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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

"Don't consume chemical sweeteners" is a pretty good rule of thumb. Almost all of them have been suspected of adverse effects of one sort or another.

Of course sugar has its own issues as well.

These days I use very little additional sweetening in any of my food. It's hard to avoid though, it's added to a lot of foods (check ingredients) and even fruit such as apples and oranges has been bred to be sweeter than it naturally was 100 years ago.

Biggest difference-maker for most people is probably sweetened drinks. Avoid soft drinks (diet or regular), sweetened tea or coffee, sports drinks, and most packaged juices.

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> "Don't consume chemical sweeteners" is a pretty good rule of thumb.

I assume you mean non-caloric sweeteners, since all sweeteners are chemicals including table sugar (sucrose).

While suspected, few have any proven negative impacts. AceK and aspartame are probably the most well studied and the evidence is equivocal. It's probably in the end net neutral.

Some even have benefits, including most sugar alcohols being good for oral health. Erythritol has antioxidant effects in animal models as well.

This 5+ hour podcast on Aspartame is as fascinating as a podcast on the topic could be: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/podcast-episode-116/

For a very small but non-negligible amount of population aspartame is a severe migraine trigger.

last time I drank half a can of diet soda, about 2 months ago, I was in pain for a week because of aspartame. every single time I take it's like that. it's the same with most artificial sugars.

Sugar alcohols have other benefits like not dramatically raising blood sugar levels.

also:

> Xylitol is a sugar alcohol that is found in small amounts in fruit and vegetables, and the human body also produces it.

Everything you ingest is a chemical except light and heat.

Okay, sure, but there's colloquial definitions which in a culinary context mean "industrially-synthesized compound meant to mimic the culinary properties of a commonly consumed chemical", here trying to mimic sugar.

Xylitol may exist in nature and be produced by our bodies, but per this article foods with it added contain 1000x the amount we would ordinarily produce.

Perhaps a better rule of thumb would be "for a given chemical, keep your exposure/consumption within an order of magnitude of what would have been typical for a human pre-1850".

That sounds great if you think that humans had access to perfect diets in 1849.

I suggest to you that is not reasonable.

"For a given chemical, avoid doses known to have a high probability of harm" is, I think, what you actually want. Then we can talk about known vs suspected and what qualifies as high probability -- impact on years of life expectancy is probably a good initial measure.

There is no Golden Age in the past. There may be a Golden Age in the future, but it's not at all certain.

They didn't, but food was much less processed then. Of course, a lot of it was also spoiled/rotten, possibly contaminated, diseased, etc.

From the standpoint of the diet that human evolution is adapted to, you have to look back to hunter/gatherer diets. Meat, fruits and vegetables, and frequent periods of near-starvation. I've sometimes wondered what a diet of one or two big meals of meat per week, with the occasional handful of nuts and berries on other days would be like.

>I've sometimes wondered what a diet of one or two big meals of meat per week, with the occasional handful of nuts and berries on other days would be like.

Assuming your general health and all, if you were careful in your nutrient profile, there's no reason you couldn't try it for, say, a week and and see how you felt.

I think you misread me a bit there. I'm not saying that human diets in 1849 were perfect, by any means.

> "For a given chemical, avoid doses known to have a high probability of harm"

is exactly what I do not want. I don't want to assume everything is safe until it's shown otherwise, after I've eaten it for a decade.

I want to assume things are poison, unless they are shown to be safe. Things eaten in quantity in 1849 generally meet that criteria, minus a few things we now know to be more dangerous than thought back then.

When introducing some new compound meant to replace something in the diet like sugar, it seems much more reasonable to assume that its use may have side effects, until satisfactorily proven otherwise.

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