrations as low as 1 μM decreased the anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic effects exerted by chemotherapeutics on several different malignant cell lines"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/ "There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer."
Are you a big vaper or something and this is upsetting to you or something? I can't see any other reason for you to react with outright lies.
But the way science works is by having lots of viewpoints and research - there are also plenty of papers on how nicotine is not carcinogenic.
"Smokers commonly misperceive that nicotine is a major carcinogen" - https://thorax.bmj.com/content/66/4/353#ref-2
"The literature to February 2019 suggests that there is no increased cardiovascular risk of nicotine exposure in consumers who have no underlying cardiovascular pathology. There is scientific consensus that nicotine is not a direct or complete carcinogen, however, it remains to be established whether it plays some role in human cancer propagation and metastasis. " - https://f1000research.com/articles/8-1586 (This is what I saw in the second article - looks like there is a chance that nicotine can promote existing cancer)
"The devastating link between tobacco products and human cancers results from a powerful alliance of two factors — nicotine and carcinogens. Without either one of these, tobacco would be just another commodity, instead of being the single greatest cause of death due to preventable cancer. Nicotine is addictive and toxic, but it is not carcinogenic. This addiction, however, causes people to use tobacco products continually, and these products contain many carcinogens." - https://www.nature.com/articles/nrc1190
I am not a vaper, I do use patches and gum. I believe that damning nicotine prevents the development of replacements for smoking which is incredibly dangerous. I don't vape because research on that is in really early stages, and there's a good chance there might be something bad in the long term, though there is no strong evidence that it is worst than other NRT, except that levels of NNAL are higher (see the first paper you posted).
Edit To clarify that you didn't provide evidence in your first post - you linked to https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-nicotine-5075412 which has citations, but the comments about nicotine being carcinogenic linked to studies that studied smoking, not NRT or non-smoke based nicotine.
There are plenty of people who swear by chemicals like nicotine and caffeine that help them achieve indirect benefits and I can't imagine they're all wrong.
You've missed the far-and-above most beneficial effect of switching to vaping, which is getting rid of inhaling the huge category of carcinogens that come with inhaling partially burned solid fuel.
Cigarettes don't give you cancer because of nicotine. They give you cancer because of partially burned solid fuel.
Also, there is no concrete evidence that sweeteners are bad for one's health, it's more the feeling of 'chemicals' are always bad. Sugar is clearly bad and causes obesity and diabetes. The choice seems pretty clear between the two.
https://www.realsimple.com/study-links-stevia-and-monk-fruit...
I love scientists, loved working with them, best clients i ever had (if you're a devops or automate dev/scientists tools, and have to regularly explain stuff to scientists and to other devs, we don't compare advantageously at all), but sometimes there is too much noise.
> However, in 2000, the warning labels were removed because scientists learned that rodents, unlike humans, have a unique combination of high pH, high calcium phosphate, and high protein levels in their urine.[34][35] One or more of the proteins that are more prevalent in male rats combine with calcium phosphate and saccharin to produce microcrystals that damage the lining of the bladder. Over time, the rat's bladder responds to this damage by overproducing cells to repair the damage, which leads to tumor formation. Since this does not occur in humans, there is no elevated risk of bladder cancer.[36]
I work in the biosciences (in a role between lab tech and actual scientist). So many things are provisionally accepted simply because you don't have the time or resources to verify them. Which is not too different from any other job, it just seems weird in the context of the sciences.
Sucrose is bad when eaten on its own, specifically in the abscence of fibre and other macronutrients that bring the GI down.
If one is out of control eating sugar it is clearly going to have bad consequences. The immediate consequences will be obesity and bad teeth. The long-term would be diabetes, and there are definitely others as well.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33762429/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning
Btw, there's in interesting story attached to mistaken view about what constitutes a lethal dose of nicotine.
These kids are vaping THC adulterated with vitamin E[1]. Vitamin E is added because it makes a cut product thicker, and thickness is thought of as an indicator of quality. My guess here is that marijuana still has a stigma/is illegal, so these kids are finding it easier to just blame nicotine vapes to try and get themselves out of trouble.
There's no reason to cut nicotine vape liquid since the base ingredients (vegetable glycerin + propylene glycol) are absurdly cheap.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
I've been wondering about that. I wasn't sure if my memory has faded or maybe drinking it often made me like the taste but these days I find Diet Coke/Coke Zero to be equally enjoyable as Coke. Have the taste of the non-sugar Coke been steadily modified?
Diet Coke has huge differences in flavor between sources and packaging options. It's universally bad out of a can or bottle, and the stuff from soda fountains varies by restaurant.
Oh god I couldn't disagree more. I literally can't stand the taste of diet pepsi/coke, the sweeteners leave such an awful aftertaste on my tongue.
The problem is that the levels of sweetness, acidity, salinity, carbonation etc. in diet soda have become normalized. People give these dessert drinks to children, and drink it like it's water.
You know how overpoweringly strong some chocolate mousse can be? The kind where you can't finish a tiny slice of cake because more than a tiny sliver on your fork is too rich? Or how some foreign cuisines can be so potently dosed with curry or pepper that you can't taste any other flavors in the dish? Imagine replacing white bread throughout your diet with that chocolate cake. Or the punch of salt and pepper on an egg with that level of curry.
Ask someone from 100 years ago to sweeten a glass of lemonade "to taste" and you'd get something so weak that a consumer of diet soda would mock it like the meme "hint of hint of lime" or "transported on a truck near strawberries" flavors of LaCroix.
Yes it's better that they drink diet than regular soda. No, it's not good to normalize that flavor. I think human appetites are just not set up to handle some stimuli that previous levels of foraging or farming, chemistry, and distribution systems could not create.
This is quiet a suspicious claim if you've studied food or beverage history. We have cocktail recipes dating back 150 years, and punch recipes dating back almost 500. They are almost universally sweeter than today. Similarly food recipes also used a good deal more sugar. Some of this was no doubt to cover off flavors, less sweet varieties, and for the preservative power of sugar. You're going to need some citations that the normalization is the problem behavior.
We've gone from "Twelve full ounces, that's a lot" to a 12oz can being the smallest commonly available size, and a 20oz bottle being common in vending machines.
Over my lifetime, the "medium" size soda at a fast-food restaurant has roughly doubled.
> The most common style today is Brut [(6 to 12 grams of sugar per litre)]. However, throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century Champagne was generally much sweeter than it is today. Moreover, except in Britain, Champagne was drunk as dessert wines (after the meal), rather than as table wines (with the meal).[55] At this time, Champagne sweetness was instead referred to by destination country, roughly as:[56]
> - Goût anglais ("English taste", between 22 and 66 grams); note that today goût anglais refers to aged vintage Champagne
> - Goût américain ("American taste", between 110 and 165 grams)
> - Goût français ("French taste", between 165 and 200 grams)
> - Goût russe ("Russian taste", between 200 and 300 grams)
By way of comparison, my favourite Orange Muscat dessert wine has 110 g/l sugar [2], a bog-standard ruby port has 102 g/l [3], my favourite sweet-ish sherry has a svelte 50 g/l [4], and a decent PX has an excruciating 417 g/l [5]. So Americans and the French alike used to drink champagne that was considerably sweeter than today's fortified and dessert wines!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champagne#Sweetness
[2] https://www.nicks.com.au/products/2003-brown-brothers-specia...
[3] https://www.vinello.co.uk/fine-ruby-port-taylors-port
[4] https://www.vinello.co.uk/apostoles-palo-cortado-vors-gonzal...
[5] https://www.vinello.co.uk/pedro-ximenez-san-emilio-emilio-lu...
Today sugary drinks are associated with poverty, lack of self-control, lack of education. Champagne is a status signaling drink, you don't want to signal that.
As far as I know, all of the sugar alternatives have some (usually neuro?) downside that makes them scarier to me than sugar!
1. This is a study done on rats and is only a single study, so caveat emptor.
2. They administer 250mg/kg/d Aspartame (human recommended max dose is 50mg/kg/d) based on the claim that "Species correction required a five to six times higher dose in rats than humans, as rats metabolize aspartame faster than humans"
3. Even if you assume effects correlate perfectly to humans, a dosage of 50mg/kg/d in the average American 90kg male corresponds to 22.5 12-oz cans of Diet Coke (200 mg Aspartame) per day for 30 days straight (length of the study).
4. There was a group of rats fed Aspartame at those levels for 1 month, then left to recover for 1 month. The sciatic nerve in these rats recovered significantly, and although it appears the recovery was incomplete, they also state that this difference is not statistically significant. There is also no discussion about whether recovery over a time period > 1 month would have resulted in complete recovery.
Just an interesting story.
About 5 years ago, I tried to cut out all processed carbs from my diet.
After several months, I was away from home and I had to eat something---the only thing open was a Dunkin Donuts. I ordered an egg-white sandwich on a plain English muffin, and for kicks I took a bite out of the English muffin.
Holy shit. It tasted super sweet!!
I can't be sure, but I assume it had refined sugar added to it to improve its palatability. Made me think about everything that goes into fast foods...
It extends shelf life though. European supermarket bread will mould in usually less than a week, but it’s really unusual for an American bread to go mouldy.
That being said, I'd much rather they used less. At this point it's pretty hard to buy a hamburger bun around here [SF] that doesn't taste like a brioche to me.
I freeze it in an air tight bag, and I take it out of the freezer a day before we want to start using it and let it thaw at room temperature.
Europeans, except Swedes. Swedish bread is also generally super sweet for some reason.
Everything I ate at that hotel tasted sweet from the pizza I ordered that night to the toast I had in the morning. What should have been delicious and savoury was instead sickening and unpleasant - it was so weird.
I don't think there is any difference to your body between sugar and 'refined sugar'. It is all going to have a lot of fructose in it.
Things like agave syrup or whatever else are just tricks to make people think they are getting healthy sugar.
If you'd like an easy way to try check out SToK. Fairly inexpensive, can be found at large store chains like Walmart.
The claim is that that's not what you're choosing between, because if that were the real choice, then the people who chose splenda would lose more weight than the people who chose sucrose, but that's apparently not the finding. So maybe the real choice is between two packets of sucrose, or splenda+two packets of sucrose, because the splenda causes you to eat more sucrose (or other trash) without your conscious realization.
Now you could argue that maybe I'm more likely to order a muffin alongside my coffee when I take splenda? Could be. I don't think so, but maybe.
"Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control in the long term. People need to consider other ways to reduce free sugars intake, such as consuming food with naturally occurring sugars, like fruit, or unsweetened food and beverages,” says Francesco Branca, WHO Director for Nutrition and Food Safety.
"NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health."
If I read that correctly, the WHO is recommending that the overall amount of sweet foods consumed should be reduced and that replacing sugar with other sweeteners will not cut it.
Perhaps because the public research eventually catches up to them.
E.g. "sucralose ingestion caused 1) a greater incremental increase in peak plasma glucose concentrations (4.2 ± 0.2 vs. 4.8 ± 0.3 mmol/L; P = 0.03), 2) a 20 ± 8% greater incremental increase in insulin area under the curve (AUC) (P < 0.03), 3) a 22 ± 7% greater peak insulin secretion rate (P < 0.02), 4) a 7 ± 4% decrease in insulin clearance (P = 0.04), and 5) a 23 ± 20% decrease in SI (P = 0.01)."
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/36/9/2530/37872/Su...
NNTs, sweet on the tongue, sweet on the liver! Yep, they trigger the same deleterious hormonal response that sugar does. They produce a cascading chemical chain reaction in the body leading to the over-production of insulin, the hunger-hormone, which signals your fat cells to begin absorbing glucose (triglycerides) from the blood stream. Removing the sugar from the bloodstream would normally cause insulin production to drop, but in this case, it's not the sugar triggering the productions, it's the NNT chemicals that are still circulating in your body..
Because nothing so far tastes as good as real sugar. The common practice in employing artificial sweeteners is to combine two or more in an effort to avoid the bitter aftertaste that you get from relying on just one.
What if you want to have some sweetness from time to time but you are watching your sugar levels? Surely that's better than just taking sugar. What if you are weaning yourself off so much sugar? Surely that's better too. It seems to me that artificial sweeteners are a useful product for many people and is obviously not a panacea. I mean, honestly, hardly anything is good in excess!
I feel this is so poorly communicated and almost guarantees people will take the wrong message from this.
Partly it seems the issue is that in many cases the reason for avoiding sugar and using a substitute does not actually avoid the negative consequences of sugar. I say this as someone who avoids sugar and has very little.
I agree though i'm a bit confused by this WHO post. I have difficulty determining the severity of the issue. Based on what they're saying it sounds like you should avoid both sugar and substitutes. This post makes them sound basically the same, so why hyper focus on one?
If you're trying to watch your sugar levels (and are not diabetic) then artificial sweeteners are strictly harming your progress toward whatever goal you're trying to achieve.
They also cause all sorts of other health issues (cancer, digestive problems, neurological problems), but those are mostly product specific. The above applies to all non-nutritional sweeteners that have been studied.
I hope the WHO ruling includes "organic" artificial sweeteners too.
That does not seem to be the scientific consensus:
"The majority of clinical studies performed thus far report no significant effects or beneficial effects of artificial sweeteners on body weight and glycemic control" [1]
"Thus, evidence from controlled studies suggests that artificial sweeteners don’t cause weight gain and may even be mildly effective for weight loss." [2]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7817779/
[2] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-a...
So, like tobacco (which doctors used to recommend to help with lung health to kill colds, etc), there are a lot of ambiguous "no / little effect" studies in favor of artificial sweeteners, and a lot of studies showing clear negative effects. However, there aren't any showing significant benefits.
It's easy to produce a no-effect study via lazy experimental setup, and slight positive effects via P-hacking for strange things. For example, this quote from [2] looks like P-hacking:
> However, a recent review of nine observational studies noted that artificial sweeteners were associated with a slightly higher BMI — but not with increased body weight or fat mass (17Trusted Source).
Anyway, here are some other quotes from [2] against artificial sweeteners.
I pasted in their conclusion at the bottom of this comment, which can be summarized as "they won't help much, but they might hurt. If you have the following symptoms, discontinue use":
Though artificial sweeteners provide sweet taste, many researchers believe that the lack of calories prevents complete activation of the food reward pathway.
This may be the reason that artificial sweeteners are linked to increased appetite and cravings for sugary food in some studies (8Trusted Source).
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in five men showed that sugar consumption decreased signaling in the hypothalamus, the appetite regulator of your brain (9Trusted Source).
This response was not seen when participants consumed aspartame — suggesting that your brain may not register artificial sweeteners as having a filling effect (9Trusted Source).
...
Another argument against artificial sweeteners is that their extreme and unnatural sweetness encourages sugar cravings and sugar dependence.
...
Though observational studies cannot prove cause and effect, the results are sometimes quite staggering.
For example, one study found that a high intake of diet soft drinks was linked to a 121% greater risk of type 2 diabetes (24Trusted Source).
Another study noted that these beverages were associated with a 34% greater risk of metabolic syndrome (25Trusted Source).
This is supported by one study on the effects of artificial sweeteners on both mice and humans. It associated the sweeteners with glucose intolerance and a disruption in gut bacteria (26Trusted Source).
...
In fact, replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners may be helpful in reducing body weight — though only slightly at best.
...
However, if you experience cravings, poor blood sugar control, or other health problems, avoiding artificial sweeteners may be one of many things to consider.
I would love to see some support of this. Artificial sweeteners are some of the most studied food additives. If there were a definitive association at practical consumption levels, that would be huge news.
A couple of days ago, a study showed one of the commonly-used sweeteners causes gut perforation.
A few months ago, they showed they disrupt gut microbes, leading to various inflammatory diseases and metabolic issues.
I could keep going back for thirty years, but discussed it in a reply to one of the sibling comments instead.
> WHO suggests that non-sugar sweeteners not be used as a means of achieving weight control or reducing the risk of noncommunicable diseases (conditional recommendation)
> Conditional recommendations are those recommendations for which the WHO guideline development group is less certain that the desirable consequences of implementing the recommendation outweigh the undesirable consequences or when the anticipated net benefits are very small. Therefore, substantive discussion amongst policy-makers may be required before a conditional recommendation can be adopted as policy.
> Because the WHO Nutrition Guidance Expert Advisory Group (NUGAG) Subgroup on Diet and Health focuses on providing guidance on the prevention of unhealthy weight gain and diet-related NCDs, providing guidance on the management of diabetes in individuals with pre-existing diabetes is beyond the scope of this guideline. Therefore, the guidance in the guideline may not be relevant for individuals with existing diabetes.
https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1501485/retrieve
I don't understand the expectations some people have of the WHO. Anything more complicated than a headline is going to get oversimplified by the media.
> The recommendation is based on evidence of low certainty overall
Me as far as added sugar and artificial sweeteners is concerned, I'm out.
Who are you following that's getting everything right? Or getting more things right than The WHO?
The WHO did the opposite of its pandemic plan. They failed to follow best practices and did so without any evidence for it.
The best evidence that the current WHO is not to be trusted... is the old WHO.
Claim: A plan was in place in 2016 that would have been effective for covid, but was not followed.
But right now they have absolutely zero evidence to back that claim up -
where is the plan?
Who decided it would work in 2019?
Did the plan need to be changed for reasons not foreseen (ex: expected or real supply shortages, unclear statistics/data, dissenting opinion from other groups, etc)
Did the WHO even have the ability to implement this plan? (ex: political meddling is a real thing)
---
Basically - I'll start with question #1: Show me the plan, because googling for a 2016 World health organization pandemic plan comes up essentially blank outside of some general influenza prep that was absolutely not usable for a pandemic of the scale of covid.
If this is so obvious, and this plan was so readily available... I would think a 10 minute google search would turn something up - but I have not found it (not claiming it does not exist - just that the rest of the conversation is fucking pointless without it).
What surprises me is that as we learned that Covid was spread in a way similar to influenza that our plan didn't track more closely to the CDC's pandemic plan. It tracked in very much the opposite direction. It's fine to change direction, but we should understand why.
Link to PDF version of pandemic plan: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...
Anybody who believes there is an almighty assembly of "experts" out there with super-human integrity, incorruptibility, and infallibility, is sadly deluded.
These Do's / Don'ts change like every 10 years. But most people seem to love self-searched guidance in their life, especially from so-called authorities, or other "SMEs".
PS: Come on introverted HN lurkers, i want more downvotes! You can do it - give them to me! 46 Karma to go!
Also: downvotes here are kinda cool, I couldn’t care less about it though, I just state my opinion and move on.
In much broader strokes, I was already not happy about how obsessed we became with prolonging life far beyond anything desirable. But even places where medically assisted death is accepted, you can't just go and say I am too old and infirm, help me end in dignity, no you need to suffer until your body and mind is gone. So says Lord Of The Rings
> ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and rail from my high seat unmanned and witless. Nay, lady, I am the last of the Númenoreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift
Sugar and sweetners are insidious. Once you get used to sweet salads, you won't like normal salads anymore and then one start putting sweetners in every meal. It's surprising how unhealthy a salad can be.
Ewww. I’m normally a regionalist, my state (SH) over the others. But sweet salad is a traditional thing here. I always make myself forget about that fact. It’s disgusting.
There was an international agreement to cut salt in processed foods by a few percent a year for a few decades, and all stakeholders emphatically agreed to do it, since there's no real downside.
Of course, nothing happened after that.
The problem is that increasing salt a few percent gives processed food manufacturers a marginal advantage over their competitors since by desensitizes them to salt, and also tastes slightly better in side-by-side comparisons. This leads to a prisoner's dilemma type situation everyone is incentivized to work against their own long term best interests.
Regulation could trivially fix the problem by stopping the arms race, and doing it slowly wouldn't lead to people noticing the reduction.
I'm still addicted to the taste.
Something tells they're much, much less popular than their caffeinated counterparts.
As a person with a healthy weight and the self-discipline to maintain it long term, with no diabetes or risk of it, who is not and never has been addicted to sugary drinks but who enjoys them (greatly) as an infrequent, calorie-counted treat, the loss of these childhood tastes is saddening, especially since there is very little evidence of any actual public health benefit.
If I were magically transported back to the 1980s the first thing I'd do is buy a bottle of Corona Cherryade.
Then again, I understand. I'm a long-term exile to the UK from a Mediterranean country. Fruit and veg in the UK are absolutely tasteless and therefore pointless as anything but a sort of medicine. You guys are really unlucky.
Well at least you got... turnips.
And there's nobody more sorry of this than me but the food in the UK is shite. There's this story I like to tell where I was buying bread from the Waitrose and it tasted like carton, like it had a distinct taste of wet box. So I figured they just don't know how to make bread because they're British and bread is not their thing. So I bought some flour and made my own bread... and it tasted exactly the same. Because it was the flour that tasted like carton. That was wholemeal flour, Waitrose own brand, and Waitrose is supposed to be "posh" or "poncy" or whatever. "Supposed" as in the British call it that because it has decent produce, imagine that.
And if it was just the bread! Everything I've ever eaten Made in Britain tastes bland, odorless, tasteless, like the perfect murder poison.
Then I take the ferry and cross to France and finally bread tastes of bread, again, cheese tastes of cheese, coffee tastes of coffee and not of boiled rotten socks. The fruit and veg is still not stellar, mind, but at least I can finally enjoy food. And if I take the train and go back home, every stop on the way I can taste the coffee getting better the farther away I move from those wretched, miserable rain-drenched isles.
But, you know, the turnips are fine.
you dont make a compelling case when you end your point with such bias
A country that keeps voting the Nasty Party to power again and again, and only votes otherwise when it votes its Light version, is not a country that people choose because it's a nice place to live in.
Your experiences of food in the UK don't match mine, and I've travelled plenty. In most places in the world you'll find some specialities done well, but I've yet to find anywhere with a greater range and depth of culinary options than London (although any truly global city will compete).
I rarely eat supermarket bread as we make our own daily. We mostly use Marriage's flour, which is available in many places, including Waitrose. That said, the bog standard Chorleywood stuff is comparable to equivalent products in Europe and decent farmhouse loaves, San Francisco style sourdough, baguettes, ciabatta, pain de campagne, etc. are all widely available in supermarkets. I can obtain more specialised baked goods from any of at least 4 good bakeries a short walk from my house.
As for cheese, France, Italy and Switzerland do have some wonderful ones, and I can obtain many of them any time I want from the cheesemonger down the road. As often as not, though, I'll buy something UK made. Baron Bigod is better than any Brie de Meaux I've tried and while Roquefort is briefly entertaining in a salty sort of way it can't compete with Colston Bassett Stilton. I don't recall seeing much of any of them in Mediterranean countries.
I can't speak for coffee as I don't drink the stuff. I'm pretty sure I could obtain just about any kind of coffee in the world with ease here, though, if I wanted to.
The tyranny of "healthy" food is the exclusion of experiences for no good reason. There's nothing wrong with sugar, fat or salt, you just need to avoid eating too much of them (or too little in the case of fat and salt). By far the most effective tool for that is good old-fashioned calorie counting, and thank god that alongside the various ill-judged public health measures in the UK there's also now the requirement for most food sellers to provide calorie info.
FWIW my dinner last night was homemade olive and garlic sourdough, which I had with some Ubriaco Rosso and some Godminster Cheddar. Delicious and life-affirming. 820kcal.
I don't know where your obsession with turnips has come from. I think I've only ever had them as part of Cornish pasties, which rule. I'm more of a swede man myself - give me haggis, neeps and tatties any time.
There is an XKCD for that style of communication, you know:
About the cheese, you should check out any supermarket in France, Italy or Greece. In Italy or Greece, chances are you'll find 30 different kinds, including a couple of locally-made ones. In France it's more like 130. In the small Auchan at the corner of Tolbiac and Rue Barrault, near where I stayed in Paris, there were six or seven refrigerators dedicated exclusively to cheese- cheese of every type (bloomy rinds, washed rinds, pressed, cooked, hard, soft, blue, white, ... ), and from every corner of France (little goat's cheeses from the Valee de la Loire, Corsican sheep's milk cheese, tommes from all over the place...). The larger Carrefour in the Italie Deux mall, at the center of the 13th arrondissement had about a dozen. My friendly neighbourhood cheesemonger stocked an even greater variety and at a much better quality. I swear I have never seen so much cheese, of so many different kinds and from so many different places all together in one place. Of course, he was "Meilleur Ouvrier de France". Try to imagine the British DWP handing out medals to the best cheesemongers, or bakers!
Stilton? Well that's a good cheese, no disagreeing. But then, you go to a Sainsbury's, or a Tesco's, and what authentically British cheeses do they stock? If they stock Stilton, that's lucky. Then it's cheddar, cheddar, cheddar... oh, and even more cheddar. Maybe a bit of Wensleydale, and that only thanks to Aardman. And you know why? Because the average Brit only knows three kinds of cheese: haloumi, mozzarella and cheddar. Did I mention cheddar?
Sorry, but the variety and quality of cheese in the continent is just not something that the UK can compare with, and the Europeans know what they are and how to appreciate them.
P.S. Olive and garlic sourdough... why? Why put things in bread? Unless you're making pizza that is. See, I don't know if you're British but that's just such a British thing to do. The British have no understanding of why bread is good, because it sucks when they make it, so they stuff it with... stuff. Because they think that makes it somehow magickally better. It doesn't! It just makes it bad bread with stuff in it.
The rest of it isn't worth responding to as I'm pretty sure I've had the exact same conversation with you before. You won't change your mind. Why you choose to live in a country you're so convinced is a shithole is a mystery to me, but next time I see you whinging about it on hn I'll know to walk on by.
The olive and garlic sourdough was wonderful. I don't care a jot if it doesn't conform to some arbitrary food rules you've invented.
>> Why you choose to live in a country you're so convinced is a shithole is a mystery to me, but next time I see you whinging about it on hn I'll know to walk on by.
It's like I say in another comment: great food, beautiful weather, wonderful people.
The words may well be opposites. Get it right, people!
So I guess if you drink a coke once in a while, diet coke is better and if you drink coke very often, you should stop drinking coke.
no one has to make that choice
I only drink normal Coke but sparingly. Usually I'm having water or plain black coffee. I think the takeaway is that diet Coke doesn't allow you to train yourself to enjoy normal sweet foods again. I just had an apple and strawberries and it is basically candy to me.
Edit: I have a question. Rank these food items by how healthful they are:
a) 150 calories of Coca-Cola Classic
b) 150 calories of fresh fruit
c) 0 calories of Diet Coke
Are you considering mental well-being as well, or just pure physical health? Because in case of the former, option b) will end up with the lowest score.
Not that anybody actually reads or pays attention to these things when they're wolfing down a bag of fritos; but still to the person at What-a-burger getting an 1100 calorie meal - they're probably better off opting for 400 fewer calories with a diet Coke than a fully loaded one.
There's a theory, and I don't know how tested it is at present, that the body uses these detectors to control the digestion process. Within this theory, the presence of the artificial sweeteners may encourage the body to work harder to scavenge calories from your digestive tract.
The upshot of this model is that if you eat a burger with a glass of water, you absorb X calories. If you eat the burger with a diet Sprite, you might be absorbing X + Y calories instead.
Remember, calorie counts for food are based on measures of caloric value of a unit of food minus the caloric value of what the average person excretes. If we were furnaces instead of meat we would get more calories from our food. And if you have odd digestive microbes you may be absorbing more or less calories from your food.
I've you've ever been diagnosed with anything that isn't mainstream, you're familiar with how much the medical community likes to stuff pegs of any shape into their favorite receptacles. A patient with ideopathic symptoms could be lying to you and sneaking food in the parking lot (I've known a couple of those), or they could be an anomaly. Singular or a few percent of the population. The world of genetics is vast and a handful of rare conditions can net you several examples within your Dunbar number.
We have a lot of people these days who don't seem to correspond directly to calories in/calories out. And unless they're absorbing energy from the universe, then something about our assumptions is broken.
At work I often find myself having to remind people that if your assumptions tell you that an event must be impossible, then it's not your eyes that are wrong but your assumptions. Half of debugging is being able to efficiently name your assumptions and sort them by probability x difficulty of verification.
If people aren't losing weight on diet soda, we need to be dismissing rules of thumb and directly testing patients instead of shrugging and saying, "exercise more, scrub." Which is a polite characterization of how medical people treat my obese friends.
The other issue is that there's so much variance. Are you making an effort at improving the quality of your food and made up that 200 calories with nutrient rich items? Too bad, you still aren't losing weight, so WHO declares that diet soda is ineffective for weight loss, articles summarize and declare that artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and you still get people thinking that diet soda is worse for you than regular soda.
I meal prep for all my meals. All my food is measured out and counted beforehand.
I started exchanging regular soda for zero sugar soda and did not change a single thing about my diet otherwise.
> All my food is measured out and counted beforehand.
That's great, but that is not representative of most people.
How can I apply it to my own situation then I wonder?
It seems like rarely does information that applies to people in general ever seems to apply to me in a relevant way.
I may have one occasionally but definitely not going back to eating them every other day.
Also this https://www.prevention.com/food-nutrition/a44156389/sucralos...
So which one is less bad ?
Unflavored isolate is pretty expensive for me, and I often find good proteins on sale (I like ISO100 from Dymatize and buy it whenever it's cheap) but for me, it is sickeningly sweet (and artificial as well). So I've been using 50% flavored protein with 50% unflavored isolate to really reduce the overall sweetness. Add in a spoon of fat-free yogurt, maybe a splash of skim milk, water, it's a good time.
If your protein powders have them - no factor. I feel like the headline is 10x more inflammatory than it needs to be.
Pea protein with no flavor takes some getting used to but is quite healthy and filling. You can mix with some sugar free almond milk to help the taste.
Overall my suggestion is to start viewing food as fuel. Of course you should enjoy some meals but don’t allow yourself to be picky or give into cravings.
Again, once your mind and body start to correlate eating good foods with feeling good you’ve got it made. You won’t even want to drink alcohol, eat sugar or seed oils. You’ll shutter at the thought because you know they will make you feel like crap.
If the WHO says something, you need to go through all the work of checking their sources, and in this case, there was no source:
>The recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) is based on a review of available evidence which suggests that artificial sweeteners do not help control body mass or reduce the risk of weight-related illnesses.
I'm a bit offended that I pay taxes to such a prominent anti-science organization. I don't mind the idea of a world health organization, but to be so brazenly anti-science and pro-authority is the last thing I want.
As an example, in the US you pay thousands for an ambulance call, get to hospital, pay hundreds of thousands, insurance (for which you pay thousands more per year) covers most of it, except they're trying to cheat you out of as much as possible so they pay less, and in the end, all amerikans are one incident away from bankruptcy.
In most if not all of Europe, you pay health taxes, but not in the upper thousands, get good doctors, and don't end up bankrupt for breaking your arm or hip. And the ambulance is free (as in your taxes pay for it).
Every other service is "nice to have" rather than "need to have" and I would certainly argue that many of those "nice to have" services ultimately will prevent the need for "need to have" services, so there is definitely room for improvement in my opinion. However, this trope of "Americans have to sell their home to afford an ambulance rode" and other snark needs to be tempered with the reality that those situations are almost entirely because of people intentionally opting out of (or being ignorant of) the existing systems to prevent such financial burden.
I'm sure many will have anecdotes to the contrary. I'm also sure many of those anecdotes will stem from someone either being unaware of available resources or choosing not to use them for one reason or another.
I also know plenty people who believe they will have to pay for things and therefore they don't get help. They don't pay for services bevause they don't get them, and they don't get services because they think they will have to pay for them out of pocket. That mentality comes (in part) from people who keep spouting the same myth that you posted. Please don't spread that rumor, it kills people.
For instance, our clinic has patients in poverty that pay 0$ per visit and 5$ per month for health insurance for... 11 people in their family. They get far better service than a private person who is cost conscious and paying $125 for a visit. Typically the former will use all 16 visits, the later tries to get out in about 4 visits.
If those people were experts, they would have been the ones writing any papers cited and they'd be repeating the results from those papers.
Study after study has shown that it is extremely, almost absurdly difficult to lose weight and keep it that way in the long term.
If "not actively causing long term weight loss" is the only criteria for advising against something, then we should be advising against a heck of a lot more things that are perfectly fine.
It's phrasing like this that causes people to go on crusades against random foods, rather than actually using moderation in all things.
"WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults."
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-b...
Did big sugar threaten you? Offer you money? Are some governments/sponsors making you say these ridiculous things?
This is an extraordinary claim that defies common sense. And your evidence is, what? Oh right, let me quote from the paper:
> The recommendation is based on evidence of low certainty overall
Now I read this still poses risks for me to develop diabetes and cardiovascular factors, how so?
There is a correlation between NSS consumption and negative health outcomes, this is true. However, read how this article states this:
>WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults.
A layman will obviously read this as a statement that NSS is a direct cause of harm, not as the correlation that it actually is.
The correlation is simply explained: NSS is heavily consumed by people who have diabetes and/or who are obese. These people are naturally going to have far more health issues than non-diabetics, and non-obese people. They even acknowledge this in the article:
>the connection between consuming NSS and disease outcomes might be subjectively determined due to “baseline characteristics” of those taking part in the study
If you have a choice of drinking regular soda and diet, the diet is without a doubt leagues better for you. I think the most convincing evidence that NSS is safe is this: It's obvious that diabetics and obese people consume NSS significantly more than the general population. Diabetics and obese people are naturally prone to high levels of health issues. Yet why is it that they never just filter these people out to get a good baseline? What are the chances that these university educated people can't filter out obese/diabetics, or that they did not anticipate needing to do this and thus did not collect sufficient data? That they didn't read decades of prior studies who failed to do this, including the studies that specifically mentioned the dirty baseline issue? Is our higher education system this bad? Are researchers just this stupid? Not likely.
The more likely explanations are these: 1 The study was funded by corn growers that are threatened by NSS (a huge number of the studies I read through fall into this category). 2 The researchers have a bias for "natural" products. 3 The researchers dislike the taste of NSS and are afraid that NSS proliferation will reduce the supply of the flavors that they enjoy.
They've tried to prove NSS is harmful for way too long. Sure, that's not proof that NSS is completely safe, but if it is harmful, it must be so minimally harmful that 4+ decades of intense research can't definitively prove it.
It is best explained by Isaac Asimov in his small essay "The Relativity of Wrong"[0].
[0]: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
There exists an International Sweeters Association, that has been against these efforts since it's inception 35 years ago: https://www.sweeteners.org/latest-science-post/the-who-recom...
https://www.sweeteners.org/about-isa/
Which shouldn't be a surprise given the Sugar Association is 80 years old: https://www.sugar.org/about/history/
So sure, consume "whatever the f*: you feel like knowing that either way you will be receiving "sciene based" communications from interested parties supporting that behavior.
You know what they mean. "Let" can be "let us carry on doing this without informing us better". Bad-faith nit-picking is detrimental to conversation.