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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Suppose aspartame is actually toxic. Wouldn’t that have population-level effects by now? It’s been in beverages for decades.

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Well we've seen hockey stick shaped population level increases in obesity[1] and colon cancer[2] in the last 40 or so years. Doesn't go to say it was caused by aspartame, but I don't think it can be argued we haven't seen population level effects of something.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/hestat/obesity_adult_07_08/obe...

[2] https://gut.bmj.com/content/gutjnl/68/10/1820.full.pdf

Maybe that something was the explosive availability of added sugar and other carbohydrates.

There's a hilarious theory that it's due to the success of stamping out smoking. Nicotine being an appetite suppressant after all.

Might be the dawning of the age of aquarius. Not really enough evidence in any direction right now.

Colon cancer is correlated to red meat and processed meat consumption. Processed meat(eg:bacon and lunch meat) is a known carcinogen and red meat is a probable carcinogen.

We eat more eat meat than previous generations.

I don't think that's a convincing explanation of this type of broken trend line, unless there was some event in the early 2000s where everyone suddenly decided to eat 10 times as much processed meat...?

It's also not solid logic. Granting that processed meat increases colon cancer risk, that does not go to demonstrate that an observed increase in cancer risk is caused by processed meat. That's affirming the consequent.

Colon cancer has been dropping since the 90s.

https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/colorect.html

See the reference above.

Population-level data, when combined with aspartame consumption, is enough to give us an approximate upper limit on how toxic aspartame is. The largest issue with estimating the upper level of toxicity would be if another unaccounted for population change decreased the risk of cancer at the same time aspartame increased the risk. Then, it's unfair to assign aspartame the entirety of that increased risk. There's probably hundreds of things introduced in modern life that have some impact on health but aren't fully accounted for in population level data.

All of this is to say, if aspartame caused cancer at the same rate as smoking, then we'd probably know about it by studying population-level data. There is a level of health impact that we should be concerned about but could get lost in all the other things happening to the population.

There could be population level effects right now.

I think the better question is wouldnt research have uncovered something more damning by now. Its very well researched and the conclusions at this point are fairly benign. Yeah, dont drink 100 cans a day or you might have problems. That basically means its harmless. That makes it less dangerous than kale or spinach which you actually can eat concerning amounts of.

Wait, I want to hear more about the kale and spinach concerns. I love kale and spinach. What research should I read?

Ill see if I can find it. It was an article on HN yesterday about green smoothies. I think the concern with kale is thyroid problems and with spinach it’s kidney problems.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37168142

Not the most self-contained reference for what Im referring to but its what prompted my comment. There are more details in the comments and should provide plenty of fodder to follow up on.

And this one puts the upper limit at 2.2lbs of kale per day https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/can-you-eat-raw-kale

So I guess its still unlikely that youd reach that but seems like a lot lower threshold than dangerous aspartame levels.

On another note, a friend of mine tried eating massive amounts of ginger to help his body heal from two years of heavy chemotherapy. The science behind his experimentation was sound and the cancer doctor confirmed that it might well work - without of course endorsing the approach.

He ended up with a platelet disorder. Anyhow... back to kale and spinach.

I'd imagine it would.be really hard to discover correlations for this. Doctors ask if you're a smoker, not a diet coke drinker.

The problem is we've been eating a bunch of other new industrial foods as well. There are a bunch of unexplained population-effects over the last 50 years such as increasing obesity, allergies, autism, different cancers, etc. It's just impossible to make the link between each new chemical and each new disease.

Other factors may have made any effect less obvious.

At least some studies have shown correlation between increased artificial sweetener intake and BMI:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/

I personally avoid the stuff, preferring to just limit sugar.

Well most people who drink diet soda are fat. Why else would you drink it?

They say correlation does not imply causation, but have you noticed how often sentences with the word "correlation" also have the word "causation"?

When I drink Diet Coke, I choose to drink it to avoid ingesting 40g+ of sugar. And I also prefer its taste to compared to sugar. And I am the opposite of fat.

There's a reason that students are taught on day 1 of Statistics 101 that observational studies can only establish correlation, NOT causation. Otherwise we might as well just admit that cancer causes smoking.

It's one of the most pervasive and blatant errors seen in the news and social media.

Obesity rates start dramatically rising around the time aspartame came to market in 1993. CDC's data isn't very granular[0], but there is a slight upward trend until 1976-1980, the next data point 1986-1994 is significantly higher and continues to rise at a much higher rate. Obviously correlation, but obesity is a contributing factor to a significant number of diseases and health issues.

There's a Quora answer that suggests aspartame was banned in France in 2015, but aspartame searches are so astroturfed on Google that I can't find anything that confirms that. There also doesn't seem to be any obvious obesity studies with data from France after 2010, if that's true.

At least one study suggests artificial sweeteners break satiation leading to increased consumption[1].

Aspartame may not be directly toxic, but there seems to be increasing evidence that it negatively affects dietary habits of some portion of the population, and that it does not contribute to weight reduction in human consumers[2].

0 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/obe... 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/ 2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7817779/

As your own summary of the chart you're reading shows, there doesn't seem to be any causal link between the introduction of aspartame and obesity, since sharp rises in obesity predate the introduction of aspartame.

My original comment should say 1983, not 1993. We apologize for the error.

Edit: Removed my previous diatribe about graph interpretation because I realized it was my mistake that caused confusion.

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