Why a cancer scare around aspartame is mostly unfounded
economist.com
economist.com
https://www.sciencealert.com/everything-we-eat-both-causes-a...
On a related note, I'm kinda happy to note that steviol is much in use here in southern europe, where I'm currently residing. They don't even make a big deal out of it, regular sodas, vitamin powders, you read the ingredients and there it is.
Steviol is a sweetener based on a natural plant Stevia. I've so far seen it in both Hungary and Croatia.
I come from Sweden and it used to be that Stevia products were in a bin on their own, marketed specifically as stevia products. But down here they don't even mention it on the marketing side of the label. It's buried in the ingredients.
If you are going to mess with complex systems, such as feed yourself aspartame, vape, give pregnant women a synthetic sedative and medication for morning sickness etc., you do it for a high potential gain that offsets potentially huge downsides. Benefits of aspartame are close to nil; if anything it probably makes things worse because people think they can consume more ultra processed foods sweetened with it because such foods have "fewer calories".
Time is not evidence of safety, that is an odd claim (see smoking tobacco), thankfully we have the scientific method to investigate hypotheses like "x is bad for you".
We might still get lucky and get beneficial side effects of aspartame or peach-flavored strawberries that makes us faster, stronger, smarter, but with these things the luck usually works in the other direction.
Are you a bot sent out from the aspartam industry?
> Is there any benefit in using sugar replacements?
Serious question? The taste joy without getting that much calories in? (Yes I know, we skew our taste and could also have joy without too much sugar, and also other ingredients, e.g. salt, but different topic).
> BOTTOM LINE: Eating carbohydrates causes a rise in blood sugar levels. Insulin is released to bring blood sugar levels back to normal. Some claim that artificial sweeteners may interfere with this process.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-b...
If you drink seven cans of Coke a day you’re likely going to end up gaining weight and could end up obese with all the additional health issues that brings.
If you drink seven cans of Diet Coke per day you’re not going to end up obese (through that method anyway).
What seems to be missing in this HN debate is that sugar itself (yes the natural substance) is not good for us either! Aspartame may be “bad” (debatable) but sugar is bad but in different ways.
Sugar isn't bad, it is a biological solution to the energy storage problem just like fat, and our bodies know how to deal with the sugar present in nature (in fruits). The sugar in an apple is absorbed slowly, without a dramatic increase in blood glucose unlike the one in a Coke can.
Monkfruit which I use supposedly has health benefits, in addition to being calorie light.
As for health benefits apparently it has antioxidant properties, but I don't know to what extent that's true. I use it because I like the taste and doesn't seem to be harmful in any way, but it also hasn't been studied as extensively.
I just would prefer the sweetener to be as natural as possible, if I had to use it.
Since you seem to be against anything artificial for god knows why, is this possibly a bias? You know it's artificial and that knowledge results in you thinking it tastes off to you?
There are plenty of natural things that are bad for you and plenty of synthetic things that are good for you.
And there absolutely are reasons to feed yourself artificial sweeteners.
Sugar-free soda is awesome for people trying to lose weight. The carbonated drink keeps you satiated and you don’t ingest any of the calories in regular soda.
For you probably there aren't, but for others there is a very valid reason: to some (me included), Stevia's (and other products') taste sucks.
It being artificial is irrelevant. Doesn't mean it's healthier or better/worse in any way.
Erm, yeah ...
Personally as someone who eats very clean and unprocessed, I like to take the sugar calorie consequence of sweet things I might eat like fruits and the occasional pastry or soda
No need to speculate or ask rhetorical questions. This is a scientific question with presumably lots of research already.
All these articles telling you how totally safe it is to ingest artificial chemical xyz remind me of how companies were telling you it was fine, even healthy, to smoke cigarettes. The degree of arrogance with which these scientists state their truths is confounding.
Meanwhile chronic illnesses and cancer rates are skyrocketing.
I'll pass on the industrial byproducts being used in my food, thanks.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/researchers-r... Dramatic rise in cancer in people under 50
If the US is flat but global is rising pretty easy to explain by (poorer) diets and detection. These scientists don’t know why but that’d be my null hypothesis to beat.
If your diet is good and you are around or below this „threshold“ then yeah no reason for artificial sweeteners, but many people (including me) enjoy sugary products and would like to drink a glass of coke for example with dinner which would limit my sugar intake for that day greatly.
Is this even possible? Can you define industrial byproduct?
Like even if you go to a typical Western grocery store and buy a single apple and then eat it. It was covered in a thin layer of wax to prolong its shelf life. Likewise if you buy a potato it might have trace amounts of industrial produced material in it from industrial farming.
Aspartame has been studied avidly, if not obsessively, for decades. It has never shown a serious carcinogenic risk. That's what we're talking about here.
Plenty of natural things will kill you, fast or slow. Also, if you combine natural things together in an industrial process, the result isn't natural anymore.
aspartame is… | odds
…good for you | very unlikely
…harmless | plausible
…bad for you | plausible"Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression in the amygdala"
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213120119
"“What this study is showing is we need to look back at the environmental factors, because what we see today is not only what’s happening today, but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer,” said co-author Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Biomedical Sciences."
"Led by doctoral candidate Sara Jones, the study involved providing mice with drinking water containing aspartame at approximately 15% of the FDA-approved maximum daily human intake. The dosage, equivalent to six to eight 8-ounce cans of diet soda a day for humans, continued for 12 weeks in a study spanning four years.
Pronounced anxiety-like behavior was observed in the mice through a variety of maze tests across multiple generations descending from the aspartame-exposed males.
“It was such a robust anxiety-like trait that I don’t think any of us were anticipating we would see,” Jones said. “It was completely unexpected. Usually you see subtle changes.”
When given diazepam, a drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, mice in all generations ceased to show anxiety-like behavior.
Researchers are planning an additional publication from this study focused on how aspartame affected memory. Future research will identify the molecular mechanisms that influence the transmission of aspartame’s effect across generations."
https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2022/12/08/fsu-res...
in the research paper there is a math:
"The FDA recommended maximum DIV for aspartame for humans is 50 mg/kg (33). Based on allometric conversion utilizing pharmacokinetic and body surface area parameters (43), the mouse equivalent of the human DIV is 615 mg/kg/d. Therefore, the male mice received a daily aspartame dose equivalent to 14.0%, 7.0%, and 3.5% of the FDA recommended human DIV, and the females received a dose equivalent to 15.5%, 7.7%, and 3.9% of the human DIV. The estimated average daily aspartame intake in humans is 4.1 mg/kg (44), corresponding to a mouse equivalent dose of 50.68 mg/kg (43), which was the dose delivered to mice consuming 0.015% aspartame."
The "mouse equivalent dose" calculated by this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804402/
- Larger animals have lower metabolic rates
- Physiological process of larger animals is slower
- Larger animals required smaller drug dose on weight basis
Until then, I'll enjoy my occasional diet coke.
> After aspartame is consumed, it immediately breaks down into three naturally occurring chemicals. Even large amounts of aspartame cause smaller fluctuations in those chemicals than normal food. The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion.
For me artificial sweeteners do not taste sweet. At least in what I have tried so far in light soda or tea sweeteners. Given the popularity of artificial sweeteners I must be an edge case.
I dont remember when, but at least here in Norway Mountain Dew partially replaced sugar with an artificial sweetener. It tasted off for me but it took me a while to figure out what they had done.
"Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group"
But, it helped me mature my pallet and avoid the next "sweet high". Chocolate tastes too sweet for me now and I tend to gravitate to healthier options. Part of that might be projection and wishful thinking, but I think it's a sweetness I was craving too much.
How is it not obvious yet that we are being manipulated on a daily basis on everything we do ranging from what we eat, how we work, how we dress, how we think?
I am not talking about conspiracy theories, I am talking about plain obvious media corruption.
So would it be healthier to drink three cans or Coke per day or three cans of Diet Coke?
As far as I can see (from all the research), ingesting sugar seems worse than ingesting artificial sweeteners with regards to long term health outcomes.