Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports | Hacker News Reader

Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

theguardian.com

465 pointssandebert565 comments

The challenge you have here is that aspartame isn't just one of most widely studied substances in the food chain, but that it's also one of the most widely and vigorously consumed. People drink a lot of diet soda; a lot of people drink it to the exclusion of all other liquids. So it's going to be tricky to get the epidemiology to match up with the claim here: if aspartame is meaningfully carcinogenic (meaning: more than by the trace amounts all sorts of other things in the food supply are, from small quantities of mold due to spoilage to acrylamide forming in almost anything we cook), we'd expect to see a pretty obvious effect in case rates.

The article mentions a French study showing a "slight" increase, over 100,000 pts, in an observational study that used self-reporting to control for other risk factors. I can't find it; has anyone else?

The other big challenge is from a SAR (structure-activity relationship) point of view, it's completely benign looking from just about any way you look at it. It's two peptides, and a methanol (which yes, gets converted to formaldehyde, but so does fruit pectin). There's nothing zany about its structure, it's not particularly lipophilic, no receptor bindings of note, no spicy reactive groups, no alkylators, no intercalators, no redox sites. If it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't quack, doesn't waddle, doesn't fly, doesn't hang out in ponds, and hasn't shown ducklike activity over 50 years, what are the odds it's secretly a duck?

So you're telling me there's a chance?

Warnings like these quickly hit the Prop 65 problem - the notices are so ubiquitous you go blind to them.

Prop 65 is especially dumb because it doesn't make producers say what the risky ingredient(s) are or how potent it is. I got some fish sauce from the Asian grocer which has a p65 warning. What is it? Are there heavy metals in the fish? Nitrites? Is it smoked and thus has trace PAH? Did they find PFAS? I have no clue, but it's goddang fish sauce and so potent I put like two drops in my stir-fry (which would itself probably warrant prop 65), so idgaf.

When you put the exact same warning on food as lead-containing special solder, cadmium paints, and other very obvious "don't eat this" industrial materials, it loses all efficacy.

These notices are ineffective to say the least. Saying “everything causes cancer” is pointless because it ignores the key questions of “how often?” and “with what severity?”

You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.

Common writing, even from well-regarded sources, is often unnecessarily vague wrt statistics.

Claim: we would benefit by building a culture where basic probability ranges are expected and used.

Idea: Serious publications could:

A. Set basic guidelines for talking about probability estimates; something akin to what you see in government or business intelligence publications. For example, maps terms to ranges:

“highly likely”: > 90%

“likely”: 70% - 90%

“somewhat likely”: 50% - 70%

…

B. Update their editorial standards to not allow pure vagary around probabilities and impacts.

Could authors write more quantitatively? At the levels of the top 100 publications, I’d guess that 80% could, with the help of research and editing staff.

Would some readers be scared off? I’d guess than 80% of a college educated audience could handle it. The rest might complain, but could level up with a little peer pressure.

Would articles become more rigorous? Over time, I’d hope most would. Shift the expectations and make the vocabulary less forgiving to vaguery and fudgery, and I think the incentives point in the right direction.

Sure, but the more links in the chain, the more control you need in order to prove the causative agent. In the absence of direct experimental evidence (give animals aspartame, they get cancer, which we haven't seen), you need to rely on huge observational studies. And these are exactly where you run into all kinds of confounders, like

Patient has standard American diet and is overweight but not obese -> that leads to sleep apnea -> chronically tired -> they develop a diet Coke habit -> slight increase in cancer risk. What's causing the cancer here, the diet, the adiposity, the sleep apnea, the lack of quality sleep, the soda itself, the effect of soda on teeth leading to gingival inflammation, or the aspartame in the soda?

What? That's the first I've ever heard of this... dang

I had fun reading this comment to my son (early-career biochem) pretending I was coming up with it as I went along. "Does it have any alkylators? NO."

Right, I'm more worried about Sucralose with all those chlorines hanging about.

I remember reading back in the early 90s a number of studies that showed elevated risks of certain brain cancers from aspartame. The evidence was pretty strong - it wasn't conclusive (hence the "possibly" qualifier in this label), but it was enough that I was personally convinced. The link between aspartame and cancer is much stronger than the one between cyclamate (banned in 1970 but legal in the EU) and cancer. My parents never let me chug Sweet'n'Low packets the same way I chugged sugar packets because of it.

IIRC, the only reason aspartame was not banned was because saccharine had just been, and if you banned aspartame there would have been literally no artificial sweeteners on the market. That is no longer the case, with sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Coke Zero and other diet sodas), Stevia, sorbitol, and several other sweeteners now on the market.

The claim you're making here is that there are studies that present strong evidence that aspartame causes brain cancer, but that they've been suppressed this long because otherwise there'd be no artificial sweeteners, a concern we're saying IARC would have had, and that as a result, in 2023, the only way we can move aspartame into Group 2B --- the possible carcinogens nobody takes seriously --- is an observational study in France showing a barely significant increase in cancer rates.

Sucralose (Splenda) has been linked to cancer quite convincingly last week. It's the only artificial sweetener that I used, and now there are no options except sugar alcohols. Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.

Source?

Perhaps this is outdated but this page says otherwise: “range of studies have found no evidence that sucralose causes cancer in humans”

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d....

Would be interesting to see sugar linked to cancer too. Alcohol already has been (with a much stronger link than aspartame).

> Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.

Do you have a citation for that? Google search is telling me the exact opposite, that it seems to reduce cancer growth.

My Peruvian climbing guide turned me onto stevia which doesn't fall into any of your categories. It is really a wholesome plant extract instead of something chemists have invented which leads me to have confidence in its (so far as we know) lack of carcinogenicity.

Why use artificial sweeteners in the first place? Honey is a great sweetener.

What about Stevia?

Sucralose saw a recent study on effects of DNA that are more compelling than Aspartame. Acesulfame-K messes with pancrease and insulin signalling, Stevia has other detractors iirc... etc. etc.

In the end, it's all a mixed bag, and who knows if it's actually better or worse than consuming more than 25-40mg of fructose or alcohol in a day. There are massive corporate interests in all directions with deep revolving doors in regulatory and research bodies. It's effectively impossible to know.

Is it a variety/strain of food that was considered "food" 250+ years ago? Probably safe. Is it a new strain that has a multiplier of hystamine or other negative hormonal responses, or in a consumption that is a multiple of 250+ years ago? Probably not safe. That's my take.

Why 250+ years?

Sweet'n'Low doesn't contain aspartame. It is Saccharin.

Wasn’t saccharine one of the first to be shown to be a likely carcinogen?

Sadly the marketing just works too well and now you're a conspiracy theorist for questioning the narrative.

What marketing? Everyone I know who drinks diet soda myself included basically assumes we're getting cancer from it eventually. It's like the most common meme about it.

Yeah I drink a lot of Pepsi Max. I just love it especially in summer. I've drank it for decades.

Would this make me worry a lot? Not really. I have worse health risks like being overweight, pfas etc.

The "if it was that dangerous we'd see the effect" is a pretty decent argument IMO considering it's been heavily used for almost 40 years.

Well, aspartame has been shown more recently and by studies not funded by the food industry to impair glucose tolerance in obese people. And soda cans are lined with plastic, so there's your PFAS intake.

Have you seen the maps that show where there is PFAS contamination in ground water and surface water? You would be doing reasonably well if soda cans were the primary source of your exposure to PFAS.

Also, here in Germany, I can get my aspartame in glass bottles, fortunately.

Yeah I'm sure it's bad but all things are "bad for you" these days.. I just don't really care that much.

I mainly drink my sodas from PET bottles by the way because cans cost twice as much per litre over here.

What effects from the last 40 years might be missing attribution?

Atmospheric nuclear testing

Cancer rates are rising rapidly. Soon 50% of people will have cancer. I’d say something is going on

Aren't you a Google search away from seeing that this is the opposite of the truth? I'm asking because I didn't look very hard, but I'm on IARC's dataviz site right now looking at a graph of cancer rates --- all causes excluding non-melanoma skin cancer --- sharply down since the '50s (no surprise, tobacco), and also down since the 1990s. You can find cancer sites that break that trend, like bladder cancer, but (for instance) that's down in the period between the introduction of aspartame and the mid-2000s.

Moreover, if you specialize on GI cancers, it looks like you see the opposite of what you'd expect if aspartame was a potent carcinogen: the rates are lower in places where Diet Coke is more prevalent.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but I really think this is a result some people on message boards just want to see.

From NIH's National Cancer institute:

* Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data). This is no where near 50% of people "having cancer".

* The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 442.4 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 cases). (.442%)

* The cancer death rate (cancer mortality) is 158.3 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 deaths) (.158%).

Regardless, these numbers are very scary.

Something is bound to get ya. As we get better at managing other diseases and risks, cancer - which is seldom truly curable - gets a larger share.

The progress on other fronts really is staggering. Forget pre-industrial times: global child mortality is half of what it was in the 1980s. The same is true for vehicle deaths in the US.

Its worth noting that we all die of something. When I see stats that rank cause of death, I'd love to see it adjusted for age.

It would be interesting if death rates had a cut-off. Don't tell me that 50% die of heart disease, rather exclude everyone over 70, then tell me percentages.

For most of my life the largest causes of death are accidents and suicide, but equally the age-group either the highest rate are over 75s.

Sure there ways to improve both quantity, and quality, of life. Smoking pretty obviously reduces both - its a good habit to quit, or not start. Chugging DDT is bad for you. But linking foods to longevity, where there is unconvincing evidence, isn't helpful to me.

Especially when that food has significant quality-of-life benefits.

Ultimately we all die of something. A death "saved" here, is a death "gained" there.

We're getting fatter and sitting in a chair all day. It's pretty well known that lack of exercise is a significant cancer risk.

Does this correlate with life expectancy?

We're better at seeing cancer now. Maybe people used to get small cancers that just went away. Which sounds insane I know! But you can be perfectly health, get a body scan, find a lump of something doing nothing and then you're on the big C train all of a sudden.

Citation?

And if sweeteners were at play (sucralose also has scary new research) I couldn't see why the food industry, the paid off gov regulators and insurance companies would cover this up and short the involved companies.

The latest figures point to 1/3 of people in the world will die due to cancer, and the statistics always have been close to that. Where are you getting the 50% figure from?

I don't think it's a decent argument.

You are using the "I was at the train station and I was never mugged there, therefore mugging never happens at train stations" extrapolated argument.

People still think that smoking doesn't cause cancer, even when they are in the hospital because of not being able to breathe.

People still deny that climate change exists because of that one bought study in the 60s.

People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world, even though it is proven that this increases cancer rates 2x as much.

As the devil's advocate I'd argue that people will only change their behaviour if a person within their personal influence radius dies because of it.

If they just read about it, they don't care.

"People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world..."

What biological cleaning process are you referring to? How does it prevent bacterial growth in the water distribution system?

ok, but if 10,000 people go to the train station and 2 get mugged instead of 1 at the bus stop, is it not fair to say it's still pretty safe?

It's not that argument.

It's more like "1 million people were at the train station and were never mugged there".

There has been 1,300+ studies in to aspartame. Pretty much all of them trying to prove that aspartame is bad for you. The fact, they've consistently tried and failed to prove a risk after so much testing yet continue to say it may be harmful just leads me to think this is more of a story line being pushed. It is impossible to prove a negative, you can't prove it can't give you cancer. And any attempt to prove it can cause you cancer fails. Not just 100 attempts, not 500, not 1000 attempts over 1,300 attempts have failed.

If someone tried to prove an airplane design can fly 1,300 times and all it did was come off the ground for a centimeter for half a second, would you say "this airplane design can possibly fly"? I doubt any reasonable person would. But with aspartame there is an idea in people's heads that it's harmful and should be avoided therefore people continue to go with the theory that even though they've failed to prove it's harmful 1,300 times they may do so in the future.

My anecdata is that at one point Aspartame and/or Asesulfame K did something to my gut flora.

Now both or either one (can't say which) give me gas. And not funny gas but "this is a war crime" -gas.

Sugary drinks don't do this. Also this is how I discovered that Scandinavian Pepsi started replacing sugar partially with Aspartame. Took me a while to read the label and find out. I switched from Pepsi to Coke (still full sugar) and the issues went away.

Even though a substance is studied extensively, there might still be adverse effects that people don't attribute to it. I'm not afraid it would give me cancer but bioweapon levels of gas is something I can't live with. Sadly it's getting harder and harder to find drinks that don't have Aspartame in it...

Might be this paper from Mar 2022, which got me to reduce my aspartame & acesulfame-K consumption when it came out last year: Artificial sweeteners and cancer risk: Results from the NutriNet-Santé population-based cohort study https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

n=102,865 adults were followed for a median 7.8 years, using 24-hour dietary records collected via web including some photographic validation. Key results:

> In particular, higher cancer risks were observed for aspartame (HR = *1.15* [95% CI 1.03 to 1.28], P = 0.002) and acesulfame-K (HR = *1.13* [95% CI 1.01 to 1.26], P = 0.007).

+13~15% raised cancer risk in high consumers of aspartame and acesulfame-K (controlling for many factors, including sugar intake, BMI and weight gain, physical activity, etc.).

> In particular, no difference was detected between the categories ‘higher artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake below the official recommended limit’ and ‘no artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake exceeding the recommended limit’

So the raised cancer risk was statistically the same for both categories (though possibly slightly worse for artificial sweeteners). No real win for sugar there (but we also have to look at their performances in the area of CVD and diabetes).

(I will say that the 100g/day cutoff for high vs low sugar consumption is kind of high, even if it includes sugars in fruit and other whole foods. The key question imo is: how would low sugar + low sweetener consumption fare against the equivalent amount of sugar?)

Overall, definitely an interesting study, considering that they adjusted for a lot of factors including BMI/weight gain, and that it's the more health-conscious types who would consume artificial sweeteners. Even the lower-consumption category was associated with a statistically significant +14% raised cancer risk vs non-consumers (for the same level of sugar intake).

One point to note was that sucralose intake didn't seem associated with raised cancer risk, the caveat being that the sucralose sample size was about half those of aspartame and acesulfame-K. This could possibly reflect sucralose being a sweetener used by the most health-conscious participants, since it's less commonly used in mass-market products. Still, would be interesting if sucralose might not contribute to cancer risk. Overall, this paper is a non-loss for sucralose on the cancer front.

If you look at page 15 of the S1 annex of the study

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003950.s002

Figure C: Cancer risk associated with the combined exposure to artificial sweetener and sugar intakes, NutriNet -Santé cohort, France, 2009-2021 (n=102,865)

For me the two interesting cases are:

"Sugar above nutritional guidelines" and "no artificial sweetener" => 1.09 (0.97 - 1.22) P=0.158

"Sugar below nutritional guidelines" and "high artificial sweetener" => 1.12 (1.00-1.25) P=0.046

nutritional guidelines are 10% max energy intake from sugar, about 50 gram of sugar per day for a 2000 kCal diet (62 gram for 2500 kCal for adult male).

A 330ml coke can has 35g of sugar, so we're talking one or two max per day to keep below the guideline.

If I read this correctly if one makes the switch from sugary beverage to artificial sweetened ones and it lowers your total sugar intake below the dieteray guidelines then your relative risk factor doesn't change (at about +10% vs low sugar and no articial sweetener).

IARC will release it when it's ready, and it'll be here: https://www.iarc.who.int/cards_page/iarc-publications/ (probably here: https://monographs.iarc.who.int/ )

Important to remember that IARC just talks about the quality of the evidence, and not the strength of the effect. If they know that something does cause cancer it'll go into group 1, even if it only causes an additional 1 case of cancer per 100,000 population.

The IARC categories (1, 2a, 2b, 3) aren't that confusing, but they do seem to cause a lot of confusion. Here's a short summary I wrote in another place: https://tildes.net/~food/1774/aspartame_may_be_declared_a_po...

So we need other dimensions. Thanks for that article you wrote, made it easy to understand 2b etc.

We need something like the danger of getting cancer from it. Tobacco doesn't make everyone get some kind of cancer, but it hugely increases the risk. What are other cancer dangers in terms of some measurable risk, compare that to this new risk.

Per the article, they're planning on Group 2B.

Yes, and the rest of this thread shows a few people confused about the meaning of "possibly causes cancer" and how to interpret that wrt their own behaviour.

IARCs comms strategy isn't great, and science journalism isn't great either.

Makes me wonder if some new (sweetener) molecule is around the corner?

I have no food allergies. Except to aspartame, if you consider it a food.

I don't drink a lot of soda so I picked up on the reaction sooner rather than later. From then on I avoided it. Until one day it was in something and I wasn't aware of that. My chest hurt so much I thought I was having a heart attack. Maybe I was.

So while that isn't cancer, it's still not a good sign. Standard sugar will do.

I suspect it's more that aspartame indirectly causes cancer, which is why it doesn't look, walk, or quack like a duck, but it DOES have a habit of feeding the ducks. What I mean by that is that candida LOVES aspartame, and candida, a fungus that lives in the human gut and feeds on sugars, alcohols, preservatives, and a few other things Americans in particular eat a ton of, HAS been seen to cause cancer. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24963692/

Cancer can take 50 years to develop. Aspartame is from the 80s, so maybe we’d only now be noticing the beginning of the wave of cancers, assuming our ability to notice is not limited, which I think the pandemic should make you wonder about. And how many other things started in the 80s. Cigarettes were relatively easy to notice, but even great minds like Fischer couldn’t see it. A 50 year lag makes a lot of things hard to notice.

We're not noticing a wave of new cancers; for most cancers, broadly including those implicated by ingesting Diet Coke, we're seeing decreases; where we're seeing increases, they don't track country-by-country consumption patterns for aspartame.

Yes, but hasn't there been also a big increase in certain cancers such as colorectal in young people, and researchers don't have good guesses at what could be causing them? The studies that I read ruled out screenings because it is happening in people decades younger than the first screening recommendations.

Meat consumption is way up and fiber consumption is way down over the past 50 years. Those two factors alone are very big contributors.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

the WHO definition of "possible carcinogen" implies only minor evidence, despite enormous numberse of studies, the schedule of this class includes such things as "Aloe Vera", "carpentry and joinery", "low frequency magnetic fields", and lots of medicines.

It's barely newsworthy and yet here we are, frontpage.

It’s also got over 50 years in the food chain.

Donald Rumsfeld was famously influential in getting aspartame's approval ; however more of the story behind this can be found here: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8846759/Nill,_As...

In 1984 the year after aspartame's approval for soft drinks, the company that held the exclusive patent on it, sold $600 million worth (1984 dollars) of it.

Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...

> Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...

True for human food as well. Maybe it’s not rancid, but food science can make terrible ingredients taste great. Take Doritos. It’s just cornmeal (animal feed) plus a ton of artificial flavoring that is incredibly well dialed in to make them delicious and even addictive.

I think it's disingenuous to say that cornmeal is just animal feed. Polenta has been a thing for a long time.

Since you don't even have to add the flavors to make corn meal taste good. Look at Fritos - corn + oil + salt.

Yeah that's like saying "sandwiches are just ground up wheat, plus a ton of delicious filling to make them taste good"

Mexico also consumes millions of tortillas every day made of exactly that.

And it's awesome, especially fried!

Or HP sauce.

Honestly I see it as a feature if we can move product that’s otherwise garbage, as long as it’s not dangerous. Reminds me of “omg do you know what’s in hotdogs?!” Hotdogs are a success story.

Tricking people's bodies into consuming garbage is a feature? For whom?

Cornmeal is just corn flour but with courser grinding? But glutamate and stuff, sure. Doritos have the same "fake" feel as Pringles according to my taste.

I eat tortilla chips of all kinds outside of the dorito sphere, dont need anything besides a little salt, let alone engineered powders

Doritos really are an amazing case. They are tortilla chips. It took me so long to realize this because that delicious dust is so transformational. It it’s literally a tortilla chip underneath that salt, msg, and spices. For the longest time I assumed it was some other novel type of chip.

Can't you buy plain Doritos where you live? In Australia, you can buy "Original Salted" Doritos, which is just oil, corn and salt: regular old Tortilla chips.

Dortitos is a tidal wave of glutamate. Not just the added MSG but the cheese extracts that add even more.

MSG is right up there with aspartame of vilified ingredients with zero evidence to back up the claims. My own mother claims to get terrible headaches from MSG, but she loves tomatoes. And nuts. And peas. And mushrooms. Turns out the headaches are dependent on knowing the food has MSG.

What's the difference between that and humans eating a pizza but not eating the raw ingredients of a pizza? If it's not inedible anymore I don't see the issue...

Not quite following you... do you mean the difference between cooked and raw, or something else?

I'm saying that you don't find it distasteful that we add sweeteners to raw cocoa powder to make chocolate edible for humans, so what's distasteful in adding sweeteners to animal feed to make it edible for animals?

To clarify, this doesn't mean aspartame in food is harmful, it means that in certain circumstances it's possible for the chemical to cause cancer. For example, workers exposed to extremely high levels during manufacturing, or breakdown products formed during improper storage.

What about the mass of people who in order to drink liters of soda every day ingest large amounts of aspartame? Is it about "circumstances" or concentration?

Is litres of soda the bar for Aspartame to be bad for someone?

What about a few cans a week?

theyre just saying the stakes are high because there is both broad and regularly high consumption

It literally doesn't matter if its causing cancer or not, that's outright a very bad decision to do so, you will 100% fuck up your health long term. It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so?

Nobody apart from maybe sales folks ever claimed these things are safe to drink in such amounts regularly. Just like nobody ever claimed that consuming say 100g of pure salt every day would be OK, yet you can buy endless amounts of 1kg bags if you want.

Do folks really need some government agency to come to them personally to tell them how to live their lives, babysit every single decision they make, steer them away from their addictions on sugar etc? That's not how game of life works.

> It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so?

Isn't the point that diet coke doesn't have calories[1]? This is why it uses aspartame as an artificial sweetener.

[1 https://www.dietcoke.com/products/diet-coke

Or soldiers stationed anywhere hot.

Can you find aspartame naturally in the environment in non processed and manufactured foods? E.g steak, fruit, milk whatever? If yes, then I'm a little more lenient on your answer. If not, personally I would rather not see artificial man made ingredients in foods I consume. I did a quick Kagi search and it looks like it's completely synthetic?

Reminder that bacon is already a known carcinogen for those worrying about artificial sweeteners but happily eating processed meats.

Why stop with nitrates and nitrites? Acrylamide is a known human carcinogen, and occurs in a huge variety of cooking processes (including baking, frying, and grilling). If you eat potatoes, you're almost certainly putting yourself at more risk than aspartame is: we've got epidemiology and mechanism of action to back up the potato risk.

I believe California even helpfully warns you about any location that has acrylamide.

What's the danger with potatoes? Can you point me towards a study or something?

Serious question: do you have kids and if so, what do you feed them if you avoid acrylamide? I’m constantly looking for alternatives for my kids and it feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole such that they do, sometimes anyways, eat the processed things because I can’t eradicate the junk from everything.

My understanding is that bacon itself is not the culprit of the possible (note — possible) carcinogen. The sodium nitrate that is often used as a preservative is. Nitrate-free bacon is easy to find though.

Nitrate-free (or, "no nitrates added") bacon still contains nitrates. About the same amount as standard bacon, and in some cases, more.

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

Nitrate-free bacon isn't bacon. The stuff that is marketed as nitrate-free isn't -- it's a dubiously moral marketing gimmick that is essentially untrue.

With bacon you know what you get, so you can dose it and take your risks. Aspartame has been sold to us as the healthy alternative to sugar. People literally use aspartame as an excuse to chug liters of soda every day.

Isn't it a healthy alternative to sugar? If you have a one in five chance to live ten years longer because you don't develop cardiovascular issues from obesity, but one in a million develops cancer, I mean...

It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.

The caffeine will get you before the aspartame if you actually chug liters a day so you can't really do that in practice.

Source: My dad has a heart attack from drinking liters of diet soda every day.

It’s actually sodium nitrite that’s carcinogenic (after being exposed to high heat), and I can find bacon without sodium nitrite here pretty much at every grocery store.

If it is completely uncured sure, but usually niteite/nitrate free bacon has an asterisk saying something like "beyond what is naturally found in the added celery juice". If you heat those nitrites in the bacon it doesn't the same thing as the synthetic stuff would. Luckily trichinosis is largely a thing of the past, so why heat it? Uncooked bacon tastes awesome. Also, in stews I believe it does reach the dangerous temps?

Adding to what remote_phone said, and repeating another comment of mine, that nitrite free bacon still has the same amount of nitrites (in some cases, more).

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

If you read carefully, it still contains sodium nitrite except as powdered celery. So the source of the sodium nitrate is “natural” but the dose is still the same.

This is not correct, in spirit of "is it carcinogenic": https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing-and-health-prof...

This is why Vitamin C was a required additive, with "nitrate" cured meats. Unfortunately, it is not with the "nitrate from celery" forms, which should lead to more cancer.

But without sodium nitrite you instead run the risk of increased bacterial growth, and in the worse case: botulinum toxin which is like instant death compared to dying of cancer at 70+.

Sodium nitrate converts to sodium nitrite over the course of a cure; that's why Prague Powder #2 is used for long-term cures.

Or drinking hot tea. Working graveyard shift. Drinking alcohol.

Breathing air in any city.

I hope you're saying to stop eating bacon as well and not just that nothing matters.

Neither nor. They're saying to see things in perspective.

Source please

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...

It's always surprising to me how quick we are to go from discovering a chemical to mass-producing it. We're only just figuring out all of the negative externalities of things like PFAS, and they're in absolutely everything (packaging, clothes, pizza box linings, food cans, cookware...)

Yes, "We've" figured out the dangers of PFAS just now, but when companies started producing them back over 50 years ago, company 3M knew it (to say the least) wasn't good.

I'm pretty sure the scientists who dealt with these chemicals even warned against using it, but some higher ups still let it pass

Leaded gasoline will really blow your mind, at least it did for me

Edit: Figuratively not literally, haha!

Interestingly, the inventor of leaded gasoline also invented freon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about that angle

"One Man Invented Two of the Deadliest Substances of the 20th Century" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-man-two-deadly...

Citation Needed, by The Technical Difficulties, has a great episode on him (and Chris's pope infestation.)

https://youtu.be/4og8wG8VQWM

It was known to be harmful back in 1920s when it was introduced

But it solved a problem that got in the way of selling you things!

It's also still used in most every prop engine that flies over my house everyday at a normal schedule, so we still haven't solved the problem of leaded gas. We never will (in my lifetime).

Vertasium has a great video on the invention of leaded gasoline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA

Worrying about aspartame is bikeshedding about minutia. The arbitrary grandfathering of thousands of chemicals under TSCA and lack of precautionary principle are far bigger risks to public health in America.

Multiple companies knew about the health dangers of certain "forever chemicals" including PFAS and intentionally did nothing because money. It's a repeat of the cigarette debacle.

3M knew about the negative "externalities" of PFAS 50 years ago, they just decide YOU didn't nee to know.

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...

It's the same with oil companies having studies on climate change privately, while discounting climate scientists publicly.

Profits over People is the way of Capitalism!

I'm always surprised by this when it's "50 years ago".

Certainly the scientists and analysts at 3M who collected and analyzed the data would have thereafter known of it's extremely harmful effects.

And I don't mean to open this up to "heh yea well they made bank!" I don't think they did relatively speaking.

My main question, is that certainly those scientists would have been advising their friends and families to stay away from X, Y, and Z products because they contain PFAS?

It's pretty easy to accidentally convince yourself of things when you get a big payday by doing so.

This is why analyzing clinical trial data is so obscenely hard. There are bad actors, there are liars, and there are scientists who are really, really hoping to achieve a breakthrough. All of them are liable to end up putting forth bad information.

Thats interesting. All the recent scientific evidence I have been seeing has been saying that Aspartame really isn't bad. This seems suspect. It's so hard to trust science today since it has become so intertwined with politics and corporate agendas.

agreed, it's really hard with lobbyists, captured agencies, flawed studies, social media noise, political narratives, etc etc etc. We try our best to just go back to first principles: as close to the food source as possible, as few added ingredients as possible, organic, etc.

Ahh, the naturalist fallacy. But the natural substitutes for artificial sweeteners are markedly worse for you, and more primitive, less industrial cooking and food preparation techniques often can be as well.

If you find everything is hard to trust, that likely just means you're not good at trusting things.

For instance, this is a known symptom of being Gen X.

AFAIK it can cause diarrhea.

Aspartame is not a sugar alcohol like the other artificial sweeteners that do cause diarrhea due to incomplete digestion.

The weird thing about this is that i stopped drinking Diet Coke, specifically because of aspartame, after reading this same thing in 1996 or perhaps early 97. WHO's decision to wait nearly 30 years before backing that just makes them look impotent.

FYI, according to the linked article, the WHO is not claiming what you think it is claiming.

>It is preparing to label the sweetener as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, Reuters reported on Thursday. That would mean there is some evidence linking aspartame to cancer, but that it is limited. The IARC has two more serious categories, “probably carcinogenic to humans” and “carcinogenic to humans”.

>It previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its probably cancer-causing class, and listed using mobile phones as possibly cancer-causing.

>The IARC safety review was conducted to assess whether or not aspartame is a potential hazard, based on all the published evidence, a person familiar with the matter told the Guardian. However, it does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume.

Some pretty weak claims. Especially weak considering the risk of aspartame (which are not confirmed, and not at amounts regularly consumer) relative to the risk sugar it replaces (which are guaranteed at amounts regularly consumed - see type 2 diabetes).

Where's the proof that drinking Diet Coke causes literally any health issue that is a direct relation to the aspartame itself specifically? Because I don't think that has ever existed because it's not actually harmful in this way... meanwhile your post reads like FUD.

You can start here: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

Diet sodas with aspartame contain a warning for this reason. Now of course, most of us do not have this condition.

But how do we know if it is safe? I decided 20+ years ago that artificial sweeteners were a crutch with no nutritional value and unknown risks, so I stopped consuming them.

Considering that sugar and excess consumption of carbohydrates is the number 1 health problem around the world, is it possible that the risks of low calorie sweeteners are not sufficient to outweigh the benefits of low calorie sweeteners?

Where's your proof that gravity exists and that we fully understand all of its effects?

Science doesn't work that way. Meanwhile aspartame has been linked to many health problems.

"Linked" doesn't mean anything because correlation is not causation.

We got to stay actively informed to be eating good stuff way sooner than the official position of the government about various foods. There are so much bad stuff in the typical supermarket. One way is reading the "right" books.

How can a layman determine the right book? Anti-vax kooks also think they're reading the right sources.

You don't need to read a book. I think you can get away with three steps:

1) This maxim from Michael Pollan: "Eat food [1]. Mostly plants. Not too much." (I personally follow an adjusted version of this: "Eat food. Only plants. Not too much.")

2) Review daily nutrient requirements to ensure your diet is providing you with adequate macro (protein, carbs, fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals).

3) A few months after adopting your new diet, get a high quality blood test that covers markers like iron, B12, etc., and make any required adjustments to what you're eating.

1: "Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize." https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/

I disagree with the GP that staying informed about nutrition can be done with books. There is very little generally accepted science when it comes to nutrition. I try to use the "test of time" approach. If we haven't figured out that something was bad after at least 500 years, then it probably isn't that bad. If we've been eating a food for less than 500 years, then it should be considered suspect.

Consider a classic like Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Eating by Walter Willett. All evidence-based. No fad crap you usually get in this space. You won't be surprised by any of the advice, but it's nice to see it all collated in one place.

https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/eat-drink-and-be-healt...

Here's a two hour interview with the author if you prefer the format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx2JUtngxkw

Does it confirm your priors? Then it’s right.

It's impossible for a layman to know because most people in accredited positions of authority lie without cessation.

Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best.

You might still get it wrong. Such is life.

You mean papers like https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.09.23290893v... , which show being "up to date" with covid vaccinations actually increases one's chance of getting covid, are not the right sources?

Personally I'm taking the WHO announcement as an implicit signal that they are no longer so tightly controlled/held captive by corporate interests as they have been for the past ... three, four decades?

Better late than never, I guess.

Why? I don’t understand. You can imagine a scenario where executives at WHO have shorted the CocaCola stock or bought Aspartame alternatives stock? Many such scenarios possible.

Government bodies took a lot more responsibility before the 90's after 90's they rather fund the private sector than be blamed for being authoritarian and monopolistic.

As a kid in the 90s I remember seeing health warnings on things like artificially-sweetened chewing gum. I have a very specific memory of asking my dad about it at the local deli.

That was saccharin. I remember the label on my granddad's Tab cola.

It caused bladder cancer in lab animals at high doses, and it was later found that the metabolic pathway that caused the cancer did not exist in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin

Literally read halfway down the article before they say that "working overnight" is also in the "probably carcinogenic" category and that the organization is known for publishing confusing results that cause panic.

FFS

Actually "working overnight" is "probably carcinogenic" which is a higher evidentiary standard than Aspartame which is "possibly carcinogenic".

Basically these WHO cancer guidelines are entirely useless in terms of public health and have probably done as much harm as Prop 65 has in California.

Healthcare Triage did a review of the research years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf82FfX-wuU

tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that did find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.

> The "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields" associated with using mobile phones are "possibly cancer-causing"

Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer

The word "possibly" does a lot of heavy lifting in having this make sense.

Did you know that sunlight causes cancer?

Yeah, with billions of cell phone users humankind is practically dead now....

They do: "Group 4: probably not carcinogenic"

The list is empty...

Honestly, what I want to know in a headline like this is "what changed?"

As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in many studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.

So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?

Right here, in this very thread, are comments suggesting that there is no credible evidence that aspartame is a carcinogen.

The most obvious substitute for aspartame is sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. In liquid form, and the quantities that people drink soda, the health risks are immense. Cardiovascular decease kills a comparable amount of people as cancer overall, from all sources. For aspartame to end up a net negative, it’d have to be massively carcinogenic.

Certainly its better to replace Diet Coke with water, all else equal, but the effort in changing habits is much higher. There is a ton of preventable decease due to bad diet and lack of exercise, despite well known causes. So why is that?

Health discussions have this psychological bias where people think “be more like me” is effective (don’t do drugs, just go out and meet people, exercise more, just stop smoking). The fact that people think like this, despite the war on drugs disaster, is madness. Especially when the solution is so simple: throw the moralism away and focus solely on harm reduction – also known as “whatever works”. Just good old empiricism.

Ok I’ll be that guy. The study says there’s no risk unless you drink equivalent of 70 cokes per day. So I think I’m ok. Barely.

You're not wrong, but the full quote from the article is:

>“Back in 1981 they established an acceptable daily intake of aspartame, of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. To consume over that limit would require a very large daily consumption of Diet Coke or similar drinks. On 14 July, Jecfa may change that risk assessment, or they may not.”

Emphasis mine. I'd be curious to see if this understanding has shifted in the past 42 years.

That doesn't mean it's good for you. I agree with the labeling of it as a neurotoxin, whether or not the rubber meets the pavement at a psychological level. There are better ways of calming for the vast majority of people than satisfying a sweet tooth so often. For one thing it can reduce the overall satisfaction of eating sweet things, through the law of diminishing returns.

I've been hearing that type of argument since the 70s, after they banned saccharine.

Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?

We often test chemicals on rats, but the problem is that they only live a few years. No one wants to wait 20+ years to see the results of an expensive study on longer lived mammals anyway.

The solution is we feed the rats excessive amounts of the chemical and see if it causes problems. This isn't a great way to do it, but what other option would you suggest?

> Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?

The same way we know cigarettes are unsafe. You look at human cohort data and run variable adjustment models on it and control for confounders. How do cigarette smokers or diet soda drinkers do over time, especially in older cohorts? Are there any other products out there with aspartame that we can look at as well until we've isolated a risk model for aspartame by itself?

Chemically, it doesn't make sense that there would be any harm in the first place. With properly functioning kidneys, the resultant chemicals get filtered out extremely quickly through the urine. It helps that most diet colas are also diuretic. The resulting methanol and/or formaldehyde don't stick around to cause harm. This is empirically backed up by the lack of adverse effects over massive populations and over decades.

I would simply suggest we stop making any strong claims until we do know.

Mobile phones, WiFi etc a have been under the same classification by WHO since 2011. The industry didn’t take it too seriously, and probably this one doesn’t mean anything either.

https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....

A few of the conspiracy nutters that I know firmly beleive that "Big Aspartame" is responsible for suppressing information about its dire negative effects.

But when you consider:

- how many doctors and scientists are personally/professionally motivated to research this

- how many gov't organizations are concerned about this

- how many industry competitors would benefit from discovering this

- how many lawyers would get rich from exploiting this

...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.

To expand on point number 3, the sugar industry is one of the most notorious at utilizing motivated research to its own benefit. If aspartame had even slightest chance of causing illness or cancer, you could bet on the inevitable, unrelenting smear campaign that Big Sugar would be waging against it.

Who are the players in Big Sugar who would exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.

Who are the players in Big Sugar who works exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.

And yet it took 40+ years for its danger to be widely acknowledged. Forgive me but for thinking there is something suspicious going on... Frankly, the Big Aspartame should be the default explanation and any other explanation be under more scrutiny.

Big Aspartame does not exist in a vacuum, however. The sugar industry is arguably bigger, more powerful, and has even more budget to fund motivated research. I don’t trust Big Aspartame to prove to is that it is safe, but I put my full faith in Big Sugar to tell us if something is wrong with Aspartame.

It's kind of similar to finding a trivial security bug in a critical piece of software after a decade of it being introduced into code. You would think it would not be possible because the software is being used everywhere for extremely important stuff, and so many highly-skilled security researchers would have already looked out for it due to incentives. But there are many examples of this happening. I have heard of many instances where a critical security bug was already reported many years ago, but no one bothered to look at it and fix it until someone else rediscovered it.

> ...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.

Have you ever heard of tobacco? Suppressing information about the harmful effects of a popular consumer product for decades is observably within the capabilities of at least some who might wish to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2B

I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.

Caffeic acid may be a carcinogen but I do not think any decent studies have found a connection between drinking coffee and cancer, and in fact some have found the opposite.

A bigger problem is likely caffeine inhibiting uptake of vitamin D and disrupting sleep.

Weird to have Coke in the Reuters headline when it's not just Coke that uses aspartame.

And this is interesting may be related?

>Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid.

>When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. ...The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate ... they ‘excite’ or stimulate the neural cells to death.

>Methanol is highly toxic; it is gradually released in the small intestine when the methyl group of the aspartame encounters the enzyme chymotrypsin. It has been pointed out that some fruit juices and alcoholic beverages contain small amounts of methanol.

source: https://www.3dchem.com/aspartame.asp

Diet Coke is undoubtedly America's biggest source of aspartame. Diet Coke has massive market share.

Regular coke is probably my biggest source of aspartame now that they changed the recipe to contain 30% less sugar compensated by aspartame and acesulfame-k. I bought a Sprite a while ago and it tasted different so I checked and it doesn't even contain any sugar even though the bottle looks just like before and says "100% saborizantes naturales" (although the sweeteners are artificial). Here's the product page, https://www.coca-cola.com.pe/marcas/sprite

I had a computer science professor who drank so much diet coke that she had a wall of empty cans stacked up from floor to ceiling in her office. Even then, 20 years ago now, I was so grossed out with that level of artificial intake I wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. But that wouldn't have helped my grade.

What is “artificial intake”? Would it have been preferable to “real” intake of sugar from regular Coke?

Why? Why does it matter to you?

Not much diet coke, but (JFYI) ...

https://uranus.chrysocome.net/coke.htm

Meh, I'd sooner believe it treats depression. Try having a Diet Coke and report on the 24h after ;)

I hope this questionable categorization doesn't result in aspartame being removed from sodas; I much prefer it to other artificial sweeteners. Can definitely tell when Diet Coke is formulated to include them.

We don't discuss the dark times when Pepsico switched from aspartame to sucralose in the 2010s.

Another "eggs are bad" article. Wake me when there's something other than a nothingburger here.

Coffee is a known carcinogen (due to formation of acrylamides in roasting). Ripe fruits emit small amounts ethylene that is carcinogenic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#United_States

"Acrylamide is considered a potential occupational carcinogen by U.S. government agencies and classified as a Group 2A carcinogen by the IARC."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene#Safety

"It is listed as an IARC class 3 carcinogen, since there is no current evidence that it causes cancer in humans."

Those are very different.

And here I just thought it just tasted kind of off and gave me headaches.

Everything might cause cancer.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

The current system (especially CA Prop 65) makes it impossible for these pronouncements to carry any meaning whatsoever.

The US research history has to be one of the weirdest possible. Large financial incentive, actual fraud, repeated animal trials where everything goes wrong.

Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)

But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.

Curiously the share value of COKE has not plunged today. (+0.21% as we speak)

Coke owns most sodas, so if you're switching, you're likely to end up switching to another Coke product.

It's already been priced in: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/ever... ;)

Why would it? If it's a carcinogen for Coke then it's a carcinogen for Pepsi or everyone else.

they'll just swap it out for the next artificial sweetener

and that'll be found to be bad in 20 years time, then they repeat again

A bit of background (from an unlikely source). The Tl;DR:

  \* Group 1: carcinogenic (this includes cigarettes, the HPV viruses that cause cervical cancer, and ionizing radiation)

  \* Group 2A: probably carcinogenic (this includes red meat, hot beverages, and working as a hairdresser)

  \* Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic (this is the group aspartame reportedly may end up in)

  \* Group 3: not classifiable

  \* Group 4: probably not carcinogenic (this list contains zero items; a chemical called caprolactam was previously on it, but was moved to group 3)

  These are not designations of cancer *risk*, but of *the chance that there is a detectable link of some kind*.

https://lifehacker.com/aspartames-possible-carcinogen-design...

Oh man, this report about Gen Z taking "Diet Coke" breaks to 'escape work' came to mind: https://fortune.com/2023/04/25/gen-z-diet-coke-break-trend-t...

Nice! I can't wait for cheap obsolete sweeteners like aspartame and acesulfam-k to begone from my beloved energy drinks to be replaced with relatively modern and supposedly prebiotic alternatives like steviol glycosides, xylitol etc. Unfortunately even the most expensive energy drink manufacturers still use aspartame and acesulfam-k.

I wish there was a switch in the mass production of products to contain neither sugar or sweeteners.

But it feels like that is never going to happen.

You can do it yourself. I used to drink a lot of sweetened soda. I switched to diet, then stopped. Regular sugar-sweetened drinks taste sickeningly sweet to me now, and diet drinks taste like chemicals.

Once you break the habit, your sense of taste recovers and you realize how nasty these drinks are. Most people get started on them as kids when you don't have a nuanced sense of taste and really crave sweet stuff.

Same. I used to drink multiple Cokes a day. I switched to Diet Coke sometime in my late 20s. In my 30s I cut back to one Diet Coke a day and about 4 years ago in my mid 40s I switched over to carbonated water when I crave something fizzy but still limit myself to one a day most days. Coffee and plain water have replaced the soda I used to drink.

This was all done over time as I realized I needed to change my diet to keep weight off and I wasn't really enjoying my daily soda(s) anyway. With an actual intent, one could drop soda within a few months easily and never miss it.

Why would there be? Sugar is good. Products with sugar are good. Self control is also good. People can like products with sugar and exercise self control, so there will always be a demand for mass produced products with sugar, and that's a good thing.

Self control doesn't reduce the amount of sugar that's already added to the soda I would like to drink. It just means I don't get to drink it. I have to go find low-sugar sodas. I would like to have more options.

We have to stop putting sugar in dumb things first, like ketchup and bacon. We have to get a grip.

No chance there would be a switch. Consumer tastes and eduction aren't going to change.

Short of that, I wish there was clearer and more consistent labeling. I avoid sugar and sweeteners. Its annoying to be in the mood for a flavored drink, see something that claims to be zero sugar/all natural/etc, grab it in a hurry, then discover on the first sip its got erythritol in it. I read the label, but sometimes I miss it. My preferred options are unsweetened iced tea, coffee, or flavored water. Those are reliable, but can get boring.

Food is generally easier. I just avoid anything that has (or should have) a lot of carbs as a rule when looking for convenient pre-packaged food. No point in sweetening a can of sardines...

I just started brewing my own tea and coffee, unsweetened. Snack foods are a bit harder, but we are better off eating whole fruits and vegetables anyway.

There are plenty of products that have an unsweetened version, at least in my experience.

Just returned from Ireland and every 'regular' soda was full of disgusting artificial sweeteners. In the usa these would be labeled diet. And of course sucralose was pretty common and we're now finding scary things about its harm to the human body. Sugar really isn't that bad..

Sugar in the amount put in soda absolutely is terrible for you. The problem definitely is with people drinking too much soda, period, but replacing your average Americans's diet soda consumption with sugar soda consumption works out to an average increase of ~73 calories/person/day. Of course, most of that consumption is being done by the subset of the population currently primarily drinking diet soda, which multiples that number by 2-5 depending on what study you refer to. Which would definitely be an alarming increase in caloric consumption in a significant block of the population.

It's really weird that we've normalized consuming huge amounts of what's effectively an exceptionally-sweet dessert drink with most non-fancy restaurant or fast-food meals. Shit made a lot more sense when standard serving size was like 7oz and free soda refills weren't a common thing (so: the 1950s or whenever, for the former, and before some time in the '90s, for the latter). 20+oz glasses (and 32oz "medium-size" to-go cups—JFC) and free refills pushed by servers are just nuts. That's so very much sugar.

Imagine consuming a pile of 37 Pixy Stix (sugar equivalent of 24oz of Coca Cola) to accompany a hamburger. WTF. That's plainly nasty as hell, and anyone doing that in public would rightly feel ashamed. And that's not even a large serving of soda, by modern standards.

73 calories actually sounds misleadingly low? How is that calculated?

I think this is what you are correcting in the rest of the post? In that a single soda is typically double that. And many folks drink more than a single soda. Considerably more.

As a biologist, I can tell you that sugar really is bad. All sorts of nasty effects (e.g., look at the RAGE gene and pathway). Of course, that doesn't mean artificial sweeteners are a good alternative. Limiting added sweeteners of any kind is a good idea, just hard to follow.

You are making it sound like alcohol - where the warning is no amount of alcohol is safe.

Sugar is a naturally occurring substance and is totally safe for consumption. However, purified added sugar is bad for you because in nature you cannot find a fruit that contains that many sugars per gram.

Just because we're finding out many sugar replacements are bad doesn't mean that sugar isn't bad in high doses as with sugary drinks.

Don't consume high doses of anything. Sugar is fantastic.

Sugar is pretty bad. Glucose spikes cause a huge amount of stress in the body.

But yeah, Ireland's drinks are like that because of a 'sugar tax', and now it's quite hard to find fizzy drinks without gross sweeteners. Even brands that were quite high quality before are kinda rancid now.

Nah, sugar is way worse.

One of my favourite all-time comments on HN was the guy that was constantly trying new experimental sweeteners just for fun and ended up with something that bound to his tastebuds for months. I can't find it.

It's better to not use sweetener at all, nor sugar. After some withdrawal period body stops to crave either. The only good amount of either is zero.

I got off the sugar addiction (which I am very happy about) but still need something to sweeten my tea and coffee addiction, which I use sweetener for

I am a Luddite when it comes to tastes, no two ways about it. I suspect many people are, and so some tradeoff has to be made.

Perhaps this will finally increase the popularity of Stevia.

Just live healthy. I hate the addition of stevia and other sweeteners to everything. Please give me cane sugar. I'm a grown up, I can handle my intake, thanks. (Especially anything in the direction of soylent, green shakes etc. No need for stevia.)

Nah, it tastes worse.

Maybe. But is this like how Bananas are radioactive? i.e. almost not at all? How carcinogenic would the equivalent amount of sugar be?

Do other people feel like aspartame introduces a tangible viscosity into drinks? I feel like it’s like drinking slime

The opposite. Real sugar makes a drink much more viscous. Fake sugar leaves the mouth feel thin.

Nope. The amount you need in a drink is so small it wouldn't substantially affect the viscosity at all. Source: me, who mixes soda syrups and did piles of informal experiments on syrup ingredients.

I think what you experiencing is an overproduction of saliva to dissolve what your body thinks is sugar.

This (Group 2B) is the same list that includes mobile phone radiation. I think I’ll take my chances.

As an experiment, sprinkle some aspartame-based artificial sweetener over an ant and watch what happens.

That stuff gives me migraines. I can't even chew most gum without a headache because it's full of it.

Isn't it mostly Xylitol in chewing gum?

Xylitol is actually pretty rare as the main sweetener in gum, it’s a lot more expensive. If gum mentions that it contains xylitol, check the ingredient list to see if there are other sweeteners listed first.

Xylitol is preferable because of its oral hygiene benefits, but most consumers are choosy enough to make sure their gum is exclusively xylitol.

There are some brands on Amazon that sell 100% xylitol gum if you go out of your way to find it though. Be careful with it around dogs though, xylitol is insanely toxic to them.

I just checked the gum in my backpack. Both Trident and Mentos gum have xylitol, sorbitol, acesulfame K, mannitol and sucralose. Mentos gum also has aspartame and maltitol syrup in addition to the others.

The ones I'm familiar with mostly use sorbitol. Though it's not uncommon to find aspartame on the 'less than 2% of the following' part of the ingredients list.

On the list of gums that give me a headache, it's aspartame on the ingredients list. Believe me, I check. :)

Some gum bases are made from non-degradable plastic polymers ... another reason to stay away.

Being 'declared possible' seems meaningless. Isn't it already implicitly possible?

Existing... is a possible cancer risk.

One would have hoped for a more definitive statement (either way) than 'possible'

It is definitive. It doesn't cause any measurable harm.

I wish they’d just force all products with a non nutritional sweetener to have a big cigarette-style warning label on the front of the packaging.

I still haven’t gotten over the rise of “organic” artificial sweeteners. That must have involved some N-th level regulatory capture with the product labeling regulators.

The eu slaps these sweeteners in drinks not marked as artificially sweetened, it's maddening.

It seems within the past month we've seen the WHO warn about non-sugar sweeteners general, aspartame in particular, and looks like sucralose in particular. I'm not generally one to support conspiracy theories, but given the number of countries placing limits on added sugar, sugar taxes and the like, what are the odds the sugar/hfcs industries are funding these studies.

Not to mention that with aspartame in particular, the evidence is sparse and low quality. The verbiage regarding Sucralose in actual human terms of consumption are much more alarming. I generally try to keep any sweet drink consumption with meals, or otherwise sweetened with stevia (which has seen it's own detractors). Given a century and a half of food industry lies, disinformation, misinformation and tethers with regulatory bodies, it's really hard to believe anything and just defer to if it was considered "food" a couple hundred years ago.

But the FDA approved it. It is safe. Silly WHO.

Is Stevia evil these days?

Tastes less toxic. Is it?

It tastes worse.

This is awful reporting.

Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria.

So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.

AFAIK, most lists of "possible carcinogenic" are just lists of things people want to cause cancer but the evidence disagrees.

There's something to say about lists where people put substances we don't know a lot, to call attention for studying more. But I haven't actually seen one of those, it's always lists of substances people study a lot, and publication bias set them marginally into statistical relevancy.

I doubt very many people want any substance to cause cancer. People want the things they eat to be healthy and wholesome but they've learned that they can't trust the people making our food or our regulatory agencies to protect them. That's caused people to be cautious and distrustful even when there is little cause for it.

Aspartame is one of the must trustable things we eat. Very few foods have been studied as much as it has. Both quality and quantity of studies.

This is part of how the medical regulation leaders in every country are the most insanely cautious, neurotic people on earth. They all recommend not to eat steaks rare. Everything is a carcinogen. When they have such a low tolerance for danger, it just means everyone learns not to listen to their advice.

I file it under the same category as, "The Daily Mail trying to divide every known substance into ones which cause cancer, and ones which cure it."

This venn diagram is just a circle

Well, is it good or neutral for you? I've always felt like these diet drinks were just marketing to make you think everything was fine, feel free to drink as many as you want. I've worked with a few people that would go through 4-6 Coke Zeros every day. In no world can I imagine that that wouldn't have negative long term effects on a human -- all things in moderation, right?

Personally, I'll drink a Mexican Coke with cane sugar maybe once or twice a year, knowing it's not great for me and treating it as a dessert.

But I do agree, it's not good reporting. Pretty much no info on the actual scientific research, but hopefully WHO will give more in depth data.

> In no world can I imagine that that wouldn't have negative long term effects on a human -- all things in moderation, right?

Why on earth would you think that?

It's carbonated water with a tiny amount of food dye, sweeter and caffeine. The latter of which, iirc, has generally positive effects.

But what does California's proposition 65 say about it?

I know this is a joke, but if anyone’s curious: Prop65 says you have to tell people if your product contains chemicals from a list of carcinogenic substances. The list is kept up-to-date by California. Prop65 has no punishment for over-reporting though - you can slap on a warning “just for fun” if you want.

Unless California has aspartame on its list, prop65 says nothing about this.

Indeed it is awful.

The BBC has a reasonably good article on this subject today

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66057216

> So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.

Saying it's "partially responsible" in essence is ridiculous, though, when it's also a critical nutrient we eat in virtually every food. Aspartame is not. It's the sheer volume of sugar ingested that's the issue.

High fructose corn syrup is not a critical nutrient.

effectively this is pick your poison: aspartame or sugar

Well no. May I suggest water?

Sucralose is another a widely used option. Cokecola uses aspartame, pepsicola uses sucralose. You can also easily buy it off the shelf

I choose Stevia

Why is it awful reporting? The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer) is labeling it as being, quite literally, a “possible carcinogen.” That’s the actual name of the category. It’s either “Not classified,” “Possible Carcinogen,” “Probable Carcinogen,” or “Carcinogen.”

Don’t like it? Bring it up with the WHO.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

    LONDON, June 29 (Reuters) - One of the world's most 
    common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a 
    possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health 
    body, according to two sources with knowledge of the 
    process, pitting it against the food industry and 
    regulators.

[…13 paragraphs later…]

    The IARC's decisions have also faced criticism for 
    sparking needless alarm over hard to avoid substances or 
    situations. It has four different levels of 
    classification - carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, 
    possibly carcinogenic and not classifiable. The levels 
    are based on the strength of the evidence, rather than 
    how dangerous a substance is.

Using a term with a technical definition that isn't remotely close to the plain english meaning of the composing words, in a headline—and not explaining the gag in the first paragraph—is terrible reporting

> The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer)

IARC is only nominally under WHO. It is a weird French agency founded by some French activists and politicians in the 1960's.

They use a 5 class classification

    Group 1: The agent is carcinogenic to humans.
    Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans.
    Group 2B: The agent is possibly carcinogenic to humans.
    Group 3: The agent is not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.
    Group 4: The agent is probably not carcinogenic to humans.

But out of the 1042 chemicals and things they have classified, none are in Group 4. (Historically, there once was one single chemical in Group 4, but they have reclassified it.)

For IARC, everything is either at least possibly carcinogenic, or there is insufficient evidence (Group 3) to yet declare it carcinogenic.

Also:

"In 2019 IARC was accused of cooperation with "toxic tort law firms" who make profit of suing companies for compensation for alleged health issues based on IARC classification. IARC was accused from hiding conflicts of interest impacting a few invited experts, especially those related to large-scale cash flows from US law firms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Agency_for_Resea...

Many countries have perfectly capable chemicals agencies and food safety agencies, who are much more reliable than the IARC.

Isn't this the same list that says Cellphones are a possible carcinogen despite mountains of evidence that they cause no cancer and also zero known mechanism of action?

That list doesn't even contain "Not a carcinogen". So basically I don't take it seriously at all.

Purely anecdotal, but I used to drink insane amounts of aspartame in the form of Crystal Lite. I don't know what that's made of now, but decades ago it was made with aspartame, and I'd guzzle gallons upon gallons of that stuff because it could be mixed with tap water and was therefore cheaper than buying drinks in cans. Maybe in the long term it will cause my butt to fall off in my 60s, IDK, but if aspartame causes cancer, then it must be incredibly weak given the unglodly amounts I was consuming on a daily basis.

Today, I'd still avoid aspartame, but also sucralose, because it's unnecessary and may even cause insulin to be artificially raised in response to the sweetness. And I also just don't drink nearly as much as I used to now that I'm metabolically healthy.

It's a common fallacy that increasing the dose necessarily increases the effects. There are a whole lot of chemicals where the relationship is more complex. There are drugs where negative effects only occur when the drug is discontinued, where the effect of the drug increases or decreases as it it taken continuously, where the effect rapidly saturates and does not increase with increasing dose, and so forth.

I know enough about pharmacology to know that I know nothing.

When I accidentally ingest food or drinks containing aspartame, it takes me out for at least 24h with a hellish migraine.

I suffer from migraines. Usually related to exposure to sun and sleep patterns, I found out that drinking diet coke during a day that I already experienced one of my other triggers, gives me a migraine almost immediately. Any other day it has no effect.

being a statistical outlier means you don't count. Good luck explaining that to your doctors.

Statistical outlier? Aspartame is known to be linked to migraine triggering:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2708042/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18627677/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28198207/

Fruit is sweet enough for me already. Some granola and Greek yogurt to cut that down a bit more.

Every now and then I get car parts delivered from USA and without fail they come with a label telling me they cause cancer. I can't take this kind of labeling seriously when it comes from an American source.

The whole war on sugar is baffling to me. After I had my first glass of soda in a decade, my impression is that artificial sweeteners are garbage. Poisonous, too. But this has been known for decades, hasn't it. It's cheap, though.

As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes

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