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.
Perhaps this is outdated but this page says otherwise: “range of studies have found no evidence that sucralose causes cancer in humans”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....
I think this is the source of the more recent concerns around sucralose.
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
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.
More people need to stop consuming garbage that wouldn't have been considered food 250+ years ago.
Do you have a citation for that? Google search is telling me the exact opposite, that it seems to reduce cancer growth.
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.
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.
Doesn't make it a good idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
An optimal organism doesn't imply an optimal environment.
fitness(org, food) = -2 org^2 + org * food + 7
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.
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...
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.
I can’t stand the taste, I’d rather go without than have a product with stevia.
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.
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.
Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave. Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
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.
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?
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”.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12421854/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21621801/
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.