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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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?”

Or maybe they are extremely effective, because the purpose is for the companies who sell REAL cancer inducing chemicals to muddy the waters so they can keep doing business.

Product warning labels are indeed subject to all manners of nonscientific meddling, often with a barely disguised goal of protecting a powerful industry. History is not usually kind when evaluating these kinds of compromises made to appease powerful corporations.

And now, a short conversation between two people to illustrate the rhetoric in play:

Person 1: “Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!”

Person 2: “Except the top three players in that industry are quite profitably killing people.”

Person 1: “But how can the industry recover if we act too drastically?”

Person 2: I will quote what you said just above: <<Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!>> You were just saying that the market is adaptable! It seems like you are conflating the idea of protecting bad actors with the idea of setting the conditions for a healthy market. A healthy market does not kill its consumers.

And if something was truly dangerous then I hope they would ban it outright rather than stick a label on it. Especially when they have been sticking those same labels everywhere.

The IARC lists do not answer these two questions on their own either, but with the "evidence level" groups there's at least some separation from alcohol down to aspartame. These levels are still insufficient for at-a-glance risk assessment: putting mustard gas and alcohol both at level 1 can send you into a bit of a spin until you realize what the grouping is about.

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.

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.

Maybe it's because I'm tired but I don't see what that has to do with what I said. Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Perhaps :) Point taken. Re-reading, it looks like I skipped a transition sentence from the comment to what I wrote. (Or maybe the parent comment got edited? Not sure.)

> 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.

I agree with the comment as written, though it strikes me that virtually no mainstream publications use writing that clarifies or quantifies these kinds of indirect relationships.

I see a lot of intellectual laziness or dumbing down. Two categorical errors happen often:

(A) writing “everything is connected”. This can be true in some sense while also being useless. The more interesting framing is to ask “to what degree” and under what modeling assumptions.

(B) Writing about various linkages without clarifying probability and impact dilution.

The connecting idea in my head was something like this: when most publications talk about cancer they tend to lack even a basic statistical language.

Backstory: Having hundreds of interactions with ChatGPT, which is trained on much mainstream writing, made this interaction pattern obvious and tiresome.

Another way of saying my complaint: It feels like otherwise intelligent people hit a barrier where they start speaking vaguely. They pretend like this is the best we can do. It ideally isn’t; we have extensive scientific and statistical studies. There is no reason why we as a culture have to accept such statistical phobia as quality writing.

Explore the Associated Press "AP Stylebook" (pay-walled, sadly), and propose a mapping to them. It would take a few years to get accepted and more to propagate throughout the working press.

I work with readers and editors sometimes. They get swollen and puffy when they see numbers, though they will swallow their pain if it’s a scientific article. Otherwise they will complain loudly and the editors will use their red pens a lot.

With that said, I consider your idea has merit and should be implemented.

Thanks for sharing. To these folks I would ask: what about numbers is problematic? To the degree that it has to be with current reader perceptions, I understand and empathize.

But in terms of where we want to go, we can do better. Great writers care about precision, and wisely chosen numbers and ranges are able to provide that. It may be appropriate to situate them in footnotes or endnotes, depending on the context. But the numbers matter.

I thought there was already common terminology for probability of side effects [0]

Very common = greater than 1 in 10

Common = 1 in 100 to 1 in 10

Uncommon [formerly 'less commonly' in BNF publications] = 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100

Rare = 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000

Very rare = less than 1 in 10 000

Frequency not known = frequency is not defined by product literature or the side-effect has been reported from post-marketing surveillance data

[0] https://bnf.nice.org.uk/medicines-guidance/adverse-reactions...

Perhaps, but… How many publications have any such guidelines? Make them public? How well do they follow them?

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

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?

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.

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.

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

Sugar being a readily metabolized energy source is almost undoubtedly a cancer source because increase in energy results in increase in cellular production one way or another, which leads to higher risk of mutated cancerous cells, period. Hence the link of obesity to cancer as well.

The fact is that anything that increases the amount of you or the rate of you over time over the bare minimum needed for survival is an increased cancer risk... there are other causes like exposure to radiation that actually damage cells and so on as well.

Ultimately the question isn't if there's a link to cancer, it's how much something is increasing your risk of cancer relative to the alternatives. I suspect artificial sweeteners are in general for most less risk than consuming vast amounts of sugar, gaining lots of weight, becoming inactive, and increasing their cancer risk that way but who knows. Obviously if you ommit everything but consume the bare minimum sugar you need for survival you'll have a lower risk... good luck with that in modern society and diets

Diet drink consumption gone up, but doesnt seem to have made a dent in the obesity crisis.

Your point is only valid if it actually lowers sugar and other carbs intake. Which isn't the case for most people.

Next to that. With diet drinks people drink more since they feel like they can get a way with, some do with sugar variants as well, but seems like more people binge drink diet versions which could lead to higher exposure relatively.

The has been processing sugar for millennia, these chemicals are pretty new.

Most people drinking diet soda aren't limiting other carbs... and we've had about half a century of people thinking that "low fat" diets are the solution and snacking on low-fat, but high carb foods.

More people need to stop consuming garbage that wouldn't have been considered food 250+ years ago.

Eating fruit and honey alone for anything “sweet” has worked great for me. Never get any cravings for anything else. It seems to me like these things truly are the carb sources we are “meant” to eat.

Worth noting, that fruit would generally only be available a few weeks out of the year, and natural varieties not nearly as sweet as what's in the stores. Honey was also in much more limited supply. We consume a multiple of fructose and glucose of what would have been consumed just a couple hundred years ago.

Highly dependent on where your ancestors have lived, but in my case they’ve probably got along with meat and potatoes since no fruit really grows here. Maybe my body is somehow less prepared to handle fructose than someone with roots in south-east Asia, but I digress.

Fructose often in concert with Glucose is generally less readily metabolized (only by the liver) and can have the same/similar negative effects of heavy alcohol consumption on the body.

Pretty sure it's been conclusively shown that sugar overconsumption does cause cancer, but i think its more because of metabolic issues than directly causing a certain cell type to become cancerous.

Yeah, I looked as well and couldn't find anything, limiting the search to this last weel pulled up this very thread, with all the dietary disinformation and active bad actors call me skeptical until at least google has a result.

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.

> 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.

This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy [1]. A naturally occurring substance is not automatically less carcinogen, or harmful, than a manufactured one. Coffee is associated with elevated risk for bladder cancer. Cycad trees are known to be highly carcinogenic. Mycotoxins (mold) are toxic and carcinogenic. Aflatoxin from peanuts is found to be carcinogenic.

I'm not saying that stevia is not safe, but safety has nothing to do with being natural or not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Cocaine is a natural plant extract as well.

yeah and it aint that bad for you until you extract the pure cocaine from it. the leaf is fine, I think

Actually he was recommending stevia to chew with coca leaves at the time. As I said, this was high altitude climbing in Peru where that is a cultural norm.

It's also the cultural norm in Hollywood.

Doesn't make it a good idea.

And of course copious use of cocaine is known to prevent cancer.... Now the way it prevents cancer is probably not optimal......

I don't think it's a fallacy to conclude generally that consuming plants which coevolved with humans is safer than consuming chemicals which are completely exogenous to any stage of the human body's development.

It would be a fallacy to suggest that one group or the other were unconditionally safer, but I find no dilemma in generalizing that the human body is more capable of processing plant-based substances. Just like I would generalize that consuming plant-based substances is healthier than consuming paint. Sure you can nit pick outliers, safe paint or oleander or whatever, but the heuristic is still of value.

Tobacco coevolved with humans. So did areca nuts. And bracken ferns.

I believe that more when humans have had a long history of consuming the thing without noticeable problems. And even then, sometimes traditional ways of preparing it turn out to be rather important:

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

It makes me wonder if some of the things like, e.g. the supposed success of the Mediterranean diet, are due to bits of food culture like this that we've lost or never fully understood.

I have no reason to believe that stevia increases the risk of cancer, but I'm afraid that arguing it is likely to be safe because it "coevolved" with humans is basically falling into the naturalistic fallacy with extra steps.

For stevia to be arguably safer due coevolution with humans, the following would need to be true:

1. There is a selective pressure for stevia to not increase the risk of cancer in humans.

2. There is a selective pressure on humans to not have an increased risk of cancer from consuming stevia.

In other words, it is firstly to argue that a stevia plant which had a tendency to increase cancer risk in humans would be significantly less likely to reproduce. This effect would be hard enough even if the hypothetical carcinogen were to be otherwise selectively neutral, but it could have a selectively positive pressure if it were an essential hormone or defence against insects, pathogens, competitors, etc.

Secondly, it is to argue that if stevia were potentially carcinogenic, then humans that were susceptible to its effects were significantly less likely to reproduce. This fails on two levels. First, consider that even in the cut-and-dried cause of cancer that is smoking, lung cancer is still extremely rare among young smokers. Lung cancer patients are virtually always well past their reproductive age, meaning that even if a genetic mutation to be immune to tobacco were to appear (or indeed it may well already exist) then said mutation still has no selective advantage with regards to the consumption of tobacco. Second, even if a hypothetically-carcinogenic stevia[0] could exert selective pressure on humans to become unaffected by it, then that effect would only have taken place on the populations which consumed significant amounts of stevia over generations and not humanity as a whole.

[0] Which I insist, I don't believe is the case.

Selective pressure doesn't need to be perfectly foolproof to be valid.

Humans are pretty observant, and have decent odds of noticing over time when particular things correlate with health problems. A plant known to cause health problems is less likely to become and remain a dietary staple. A plant that isn't a dietary staple misses out on a wealth of opportunity for propagation.

I think you're also hyperfocusing on the issue of evolution. The point isn't that stevia is a plant which merely exists, but rather its longevity in human culture[0].

What you're saying makes sense for random plants picked up in the woods; less so for plants that have been consumed by humans since antiquity. By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.

0: https://www.britannica.com/plant/stevia-plant#ref350513

A small long-term increase in cancer risk is really hard to notice.

And lots of cultivated plants have downsides.

> By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.

No, that's a strawman. Nobody is suggesting that "random research chemicals" should be considered safe. And extracting random chemicals out of plants would also be dangerous!

Though, there are many plants that coevolved with humans that are toxic in various ways.

> I don't think it's a fallacy to conclude generally that consuming plants which coevolved with humans is safer than consuming chemicals which are completely exogenous to any stage of the human body's development.

An optimal organism doesn't imply an optimal environment.

  fitness(org, food) = -2 org^2 + org * food + 7

If evolution had optimized fitness by adjusting "org" while keeping "food" constant, that wouldn't imply holding "org" constant and changing "food" wouldn't yield improvement.

Evolution doesn't optimize the environment for the organism. Evolution performs stochastic gradient descent, improving the organism for the environment, which can easily get stuck at global optima. More importantly, it improves the organism for the environment/food/etc. The idea that the food is optimal for the organism gets the improvement mechanism backward.

By that logic, burning tobacco shouldn't be carcinogenic either.

I wouldn't propose apple seeds as a sweetener simply because they naturally grow inside apples.

Stevia’s on the WHO list of artificial sweeteners they advise avoiding.

https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...

That is a conditional recommendation pending the formation of actual guidelines.

It is, but IIRC for a nonsensical reason. They're lumping it in with a completely unrelated sweetener, erythritol, because some products on the market combine the two sweeteners. Using pure stevia is completely safe, as far as any research I've seen would indicate.

Liquid stevia is my go-to sweetener for most purposes, or if I'm baking I'll use a stevia-monk-inulin mix that measures 1:1 for sugar.

More recently, I've been using freeze dried miracle berries as a sweetener for low-sugar fruits. They essentially convert sour taste signals to sweet, which works great for strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, kiwi, passion fruit, and citrus. Also has a bit of an effect on blackberries and dragon fruit, and starfruit is on my list to try.

Related LPT: most of the fruits I eat are frozen with a few minutes of thawing at room temperature. Easier to store, easier to prep, and turns out to be pretty similar to Italian ice.

Frozen fruits are usually fresher and cheaper as well, win-win.

Stevia is nasty though!

I can’t stand the taste, I’d rather go without than have a product with stevia.

Cyanide is also one of those "wholesome plant extract". Not entirely sure why that would even qualify as an argument.

Appeal to nature[0] is a poor mental shortcut. There are tons of natural carcinogens, notably aflatoxins and cycacins.

Clothes, refrigeration, and Pasteurization are all extremely recent on an evolutionary timescale. They're all artificial and extremely beneficial to human well-being.

Also, the idea that something is good because we've evolved with it gets the mechanism of evolution backward. Even if it were true that evolution's stochastic gradient descent had found the global maximum 15k years ago (instead of perhaps approximating a local maximum), that would imply no changes to the human would improve human reproductive success. It would not imply that no changes to the environment (such as available foods) would improve human reproductive success.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

> 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.

That's not a good reason to eat something either - reducing cancer growth typically means something is poisonous.

Or it's an immunomodulator in some sense.

Any way (or source) for you or anybody else to back up this claim?

It's obvious. That's how chemo works, by poisoning the cancer before the rest of you.

Similarly though, antioxidants are often sold as a health food but can promote cancer because they benefit the cancer more than the rest of you, and some of them directly shut off chemo drugs. There's plenty of evidence of that one.

What about Stevia?

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....

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2...

I think this is the source of the more recent concerns around sucralose.

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

Sure, in the right things - but I wouldn't want the taste.

Besides, honey doesn't really do what the artificial sweeteners does. "Just use honey" is horrible advice for diabetics, for example. It isn't going to help folks that are looking to avoid carbs. And so on.

Realistically, if you aren't supposed to be eating added sugar, honey isn't going to do the job either. It is just a different form of sugar.

Carbs are essential for good health and any sort of exercising. Why would someone want to avoid carbs entirely?

Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave. Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?

Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave.

I mean, good luck avoiding them and liking chewing gum. Or good luck if you are diabetic and want a soda from time to time.

Folks on keto diets avoid a lot of carbs, and diabetics tend to watch them. Artificial sweeteners help folks do this. Honey has similar woes to actual sugar, and if you are using the artificial stuff to avoid the effects of real sugar, honey is no solution.

Choosing between the two - artificial or "natural" - is really just a question of risk. You aren't in the position of considering that a soda might kill you. Or trying to explain your diabetic grandmother with memory problems that she simply can't have soda at all: I'm not sure giving an artificially sweetened drink really is going to be what puts them in an early grave.

I suppose you can exclude metabolically unhealthy people from the span of my advice. To be fair, the diabetes was probably caused by not following my advice in the first place too.

>Why would someone want to avoid carbs entirely?

People aren't literally eating zero carbs, they are minimizing their carb intake for various reasons (like being diabetic). With almost any variety in your diet, you are getting enough carbs to function. People "avoid carbs" because with our modern world of abundance, it is too easy to over consume carbs. If you are diabetic, honey is more likely to put you in an early grave than artificial sweeteners.

>Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?

Just because something is "artificial" doesn't mean bad. And rarely is one thing universally "better". it depends on the situation. Again, a diabetic looking for a soda-like drink is looking for different things than a vegan looking for dessert recipes.

>Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave.

Source?

> Just because something is "artificial" doesn't mean bad.

I’d be willing to bet in more than 50% of cases it does.

> Source?

Didn’t WHO or some similar organisation just start officially recommending against them? I haven’t actually read any of the research on this, I’ve just taken my advice from people who have. My personal source is an argument from nature along the lines of “if we didn’t need artificial sweeteners for 300,000 years, we probably won’t need them now”.

Honey is sweet because it has sugar in it, the same reason people would be using an artificial sweetener in the first place.

Sure, it just doesn’t have the health disadvantages of the alternatives. It might even be good for you.

It has the health disadvantages of sugar, because it contains sugar (fructose). Don't be fooled by sugar in a different form.

Evidence [0][1] suggests that the fructose in honey acts differently from fructose in table sugar, and seems to have some unexplained metabolic benefits.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12421854/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21621801/

Your first study is testing three different diets only specifically for high triglycerides and the second doesn't mention honey.

That looks like some very lazy criticism. Care to provide contradicting studies?

very lazy criticism

It's literally true and fundamental to what you're claiming.

Care to provide contradicting studies?

That sugar is bad for you? Here is a presentation with lots of studies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

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.

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.

??? I’m hearing this first. Know a lot of people who drink Diet Coke.

at least in my part of the world (southern Europe) the Aspartame causes cancer meme has been floating around since the 90s at least

I drink diet soda sometimes and have a strong idea it is unhealthy so I limit intake. I switched from full sugar soda which has its own risks. I tend to now drink flavored selzter with out sweeteners although there is a question what natural flavors may be. I also imagine the same risks apply to hot dogs and processed lunch meats that diet soda has.

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?

I remember warnings in the 90s on labels that saccharine causes cancer in high doses in lab mice on gum - over time ace k / Splenda and aspartame were used instead.

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?

Crops as industry. Most of the changes are more recent. But selective breeding for appeal en mass is not the same as for nutrition.

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.

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

Atmospheric nuclear testing

Not in the last 40 years, it was all before then.

radioactive fallout never has long-lasting effects on the places they fall.

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

Citation?

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.

Well, I'd also say that as society continues to get more complex we're exposed to more and more previously-unknown substances, chemicals, and compounds. Kids used to play in the DDT mist sprayed by trucks. How many DDTs are there right now that we don't know about? I'd guess a whole lot.

Ultra and highly processed foods are terrible for us. Consuming so much more sugar than in nature seems to be bad for glucose intolerance. I love bacon but I try to resist ever having any. Don't buy meats with nitrates.

We do have way more cancers, a big reason we know about is our food choices. We don't even know the impact of hard things to measure yet, like the impact of all these things on our gut biology. It's not a new discovery that eating a lot of sugary foods leads to greatly increased diabetes, and now we are learning more about how artificial sugars have their own impact. So basically, it's increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are not good for you too, maybe in different ways than "natural sugars".

> I love bacon but I try to resist ever having any. Don't buy meats with nitrates.

That is no way to live.

In general, you should think about risk management, not exclusion. Have your bacon as a bi-monthly treat, and splurge for some high quality bacon at the butcher.

I remember seeing a video of a talk where the host asked who was managing their health by going partially or fully vegetarian. Lots of raised hands. Then he asked who was sitting or standing still for extended amounts of time. Even more raised hands, including almost all of the previous group. And that’s a higher cancer risk than meat eating :)

In the name of sanity, let’s all avoid “biweekly” and “bimonthly”. Just say twice a X to be clear. Pretty funny how the dictionary claims to be largely neutral by only reflecting the cultural ambiguity. I want an f-ing opinionated dictionary that says: avoid this ambiguous word!

If you mix the definitions, biweekly and bimonthly can even be the same timeframe!

Or, since we have a word already, we could use that... Fortnightly. Biweekly needs to mean, specifically, twice a week.

I like that. And we could use halfweekly to mean twice a week. And halfmonthly to mean somewhere between 14 and 15.5 days.

It is not increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are bad for you, and the cancers linked to nitrates are also down significantly in the US over the last 40 years. That's certainly not because people are eating less bacon, or because grocery store bacon has less nitrates in it ("nitrate-free bacon" is a fraud).

You're seeing half the picture. Cancer is, in the large majority of cases, a preventable disease. It is caused mainly by environmental factors, i.e. the modern way of a sedentary obese lifestyle.

A Cancer maybe preventable. Cancer in general is most certainly not a preventable disease. The only thing you can do is stall it. There is no lifestyle that ensures you will not get cancer.

Does this correlate with life expectancy?

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.

Those numbers have been about the same in the last two decades. The numbers have always been that high.

40% is definitely near 50%

"will have" infers a future present though. 40% will have at some point in their life is substantively different than 50% having at a single moment in time

Those numbers are context-less. Cancer is what happens to you if something else doesn't kill you first.

Exactly this. The prevalence of cancer in my family is pushing 100%. However, the onset is almost always in the mid/upper 80s to early 90s. So it's not really that cancer is a problem for my family as much as it seems like living long enough to get killed by it is.

This just says we're living longer, not that cancer is suddenly becoming an epidemic.

Live long enough and you will get cancer.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you want to post that link if you're on the site? I'm guessing you're looking at cancer mortality rates rather than cancer diagnosis rates. Because while the former has decreased since 1950 due to improvements in treatment, I'm pretty sure the latter has risen since 1950.

I closed the tab since last night, but if you Google "IARC dataviz" you're probably going to get it as the first Google search result. It's a site IARC runs itself, with historical data visualizations.

Right it was as I thought. Cancer incidence rate was increasing since 1960

https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...

while cancer mortality rate was decreasing since 1980

https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...

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.

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.

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?

"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?

Microscopic chloroforms. I’m pretty sure they’re related to midi-chlorians.

</joke>

Thank you for telling everyone that you are not even remotely involved in water treatment, especially for those that are. No matter the treatment method, absolutely purified water can encounter pathogens. The water treatment process uses various methods to make water safe for consumption but the distribution system requires a residual for any biological contaminants that can enter, or be harbored within, and low concentrations of free chlorine (<2 ppm) provide that while carrying very little risk. Especially compared to most risks in modern life, like being in a passenger vehicle. Safe drinking water, partially due to chlorination is the greatest public health achievement of humanity so far. You are spreading misinformation.

It was low-quality humor. I figured the midi-chlorian reference gave it away, due to the high density of Star Wars fandom on this site. Sorry to trigger you. I added a joke indicator, and I hope your blood pressure will decrease.

https://www.starwars.com/news/so-what-the-heck-are-midi-chlo...

It was obvious. Don't waste everyone's time talking way outside your level of expertise and then trying to make jokes when you're called out. It's juvenile.

Man it seems like you’re having a rough week. I hope you can enjoy your weekend! Cheers.

Thanks and I was, I'm sorry that I acted like that.

It was CookieEngineer who made the original comment about something to do with biological cleaning of water.

You may have caught that, but it was Tomcan who made the "joke" comment. I just read it as they responded to your question, but added the terrible humour to imply that they didn't take it seriously.

This [1] and [2] are a pretty good primer on how Kläranlagen are built in Germany where we use a biological water treatment process and are recycling 96% of sewage water.

The remaining ~4% (the Schlacke) usually are used as fertilizers for farming or are burned in biogas energy plants. The latter happens when the quality is not good enough or the sewege plant doesn't have a stage 4 filtration system.

The German wikipedia entry is actually also pretty good [4]

[1] https://umwelt.provinz.bz.it/wasser/wie-funktioniert-eine-kl...

[2] https://av-selbitztal.de/klaeranlage-naila/funktionsweise

[3] https://industryeurope.com/sectors/energy-utilities/how-germ...

[4] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kl%C3%A4ranlage

Admittedly I don't read German, but I read the translated version and ... it looks very much like a typical sewage treatment plant in the US? What's unique about it?

Not adding any chlorine is an interesting choice in any case, you can start out with perfectly pure water and still end up with contamination along the way to your tap. A tiny amount of chlorine prevents that, and it evaporates quickly after the water leaves the tap.

That's a sewage treatment plant treatment process. We don't typically drink treated wastewater, but some places recycle the water after a intensive purification process. Chlorine in drinking water treatment is used for disinfection and a small amount is added after treatment to keep bacteria from growing in the distribution system. Your information is not really relevant but interesting.

It's not that argument.

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

I doubt that you asked and verified the statements of 1 million people before you made that comment.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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