Drinking diet sodas daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring
news.uthscsa.edu
news.uthscsa.edu
This is scientific malpractice! The most ridiculous confidence interval I've ever seen! 1.02 to 9.7, reported as "tripled", seriously? And of course the data is non-blinded, self-reported survey responses recalling events that occurred many years ago, and the analysis is not preregistered and splits the cohort in an arbitrary way to eke out so-called "statistical significance" (by the slimmest imaginable margin, 1.02 > 1.00, just barely).
How can this dreck be published? Everyone involved should be sanctioned. And everyone who took this headline at face value should seriously reconsider their approach to consuming science news.
Normally when I see a bad study there's like one or two serious problems with methodology, but when I read this through it's almost just every couple of paragraphs that the authors will say something or describe methodology that should be giving the reader pause. From literally the first paragraph in the intro:
> Changes in diagnostic definitions and guidelines and increased testing availability and funding have made major contributions to this increase in diagnosed cases; under the added impacts of changes in dietary, environmental, and other exposures affecting the intrauterine environment, ASD prevalence has reached unprecedented proportions.
Those two sentences contradict each other! You can't just tie them together with a semicolon like one thought implies the other. I'm not even saying that autism cases aren't actually rising at all, but you can't just go "our diagnostic criteria have changed; therefore environmental and dietary exposures are the cause." You have to actually put in the bare-bottom minimal amount of work to describe why you think that diagnostic criteria and social awareness aren't the primary causes, you can't just claim that changing diagnostic criteria itself implies diets are to blame.
It's unsurprising that somebody who would write this way would do bad statistical analysis.
To be fair, upvote doesn't necessarily mean "I agree with this", it often just means "this is the topic I would like to discuss".
I agree that the article is crap though.
> Those two sentences contradict each other!
Id say that it’s a non sequitur; the first part of the sentence before the semicolon states something completely different than what follows, so the ‘impacts’ can’t be ‘added’ - they don’t have the same units.
https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/16t4eyg/drinking_d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Resignations_of_editors
In August 2018, 10 senior editors (including the editor-in-chief) of the journal Nutrients resigned, alleging that MDPI forced the replacement of the editor-in-chief because of his high editorial standards and for resisting pressure to "accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.
I was "around" science for a good chunk of my life (both mom and that used to be academics, and I spent 8 years in academia myself doing a phd and postdoc).
The amount of crap studies, politics and bullshit that happens in those circles will make you realise how sad the state of the "advancement of science" is. And my experience was in 3 very different countries. We desperately need something like AI to be able to synthesize and filter scientific publications
I understood enough that this study found a correlation and that this was based on surveys. I thought it was an interesting finding, and concluded that this correlation should be examined more closely with more rigorous studies.
I did not go into the details of methodology and statistics and did not conclude, like you did, that this study has dubious value.
This is a trap that the public find themselves in with science reporting. Many people on HN have technical training to grasp these concepts but not understand them. I my self program, and use many of the same intellectual building blocks scientists use in the execution of my job. But I am not a scientist.
I am not a scientist is the key point because it means that I do not understand science. I know the “process” of science. I’ve read scientific papers. I’ve done toy experiments in school and in university. But I don’t understand it. To draw an analogy, Programming is a perception of reality. There are things that I do that I can never explain to management because they do not have direct experience with it. The “identity a bird in the park” XKCD comic is a meme of this concept [1] notwithstanding advances in AI research.
Like programming, science is a perception of reality. Like my management, I may have taken statistics, I know what confidence intervals are. But I have not lived the experience of building an experiment. Getting results, analyzing them, and constructing the distinctions necessary to reach an interesting and valid conclusion. If you’ve gone though that process, you know where to look for problems in a study. I and many people don’t. We will at best say, further study is needed, and at worst say that diet soda causes autism.
The public depends on experts to enter the conversation and share why things are wrong. This of course gets into the problem of “lies will make it half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. Retractions may be made, but never perceived. This makes us vulnerable to bad faith actors employing the gish gallop and there’s not a general purpose solution to that.
Assuming data is valid and unbiased of course.
Not a statistician, just curious.
The parent comment's point is that although the reported effect is significant at $\alpha = 0.05$ (the usual "95% CI" you mentioned), there are other problems that render their test of this hypothesis less than valid.
edit for those curious about odds ratio https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK431098/#:~:text=The%20....
That’s explained here: https://xkcd.com/882/
What is interesting here is that drinking 'diet soda' actually decreased the odds for girls (though not reaching statistical significance) - that strikes me as an extremely odd finding. Their discussion of 'why' was not very compelling. I have a hard time thinking there's anything causative with such a disparity in sex.
I also noticed that adjusting for some of the larger confounders for autism (maternal age, SES) didn't move the needle much. I would expect there to be a much larger difference between adjusted/not-adjusted OR. Maybe there's other confounders lurking or the adjustment was insufficient.
It'd be like trying to do anabolic steroids while your natural testosterone is very high.
Receptor saturation (in this case, E1 vs E2; first pass metabolism turns E2 into E1) is something I had to learn out of neccessity because my endocrinologist didn't really do anything beyond loosely following ancient standards of practice (we don't have specialized gender clinics in Germany).
Additionally, do we know whether autistic people drink more diet soda than others? If autism is at least partly genetic, as it seems to be, then the mothers in the study might themselves be autistic or carriers of autism-linked genetic mutations.
I have read in prior research that overweight mothers are more likely to have autistic children. Another possibility is that being overweight is associated with frequent diet soda consumption, and it’s the mother being overweight that is more the issue than the soda consumption per se.
Anyway, I am not at all convinced of the implication that a mother drinking diet soda increases her child’s risk of autism, especially if the mother is at a healthy weight.
I'd never heard that before, but you're right -- "Coke contains 32 mg of caffeine per 12-ounce (335-ml) serving. Diet Coke is higher in caffeine, with about 42 mg per 12 ounces (335 ml)." [1]
I wonder why that is? If people expect an energy boost from Coke, and if sugar isn't contributing to that any more, a little extra caffeine will?
Coke Zero, on the other hand, "contains only 34mg of caffeine per can (12oz)" [2]. So it's more like regular Coke.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/caffeine-in-coke
[2] https://lifeboostcoffee.com/blogs/lifeboost/caffeine-in-coke...
It is true that Diet Coke has a higher caffeine content. Though I would not say it is significant:
A 12 oz. can of Coke contains 32 mg, Diet Coke contains 42 mg
A difference of 10 mg is not significant in this context.
I wonder, are we simply underdianosing the women with autism as usual?
And I wonder if there's a correlation between drinking diet sodas (as opposed to naturally sweetened?) and getting your children evaluated for autism (like, say - diet soda drinkers are on average wealthier, and that correlates with better access to healthcare and more parental involvement, thus reducing underdiagnosis of autism?)
Given how sensitive obstetrics are to even small risks and how prevalent aspartame is, I'd be surprised if there is a genuine causal link here of such strong statistical effect. I mean, how many people use zofran? And yet obstetrics we're limiting its use in pregnant women just for a very very small alleged increase in the risk of heart problems in the baby.
So, there’s a significant gender difference here, possibly with diagnosis but likely a deeper connection. Alternatively, it might impact both but this study didn’t have enough statistical power to notice the correlation.
Same happens with ADD. A lot of parents are diagnosed in hindsight when their child is diagnosed. “Wait my son had ADHD because he acts like this? I acted exactly like this.”
But I also have known women who will happily bounce from topic to topic and the hint of a tangent, and it’s obvious to me they should have been diagnosed by ten. Some have been as young adults, some older, one at least I don’t think ever was. It’s not just different presentations. We don’t want to see it.
Inattentive is a bit of a misnomer, too—it's not that they can't hold attention on something, it's that they have a hard time controlling where their attention goes. This is another reason why this presentation often flies under the radar: "my {daughter/son} can't have ADHD, {she/he} can stay focused on {favorite activity here} for hours!"
At the same time the term has been more widely applied over time to include people with minimal intellectual or linguistic impairment, but that doesn’t mean people with such profound issues no longer exist.
Thus, if you’re talking about the full autistic population overall they are going to on average be worse at basically any task.
Abstract:
> No statistically significant associations were found in females.
Discussion section:
> Several possible explanations exist for the lack of associations among girls in our study; these include insufficient statistical power, inherent sex dimorphism in response to DS/aspartame exposures, and possibly even the recruitment strategy itself, which, by including as controls neurotypically developing female siblings of male cases, increased the likelihood that any early-life exposures found to be risk-enhancing among their brothers with ASD might appear to be negatively associated with ASD in the analyses for females. Further research with larger sample sizes for both sexes and prospectively gathered data would be important for investigating this association further in females and in all participants combined.
This study didn't find an effect in females, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
To control for demographics they divided that ~15 into 6 different demographics (or 5 if male/female was already included, about 3 people per demographic if so).
It's a shame this kind of science is allowed publication.
The paper (https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3772) claims this is the first time somebody has looked for an association between autism and maternal consumption of aspartame during pregnancy / breastfeeding.
Autism is quite a different consideration, no?
The control side was 54 males without autism and 67 females without autism.
Maybe 34 is enough to get that statistical conclusion, but it seems pretty small. It's based on recall of if they had -frequent diet drinks- (edit: cutoff variable was one single diet drink per day) during pregnancy, so it might be being determined by like 15 people for the female side that were diet drink users and more for the controls, further divided by 6 different demographic subsets? Will try and find that number.
From the abstract of the study [0]:
> No statistically significant associations were found in females.
I feel like there are things not being said in the study that should have been. I could be wrong, but I don't see a mention of whether the parents of the autistic children were themselves autistic or not and feel that could be important criteria to have noted.
Since then I think they discovered they were under-diagnosing it in females due to gender norms, but my impression is that it still skews more heavily towards males (3:1 or 4:1).
We keep encountering situations like this where a new chemical compound was introduced, becomes ubiquitous in our diets or environments and only later do we find out "Oops, it has serious health or environmental consequences."
It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. We're still paying the cost of introducing lead into our environment in a myriad of subtle ways. We still don't fully understand what the cost of the introduction of microplastics or PFAS is going to be. And regardless of the whether this particular study holds up under replication it is looking increasingly likely that aspartame is not something we should be consuming.
And what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause to generations.
What specific studies should we have done to notice this association? What specific safety studies need to be done before introducing a new chemical compound into our society?
Historically speaking, the only conceivable way they would have learned this if they feed aspartame to pregnant women and then studied the offsprings. This is fine for a final testing phase of safety, but is inhumane to do unless you are incredibly sure it is safe. Animal models for studying autism are flawed, and wouldn't come at all for decades after aspartame's introduction.
In modern testing, we could theoretically generate a super long list of safety checks to do. This test might look like raising a large generation or two of the specific line of mice used for studying autism. Then checking the offspring autism rate of those exposed to aspartame compared to a control. This would be a single checkbox every new chemical compound would need to do, and there could easily be tens of thousands of similar tests that would need to be done. We would need to add to the list overtime, as our understanding of optimal human health improves over time.
Imagine the investment required to pass these safety tests. It's a minimum price tag of 25M, if the safety tests are standardized and lab techs are trained on them and do them in an assembly line like fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost be 10-100x. At that level of investment there's two issues. The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate. The other problem is this is just the safety test portion of R&D, after spending so much money this seems like a likely target for corruption and my skepticism for the results of such a test will be high.
Could you elaborate on why this is a problem? It seems to me that there is not inherent right to introduce new chemicals into our lives, and I would prefer this not be done without thorough risk assessment studies.
In the medical industry, introducing a new medicine requires years of testing for something that will be given to a tiny slice of the population. I find it odd that there does not seem to be a similar process for chemicals that could be spread throughout the entire population.
* We are often creating chemicals that do the job of existing chemicals safer and more efficient. This ban would probably include a grandfather clause for old chemicals, and thus we might be using inferior products and doing more harm than we otherwise could. Look at refrigerants as an example of a chemical compound that has improved over the decades.
* Many chemical compounds introduced in the last 100 years directly improve productivity. The United States is in economic competition with other regions of the world. We could be creating a disadvantage that reduces our geo-political power.
* Many of these chemical compound increase quality of life. There's a strong unitarian argument for sucralose and polyurethane insulation.
The bad stuff we may already be eating is a given, and something to be distinguished from introducing new things with no existing role in the foot chain.
Is it more humane to launch it without testing, producing the same effect for a much, much larger group of people than would have been involved in the intentional study? This seems to be a fairly gaping hole in the definition of humane. It reminds me of people who see an accident and don’t help because they might be held liable for the accident and they don’t want to get involved.
Prohibiting new chemicals outright would be fine, but that is pretty far from where we are today.
The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/...
There was huge controversy over aspertame (discovered 1965, limited approval in 1983) in the first decade even though the only solid case against it was that it is bad for a handful of people who have the genetic defect PKU.
Sucralose was discovered in 1976 and wasn't approved in the US until 1998.
The strangest case is Stevia which, since it is a natural product, has gotten into heavy use without really being approved as a food additive. (Loose Stevia rebaudiana leaves make a nice sweet tea combined with Camellia sinensis I'll grant that.)
(2) If you were trying to psychologically manipulate people, "autism" is the threat you would use.
That doesn't make it safe, but it's standard that traditional foods are regarded as safe to eat unless evidence emerges that they aren't.
Artificial sweeteners, specifically, are a bandage over the festering wound of a culture of mindless consumption. Companies want you to consume more so you buy more, but as soon as people began to worry about the rather expected obesity resulting from gorging and constant snacking on food and drink, and mediocre food and drink at that, the only alternative in the unhinged profit-above-all-else logic of consumerism is to maintain or increase consumption exceeding actual need, but reduce the apparent consequences of mindless consumption.
The common good requires a conservative legal oversight in this space where weird food additives are concerned, but it also includes abstract truths like "gluttony is evil" or "making financial profit the highest end is disordered". Our cultural and civilizational demise is rooted in things like the latter, and the intellectual and spiritual rot and resulting debasement of common sensibilities regarding such intangibles. Which is to say, regulation by itself, without appropriate cultural shifts, will, at best, function as another bandage that corporations will lobby to dilute and weaken and redefine at every opportunity.
And yet all those chemicals are allowed in Europe.
So what happened? Were they grandfathered in?
This was overhauled with the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act of 2015, which requires the EPA to make safety determinations of new products hitting the market. It however ties the hands of states. If the EPA rules a chemical as having no unreasonable risk, states have no authority to regulate it [1].
[1] https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-toxic-chemical-safe...
I really dislike the trend of studies claiming a 'link'. It's misleading, as almost all readers interpret it as causality. The article points out the study doesn't imply causation, yet this comment highlights the 'consequences' of aspartame. It just seems like a big disconnect.
If we want to “change the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment at a mass scale”, what do we… do? We can require more research before something is offered up to the market, there’s dimensioning returns on research. The only way you’ll know FOR SURE that something is harmless is universal consumption, after many decades.
Now, I am taking you saying “ensure that [new materials] are safe” to mean, we stop fucking up entirely. That’s probably not what you really mean. More publicly funded research to LIMIT harm further than we currently do, is a noble goal! Most nations have some entity that researches new drugs/additives/products before going to market. Greater funding (harder to bribe) and power (full power to stop untested substances being used) for those is a good step.
But humanity will keep poisoning itself, no silver bullet there.
How much slower would we have reasonably gone to avoid lead?
Incidentally, the lead wasn't really being mined to make lead pipes. They mined galena for the tiny amount of silver it has and got tons of lead from that.
Because all of human progress is just building on top of what we've been able to find, then using those things in combination, and those things, and so on until you get to super evil chemical manufacture. Seems like an arbitratry line?
(For what it's worth I cook a lot and buy very little that isn't a 'raw ingredient', I'm not saying this from a 'let me have my ready meals' sort of perspective.)
More relevant to the sokoloff's point is the fact that extraction of lead was not done for the sake of plumbing, it began thousands of years before lead pipes were invented. There wasn't a point where people were weighing the harm of extracting lead against the utility of plumbing; the lead was essentially a waste product of the silver industry.
Cigarettes is interesting, growing tobacco certainly help some poor communities, it had cultural significance etc. Not easy.
I'm guessing you are also a supporter of sarin gas, depleted uranium munitions, white phosphorus, zyklon b, and agent orange.
The discovery (then in its white allotrope) of phosphorus was critically important for many things down the line - not sure we could survive without knowing about that element.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80 BCE – c. 15 BCE) wrote:
> 10. Clay pipes for conducting water have the following advantages. In the first place, in construction:--if anything happens to them, anybody can repair the damage. Secondly, water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome.
> 11. This we can exemplify from plumbers, since in them the natural colour of the body is replaced by a deep pallor. For when lead is smelted in casting, the fumes from it settle upon their members, and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs. Hence, water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes, if we want to have it wholesome. That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life, for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels, yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Boo...
Pliny speaks of the "noxious and deadly vapour" (sulfur dioxide) of the lead furnace (XXXIV.l.167; there was, in fact, a four-fold increase in atmospheric Pb pollution during the Greco-Roman period); red lead (minium) (XXXIII.xli.124) and white lead (ceruse) (XXXIV.liv.176) as poisonous, even though both were used as a medicine and cosmetic; and the power of sapa (and onion) to induce an abortion (XXIII.xxx.62). Dioscorides cautions against taking white lead internally, as it is deadly (V.103). Soranus recommends that the mouth of the uterus be smeared with white lead to prevent conception (Gynecology, I.19.61). Galen (On Antidotes, XIV.144) and Celsus (V.27.12b) both provide an antidote for poisoning by white lead, and Vitruvius remarks on the pernicious effects of water found near lead mines and its effect on the body (VIII.3.5, 6.11).
The earliest description of acute lead poisoning (mid-second century BC) is given in the Alexipharmaca of Nicander, who speaks of "gleaming, deadly white lead whose fresh colour is like milk which foams all over" (II.74ff). The poet describes a frothing mouth, asperity of the tongue, and dry throat, together with dry retching, chills, delusions, and overwhelming fatigue. But if lead poisoning had been endemic, it presumably would have been remarked upon at the time. And yet there is no mention of the fact until early in the seventh century AD, when Paul of Aegina, a Byzantine physician, described chronic lead poisoning (although he does not associate its symptoms with the disease). "I am of the opinion that the colic affection which now prevails is occasioned by such humours; the disease having taken its rise in the country of Italy, but raging also in many other regions of the Roman empire, like a pestilential contagion, which in many cases terminates in epilepsy, but in others in paralysis of the extremities, while the sensibility of them is preserved, and sometimes both these afflictions attacking together" (Medical Compendium in Seven Books, III.64).
It's also a favorite target of the sugar lobby.
Really, what needs to happen most of all, is to let special interest out of nutritional research completely. Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely.
You're going to study autism in lab rats? (Only recently has anyone come up with markers, and even then the predictive quality is suspect.)
Artificial sweeteners have been labs tested many times, but not for autism.
How can you ever prove something doesn't have any negative impacts? You're trying to prove a negative. Would you be willing to further delay a new medication that can help people today, but may have some averse effects for a subset of people far in the future? This is what we went through with the mRNA vaccines. We have to look at the tradeoffs. If banning aspartame means we may potentially prevent some cases of autism, but at the definite cost of large increases in obesity, would that be worth it?
Aspartame and added sugar would both be scrutinized in this hypothetical future where we are bit more cautious.
The answer is to probably ban aspartame if there is good reason to believe it is harming us, and/or tax sugary drinks until their negative externalities on society are paid for.
Please. This is quite an exagarated claim.
You make it sounds like mustache twirling villians going around and intentionally poisoning people.
If a tiny increase in the amount of amino acids found in the body already can cause autism, that's really really surprising, to the point where it's much more likely that this result was just due to randomness.
If you take autistic children and test a hundred things that their parents were doing, one will probably come out statistically significantly higher, just by chance.
They asked about 350 mothers to think back and recall if they drank diet soda daily during pregnancy. Of their children, 235 have since been diagnosed with autism and 121 were in a control group. From their data, the kids with autism were about 3x more likely to have moms who remembered consuming daily sodas during pregnancy.
The best you can say is they have a hypothesis (inkling?), and much more research is needed.
There is literally billions of dollars to astroturf the safety of aspartame.
I don’t know if there is a correlation with Autism, but it does not seem completely inert either. I also have a hard time believing statements like - it can only do the following things to the body. We were told similar things about mRNA (can’t travel outside the localized muscle area, destroyed by the body in x many days, etc.) that may have been true in a lab, but was not in practice.
Do you have a source on that?
not restricted to the injection site: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
Perspective time.
Global life expectancy is higher than it has ever been at any point in history and many of these materials you want to be "cautious" about (is any level of "cautious" ever cautious enough?) are involved partially or heavily in providing those health advances.
If there's anything we should be "cautious" about it's glib interpretations of subtly complex statistical studies.
I'm also not sure how much the smash-the-system/anti-capitalist hand-waving helps.
It cost exactly $0 to not drink poison
Good luck using your personal consumer choices to avoid Pesticides in aquifers and breathing Tire dust in the air.
It cost 0 to not drink and drive
It cost 0 to ...
It's not a cost issue, it's a "we're slightly above average IQ monkeys, but we're still fucking monkeys" issue, we're easy to use and abuse, companies know that
You're sneaking free will in the back door. In your view, "victims" don't have free will but big companies do.
Weirdly enough the money is available when it generates more money or to lobby against regulation...
Do you think people wake up one day with the bright idea of becoming obese and dying at 45 of heart issues ?
You can only make decisions between the choices you're being provided, and if half of these choices are engineered to be addictive, on a global scale you're fighting a losing battle
> is more responsible for people making bad choices than engineers at facebook.
But... they're the same mentality, don't you see it ? It's been studied and developed by marketing people
That's good but have you considered that this is motivated reasoning? I.e. you think you have free will but all those shlubs making bad choices don't. This casts you as a hero with special insight into various oppressive "systems" to which you are apparently immune.
It would be better to judge people for their bad decisions. Although this strikes many people as cruel, judgment involves respecting other people's agency and creates a culture that encourages people to take responsibility for their lives and make better decisions. To put it another way, people don't intend to be obese...but they also don't believe they have a choice, and that's not good.
Finally, I think you seriously overrate the ability of behavioral sciences to do anything useful. What you're really pushing is the always-seductive idea that shadowy forces manipulate the masses through quasi-magical powers.
You can say “companies should do more research on the consequences of this chemical before releasing it”, and you can also say “people should do more research on this chemical before drinking it”.
Second, these people spend their entire life mastering the art of manipulating large populations into consumerism and induced demand. Humans have limited bandwidth, and it wouldn't be most people's specific domain knowledge to spot the mechanisms and the resist them.
And, calling back to point one, even if you know the mechanisms of propaganda, you are not immune to propaganda.
It has nothing to do with “propaganda”. Are people just supposed to magically know the long term effects of every chemical they ingest? And if not, why are companies supposed to magically know it? Do companies have a crystal ball that normal people don’t have?
Try arguing in good faith for a bit it really isn't that hard. I'm not asking them to see the future, I'm asking them to study their products so we don't discover decades later that "oh snap lead in gas was bad!?", "Oh what, breathing asbestos isn't so good in the end?!"
They have unlimited money when it comes to finding new ways to make more profit but as soon as we talk risk assessment and management the money printing press runs dry, how convenient
Do you think the top behavioural scientists at facebook working on how to make you more engaged don't know what they're doing ? If so why are all people in the loop not giving phones to their kids, not allowing them to access social medias, &c. ?
https://www.independent.ie/life/family/parenting/the-tech-mo...
It’s a very strange möbius loop of self-contradiction.
> Evil Companies pull off one decades-long too-secret conspiracy after another
Famous conspiracies such as DDT, asbestos, freon, lead in gas, lead in paint, madcow disease, &c.
Regardless, they have a point. Our system is driven by financially motivated, and subsidized action. Most people are just trying to live their lives with minimal interference and are not sampling for sources of psychological manipulation. Self-generated or external-to-self originated. In point of fact, metacognition is not last I researched on it, a universal thing for everyone.
I do not exclude myself from this population of non-samplers either, but as a tester, I am also well acquainted with the fact that testing costs and nature selects to minimize costs. Just as bacteria will abandon costly resistance mechanisms to a stressor given sufficient time removed from a stressor, so too do we in terms of our mental safeguarding behavior.
And yes if you're on this forum chances are you're above average, if you're college educated you're already above average, it's not that hard really. I think you're overestimating what the average human is and underestimating what the top minds of google &co are being paid millions for.
> I suppose it's pure selflessness that leads you -
What about lobbyist ? The tobacco industry is run on goodwill too ? After all cigarettes were advertised as improving your lung capacity, why don't you smoke ? Don't you want better lungs ? Why would you want kids not to smoke ? Are you anti freedom ?
It's not, it is against fundamental animal/human instinct and hormonal response developed during evolution: eat as much as you can when you have access to food.
Don't you think it's a bit less simplistic maybe ?
probably more Americans spent time physically working, and not sitting 10h/d in office and another 2h in the car commuting.
> Especially rich folks who have access to infinite amount of food
I am sure there are obese rich, also rich likely in general have more willpower to control their instincts, and that's partially how they become rich.
Meanwhile, the investors and executives of the companies that produced these compounds are quite wealthy.
Ironically all of the rich people migrating to waterfront property may be what finally gets us past where we are today with waterway pollution and global warming.
Hang on, that would be awesome. No survelliance, everyone has identical gear with added features like gait protection and infared protection. iPhones built in, with HUD on facemask interior. Heating/cooling pads in clothing. Ventilation as required, optional battery pack addon.
Oh gosh... star wars and space marines aren't meant to be a pratical solution to societal problems....
Do you avoid food containing Disodium Inosinate? Why or why not? What about Agar-Agar? What about Calcium Propionate? Cyclamate?
If a well-dressed person states it loudly and confidently over the tv/internet/etc, it's probably a lie.
The people were naive. It's not like they had malicious intent. 'Don't hate lazy people - they did nothing'
Manslaughter is a criminal charge. As is criminal negligence.
And quite apart from facing criminal charges, the folks who introduced lead in the gasoline, produced microplastics and PFAS, and more all have the kind of wealth that gives them raw economic and political power and with it, the ability to do continued harm.
See also the Cuyahoga catching on fire. Water burning is quite a poster child.
It is worth noting that this probably had more to do with the awful state of the city sewage system, so the water was well known to be contaminated. Luckily we've improved somewhat with sewage (I think).
Although anecdotally I've had a local lake closed for weeks at least due to toxic red algae blooms related to run off from farms (I believe it's fertilizer runoff that's attributed to these blooms)
that's be my guess why, assuming there's any correlation whatsoever.
The study does suggest that the effect is caused by one of the metabolites of aspartame, methanol. Methanol doesn't only come from aspartame in diet soda (and for that matter, aspartame isn't only found in diet soda, any chance your parents used aspartame to sweeten their coffee or tea?) The paper points out that methanol may also come from processed fruit and vegetable juices. (It's also found in liquor, particularly moonshine, but the paper doesn't mention this.)
*That 200+ vs 100+ ratio in the groups kinda implies they went looking for this specific connection rather than it just popping up as they did various regressions, and if you're looking for a specific connection it's easy to accidently-on-purpose pull in people who already believe in that connection which can color their recollection.
The mothers of 54 non-autistic boys were surveyed, and 7.4% of them had at least one diet soda per day.
The mothers of 67 non-autistic girls were surveyed, and 17.9% of them had at least one diet soda per day.
The mothers of 140 autistic boys were surveyed, and 19.3% of them had at least one diet soda per day.
The mothers of 28 autistic girls were surveyed, and 10.7% of them had at least one diet soda per day.
They did some analysis that was supposed to control for income, education, ethnicity, and geographical location to get the odds ratios and confidence intervals that other people are commenting.
Just look at the sneaky "linked" word in the title. Technically they aren't lying, because they don't say "caused". But the whole press release is written to encourage you to misinterpret it as "caused". Don't be fooled. The FDA would laugh if you submitted this kind of data for a drug.
Many autistic people feel that Autism Speaks is a hate group. Even among those who don't feel quite as strongly, it's still often considered a problematic group. Possibly akin to groups that used to want to "cure" homosexuality.
Among other things, Autism Speaks was a big advocate of the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism [1].
[0] See the funding statement in https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3772.
Of course, it isn't the actual bevarage but one or combination of its compounds.
What else did you expect?
There’s a whole lot of other indicators that could be linked with soda drinkers (education, income etc), so unless the only variable was diet vs not, consider me skeptical.
Who remembers what they had to eat yesterday? What about last week? What about over the course of 8 months, *literally years ago*? What, you don't remember how much soda you drank in 2020? That's weird. All 300 study participants here probably have better memories than you, I guess.
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Many very different things fall under the label of science, but not all of these things are the same. The confidence we can have of our models and understandings in particle physics is very different than the confidence and understanding we can have with vaccine trials is very different than the confidence and understanding we can have with nutritional epidemiology. Personally, I think the last falls outside the realm of science [1], and closer to "here's something I thought of. There's some data attached too. Misled yet?"
Aspartame has been exhaustively studied since the 1980s! The odds you _don't find_ correlations between consumption of a novel compound (that has the most explicit healthy-user bias you could imagine) and medical conditions is 0.
(A reminder that is _not_ a pro-aspartame comment. I don't drink diet soda (unless I get snipped by Diet Coke), or much regular soda for that matter. But a single, *non-randomized, retrospective, recall-based (!!!!) study* making it to the front page is really surprising to me.)
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Edit: even a cursory skim of the paper should totally disqualify this from the front page, IMO, *even from nutritional epidemiology standards.* The paper does not even attempt to account for "for maternal overweight/obesity and diabetes, maternal mental health, and other potential confounders in our study." The classic: let's imply a casual variable, ignore the rest of the other possible ones, simply b/c "no covariate data were available."
But the article doesn't seem to measure any of the relevant variables to determine this.
the data is bad since women are often not diagnosed for autism, as their neurodivergence blends in already
Waiting for replication of the study is practically a necessity before trying to make any sweeping policy decisions.
At the same time, a cautious person may decide that there's a probability that this correlation is both true and also a causal association. And in caution, stay below the one drink per day cutoff in the study, or even go to zero, when pregnant. Already, there are many guidelines on for for pregnant women that are based on abundance of caution rather than full knowledge of definite risk.
TL;DR the scientific literature is not a textbook, it is the active working document and communication between scientists as they are working through the self-correcting scientific process. And the scientific literature should treat any single paper as a collection of data that is incomplete, may not be fully understood, and may have faulty conclusions attached to the data. It takes time and further evaluation do fully understand natural phenomenon. The rare paper that conclusively proves something is the exception, and in the end it is only proven when it has been replicated by others.
I am autistic. I have/experience the fever effects, so my symptoms significantly improve when I have a fever (yes, for the curious HN reader -- the exogenous compound that emulates this effect in susceptible individuals is sulforaphane, that is an entirely original post on its own, however.)
Based on my experience with the fever effect, I would rate being neurotypical, or experiencing neurotypicality as significantly better than autism by itself. I can't really quite elucidate how constantly overwhelming it is not having extra information filtered out, which I believe is the central cause of many downstream autistic effects. You can use models of cPTSD to show how many other symptoms (actively avoiding eye contact, perseverance, 'special interests ' [ mine has been deep learning, and also, ironically, deep learning too ;P I have contributed some impactful open-source work and will keep doing so as long as I can keep up funding to maintain the lifestyle ]) derive from this core. After all, from an information theoretic perspective, there needs to be some unifying set of 'information' unifying a cluster of underlying symptoms in a disorder, the alternatives are just far too unlikely, especially with the specificity in such a high dimensional symptomatic space, (which is, btw, I believe, _the_ principle behind Occam's razor).
Several things in pregnancy that I've seen plausibly proposed as tied to autism: acetaminophen (!), _brain inflammation from viral infection during pregnancy_ (!), glyphosates (), general inflammation during pregnancy.
The for glyphosates is that glyphosate itself is used as a wedge by oftentimes more-unethical companies to prove its use is 'safe'. The compound itself breaks down in about 1-2 weeks -- extremely short, and is metabolized well by animals. Why is a problem?
Aminomethylphosphonic acid. This is a byproduct of glyphosate, and is the main compound of concern. It, unlike, glyphosate, appears to build up in soil and is damaging in parts more than .5 ppm (!!!!). It appears to potentially be metabolized by bacteria, but still is an issue. Studies have shown toxicity, but compared to nearly every other compound out there that I've looked at, there is an uncomfortable dearth of studies about it, especially considering how ubiquitous it is. I remember hearing some rumble about Monsanto applying pressure to studies showing negative effects of Roundup, but I can't speak anything concrete beyond that.
People will often talk about the benefits of autism when I bring up the negative sides of things. I think everything is on a spectrum of 'positive' and 'negative' experiences. For example, some poisons actually are anti-inflammatory in some parts of the body, some beneficial medications are toxic in different ways. They're just compounds, and autism is just a syndrome of being. My brain is autistic, not my soul.
My experience has improved much in meditation, and in getting to a place where my sensations, thoughts, and beliefs, and, well, everything that one would consider what I "am" is just a series of experiences to me. Which is a different thing that living life as a person associated with a particular personality, set of emotions, or set of sensory experiences. I am still finding myself in the process of this change, but there is a certain euphoria in being able to just experience things as they come in, and then they go without infinitely looping, or causing pain. That is one of the big negatives to autism, everything is loud, especially pain. And due to increased neuroplasticity, the threshold for developing a syndrome of constant hypersensitivity/fatigue/pain/etc is much higher.
My lifestyle is adapted as much as possible to how my brain works, and I'll keep doing so over time. It is hard when very basic things like washing the dishes can be overwhelming (sensitive to residual soap, sensory aspects of washing, change in activity has mental cost), or going from apartment to the outdoors for errands (change of environment, _so much noise_ (even with earplugs, a screaming child can take an extra 30 min - 1 hour to destim from), eye contact depending on the day, potential to miss an item but overwhelmed by lists). So the best adaptation for that is adapting lifestyle to still meet my basic needs (socialization, etc) while minimizing overwhelming costs.
Not all of the above can be overwhelming, but the reason the above can be overwhelming is the 'unknown' aspect of it, oftentimes. Because my brain doesn't automatically filter information, I have to constantly do it manually. Think having to manually pedal a bike for 4-5 hours, of course you'll be mentally fatigued!
I am hoping to make some progress on finding a med+lifestyle combo to free up my mental budget for more things I want to do. At some point I might move out of sabbatical to a part time job, but I think that depends upon whether I can _sustainably_ do that while enjoying a life outside of that (previously it was 24/7 survival mode -- crash on Sat/Sun, keep going Monday. Burnout recipe!).
One of the upsides is that I'm one of the best out there in the niche I'm in (neural network training speed + simplicity). As you can see, few things really do come for 'free', _especially_ where there's some Pareto front involved. ;PPPP
So, needless to say, it's an important issue. ;) ;')