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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Can we wait for verification before we get to "omg we're drinking poison!!!1"? As far as I know, aspartame dissolves to aspartic acid plus phenylalanine, both normal amino acids already found in the body.

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.

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I agree. This is way too small of a sample size and it's quite a big leap to see causation from the mild correlation they found.

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.

I mentioned this on the last aspartame thread, but there is a significant correlation between obesity and the introduction of aspartame in Diet Coke. Unfortunately, the data was inconsistently taken in the late seventies through early 90s, but something happens between the last data from the early 80s to the first data from the early 90s that caused obesity rates to accelerate as never before seen (if anything, severe obesity was declining going into the 80s). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/obe...

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.

I can believe a correlation with obesity, but the mechanism for autism isn't necessarily the same. I don't think the psychological mechanism of "I had a diet coke, so I'm entitled to have some more dessert" applies equally to having autistic children.

> 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?

There have at least been studies that have found mRNA after 15 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/) and 28 days (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apm.13294) and other that show spike proteins months after vaccination.

not restricted to the injection site: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...

The study is also self reported over something that happened years back. It's hard to take it seriously, also it'd mean diabetic mothers would be a lot likely to have male offspring with autism with aspartame being a common substitute for sugar

Diabetic mothers are significantly more likely than non-diabetic mothers to give birth to children with autism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181720/

> These associations do not prove causality, but taken in concert with reports from earlier studies of increased prematurity and cardiometabolic health impacts among infants and children exposed daily to diet beverages and/or aspartame during pregnancy, our findings raise new questions about potential neurological impacts that need to be addressed

Either way, we won't know for a long time. I say we just lean our shoulders into this whole thing and watch the chronic illness rates climb with shrugged hands and turned heads because of just how dern complix all this stuff is that all of the beautiful minds in the world are hard at work on.

The alternative is to go live in the woods, because god knows how many other items in our houses give us a 1% higher chance to have an autistic child.

Yes, unfortunately, there is no way to study and predict what chemicals harm human health, and no regulatory bodies that could stop those products from being sold in public marketplaces. I mean, who in the world could have predicted that sugar free soda would be horrible for your health? Sadly, such technology simply doesn't exist, so we will have to go on and hope for the best, the only alternative being the woods, as you rightly point out.

Hard to take your comment seriously when you conveniently leave out aspartame's third metabolite, methanol.

Around ~25mg of methanol (35/294 molar ratio in aspartame, 200mg of aspartame in a can of diet coke) will be produced from the metabolism of aspartame, which is around 10x less by weight than, say, apples or peppers.

That is irrelevant - the point was that they excluded one of the metabolites, not about whether any of the metabolites are safe or not.

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