Why prefer something that you know is definitely bad for you over something that maybe is but more likely benign?
The possible artificial sweetener issues implied by the article ("may be poison") are ultra scary.
40% of the U.S. is overweight, 11% are diabetic, etc etc. There is no such magnitude of a problem due to erythritol or artificial sweeteners.
If "too many calories" were easy to solve we would not have an epidemic of it.
Now, implementing this is hard or maybe impossible for many individuals, I'm not denying this. The solution is simple, but for some it is not easy to implement.
It’s just that some people have mental addictions or whatever problems that makes them want to overeat or not exercise enough. But the solution itself is simple and straightforward.
Also, you forget that sweeteners still cause an insulin release and some research shows that their effect on metabolism might be even worse than sugar itself because, being zero calories, they do not contribute to the sense of “caloric satiety,” so for the same volume of food your body has released more insulin.
It’s convenient for companies to claim sweeteners are safe and sugar is the devil, but consumers should take such a claim with a grain of salt. There is no silver bullet, and dietary sciences is a field of bad science and enormous commercial incentives to lie. A good rule of thumb is whatever we have consumed for thousands of years is likely not that bad. Sugar in quantities should be avoided, but elsewhere you have claimed that it is bad for you and I have to disagree with such hyperbole, compared to something we’ve eaten for less than 50 years created by food lobbies.
From Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories:
> “To attribute obesity to ‘overeating,’” as the Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer suggested back in 1968, “is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’”
Obesity etc are hormonal issues. It is not simple calorie-in, calorie-out math. I have been on a diet, off-and-on, for 15 years, and I can notice craving for carbs increase after "slipping/cheating" by consuming sugary food. While I generally manage to avoid reaching for snacks, I can only imagine how people can struggle with this, more so when others around them are stuffing themselves with food rich in sugar.
- If I consume more than 2,300 kcal per day, I gain measurable weight in weeks.
- If I consume less than 2,100 kcal per day, I lose measurable weight in weeks.
- Physical activity has little effect on my weight change.
- Age has little effect on my weight change.
- When losing weight, I must work out to retain strength. Moving around an extra 10 kg takes strength that is lost when the weight is lost.
In my case, any hormonal effects are secondary to the above. I've changed what I eat over the years and my weight didn't change if I consumed the same kcals. There are likely subtleties I am missing, but eating less works for me. YMMV
I know of diabetics who cannot give up on sugary treats with full knowledge of the consequences of their behavior, people who have seen others in the family lose eyes, limbs, kidneys and life to the disease. Not a single one of them will consume a block of cheese or butter if one were to set these in front of them. Or a plate of diced carrots or cucumbers. It is always the chocolates and chips and the cookies and the ice cream and the biscuits.
Over the last two decades, I have been 128 kg at my peak. I have also been 93 kg. I have noticed that carbs absolutely wreck my ability to maintain weight. You lose the will to say no to food.
I am in India. Festivals start in September and continue for the next few months. It is an unending caravan of carb-heavy food. I can very easily put on 10 kg in those months. 70K excess calories in 2-3 months is not a lot. This does not happen with high fat food, because you cannot eat those in large quantities. They have high satiety value.
> Physical activity has little effect on my weight change
The human body is insanely adaptive. The natural impulse, I believe, is to conserve energy. For different people, it will respond to continuous over- and under-eating as well as over- and under-exertion in different ways.
People should do what works for them.
I sometimes binge on cheese and nuts or peanut butter when I'm not at my best, but even when I do this for weeks, and I'm talking an extra 2000 calories in a day which is easy with those things, I haven't gained weight (fat). I don't feel as good and I don't recommend it, but I think it's safer than eating sugar if one is going to binge. I had a couple years 10 years ago where I ate sweet things most days and did gain noticeable weight (fat). So it's not like I'm genetically not going to gain weight either.
As an aside, physical activity might not affect weight change as much but it will affect the fat/muscle ratio.
The extra 200 calories would be more of the same, just bigger portions. I record everything by weight when eating at home, and have a good feel for calories per unit weight, but double check often. Cheeses are about 100 cals per oz, breads or snacks with little fat (pretzels) are 80-100 cals per oz, nuts are dangerously calorific at 160-180 cal per oz. Peanut butter is the same. I eat nearly everything, both good and bad for me, but keep track of calories and it's been working for me. I do eat ice cream occasionally, with full awareness of how much. My calorie limit is a target, but I enjoy life. The only thing I've eliminated completely is alcohol.
> Physical activity has little effect on my weight change.
Those two statements appear to be contradictory?
I've switched to the keto diet for other health reasons --I never had any weight issues, and my weight didn't change-- but I never feel as hungry as I used to. But eat a square of chocolate and the hunger comes back.
This happens with sugary drinks, but also with solid food, such as cake.
Sure, once you see your weight go up, you can adjust. But adjusting is difficult, and I think this is a contributing factor to the weight problems people have.
I think people get hung up on finding sugar substitutes when the root is eating sweet things constantly. You don't have to eat and drink sweet all the time. Many modern diets (not just n. Amer) are totally overindexed on sweetness.
Drink water, eat good foods, enjoy a bit of jam on your toast or whatever here and there and get lots of exercise and you'll be fine. You don't need aspartame and xylitol and stevia to be healthy.
One issue is that if you're buying drinks there are very few intermediate options. I don't mind a little sugar but if I'm traveling and stop at a store the drink options are usually 97% super sweet (artificial or otherwise) and 3% zero sweetness, with nothing in between.
No it is not. The overwhelming quantites are bad. But this applies to almost any food.
To a starving child in a impoverished nation? Sugar would be great.
Context is important.
What does this even mean?
People have very different diets and food habits across the world and I mean is similary developed nations.
Most people with healthy eating habbits will have problems with a tea spoon or two of sugar in their tea or coffee.
If your blood sugar is low, then eating/drinking stuff with a high glycemic index can be very good for you. For instance after heavy exercising.
You might think it is obvious, but people like simplistic things, so "sugar is bad for you, mmkay" is what most people believe nowadays rather than having a basic understanding of such fairly simple aspects of nutrition.
It’s just bad in general. Yes, there are corner case, like athletes, where in moderate quantities it is useful.
Don't get me wrong: In most of those cases eating something else would be better, but that does not make sugar 'bad in general'. Nutrition discourse does not benefit from such bad and misleading vilifications and simplifications. It causes people to think in 'silver bullets' and distrust science and government when that silver bullet turns out not to work.
Ok, let’s say “worse than other foods” then, if you dislike the word “bad”.
Getting hit on the foot with a sledgehammer is bad for you. But it's better than getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer. Using "better than" here does not make the former good for you, however.
That's how language works. It is important to be precise, for earlier mentioned reasons.
My point was, I do not see a contradiction between the two, hence I do not understand why you are stating is cannot be “bad”.
White meat is not as good as an egg. It "bad" too by this logic.
White bread is not too far away from sugar, like alcohol, actually. Replacing white bread with something full grain would also be something "good" for your diet – although in some places it's really hard to find full grain bread that doesn't taste like parchment, so maybe a not-so-low-hanging fruit ;)
Finally, I think I am compounding the refined sugar and the sugar lobby itself, who has been pushing for decades that what is bad for health is fat, whereas study after study proved otherwise.
There is definitely a healthy/beneficial/useful dosage of sugar. Especially while exercising, sugar is not stored and is used as litteral fuel by the body.
Kefir and kvass - do have alcohol for example. Low ammounts but it is there.
Not to mention dry red wine and such. Drink a bottle day a you will have problems. Drink 100ml every now and then and you will be the same as before.
For instance, they disrupt your metabolism, so equivalently sweet amounts of sweeteners cause more weight gain than sugar. (Due to increased hunger vs. eating nothing, decreased metabolism and decreased calorie burn.)
The study in the article isn’t surprising at all. Links between nutrisweet and migraine headaches have been well understood for a long time. It’s not surprising other similar chemicals have similar negative side effects.
There’s no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners (other than diabetes, but even then, gaining weight from the sweeteners is a problem if the diabetes is weight related.)
The most credible meta analyses (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429) only show positive or null effects compared to equivalent sugar amounts.
Sugar is still the cultural default; artificial sweeteners are something you explicitly choose due to health concerns (worried about being or becoming diabetic, or overweight, or worried about sugar being unhealthy in general, or about the mood/motivation angle, etc.).
I imagine becoming overweight itself is linked to anxiety both ways, as eating or snacking is a common reaction to stress, a way to relieve it in the moment.
If only. Check the ingredients (usually near the bottom) of some energy drinks some time. Monster, NOS, AMP, half of the Rockstar flavors, Bang, and so on will add sucralose to the normal versions with sugar or HFCS in them. It's hard to find one without artificial sweeteners. This is especially crazy as Monster already has their sugar-free (Ultra?) line. They're forcing normal people to consume sucralose, and it's awful. Luckily Red Bull seems fine for now (Blueberry flavor is really good). Guru in its original flavor only also has no sucralose, but I think all the other flavors have it. I first noticed this trend one of the times they brought back Mtn Dew Game Fuel and it tasted disgusting. Now I'm scared of any new drink, or that they'll ruin one I like.
Also, I think water is fine, caffeine pills are fine, I know some people are against energy drinks, but I don't think that's a reason to ruin them (preempting replies saying not to drink them at all). I've been drinking black coffee all week but I still have some Blueberry Red Bull in my fridge for when I feel like it.
(Full disclosure: I consider red bull very high risk of being unhealthy, considering the stuff they put in, the artificial flavours, etc. – sucralose is a mere detail to me)
Ultimately, sweeteners won me over, and I've been "on" them for the past 12 years. For me it's a simple matter: I dislike pure water, and have been drinking black tea instead ever since I was a single-digit aged kid - but I also can't stand unsweetened tea. Sweeteners save me from ingesting stupid amounts of sugar through drinking some 10 mugs of tea every day, as I used to long ago.
What? No they haven't. This is just straight-up misinformation.
Aspartame is completely safe to consume. It's not carcinogenic, it doesn't mess up your metabolism, it doesn't do anything. At worst, it can cause some people stomach upset in large quantities.
We can't just lie and make things up because they sound intuitively true. Zero-calorie sweeteners sound too good to be true, sure. That doesn't mean they actually are, that's not science.
> There’s no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners (other than diabetes, but even then, gaining weight from the sweeteners is a problem if the diabetes is weight related.)
"There's no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners" -> proceeds to list valid reasons.
Yes, people use these for weight control because they're very effective and safe. Also: it's impossible to gain weight from artificial sweeteners like Aspartame. There's no calories in them, what would make you gain weight?
I know multiple people that have had problems on the "other" list, and a few people have mentioned their own problems on this list.
According to the summary, the studies showing those side effects are universally on the list due to lack of funding on follow ups, not due to the effects disappearing when the studies were repeated with larger sample sizes.
Witholding funding and spamming inconclusive results is a common playbook for industries that are trying to slow down scientific consensus. The tobacco industry did the same thing to get an extra 50-100 years of "cigarrettes are probably good for you" to be the public consensus, despite scientists calling for additional study.
> "cigarettes are probably good for you"
The difference is Tobacco is a Group 1 Carcinogen - definitely carcinogenic. Along with processed red meat and alcohol.
Red meat is group 2B, possibly carcinogenic. This is also where Aspartame resides. Which means there are SOME studies showing carcinogenic effects, and other's which do not. Please note that the studies which showed carcinogenic effects in Aspartame used many hundreds or thousands of times the dose found in human food and beverage. The great thing about Aspartame is that it's not actually zero calorie - it's just very potent, so we put next to nothing in our food and beverage.
For all intents and purposes, Aspartame is completely safe. When compared to sugar, Aspartame is much, much safer. I mean, it's not even close.
Let me consume it everyday.
Radium, too was deemed safe to suck on. Thalidomide, perfectly safe. Hormone replacement therapy, perfectly safe...
The safety of these (Thalidomide, HRT) were also backed by studies.
I find safety studies very suspect unless there's years of experience, especially if there is money to be made by someone.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it -- Upton Sinclair
Small as in "the alternatives are most likely worse" or as in "you are consuming already a dozen other things that are known to be more problematic by an order of magnitude and you should focus on them instead".
"Years of experience" means an increasingly larger population has been subject to use of the compound. It may take 10's of millions of exposures for the problems to become clear enough to elicit action.
A surprising number of drugs (and food additives) have been used for decades before their adverse effects were recognized and the offenders removed from the market.
We should regard initial or early claims of safety as preliminary statements. Indeed skepticism is warranted. Ongoing monitoring/reevaluation is necessary. Certainly utmost caution is needed before allowing products to be widely used.
The unsafe reputation came from a flawed study of far older, women.
IMHO the inventors should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The few times I've looked in depth at the studies about the safety of a particular thing, I have found that each study has at least one obvious major flaw that makes the study not necessarily support the conclusion. You could have 10 such studies or 100 and say that lots of studies show that X is safe or Y is dangerous, and the conclusion could be wrong.
This especially common when there's a financial incentive for the people doing or controlling the study to get the result they want, which there usually is. Or for studies that don't get the desired result to not be published.
Some of the same scientists who were paid off by the tobacco industry to lie to the public about the safety of cigarettes are now working for the food industry to convince the public that food additives are safe.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...
More skepticism than usual seems reasonable.
Such as?
It is however not "lots of studies" saying that opposite, that smoking is in fact ok for you. Which was the claim that was made. It would be fantastic if someone could point me in the direction of all these "lots of studies" where these studies are credible, indepedent scientific studies showing that smoking was ok for you.
Most safety studies are paid for by entities that will profit if the study shows the thing to be safe. It's important to look at incentives.
This is also a very different problem to solve. Especially in the face of regulatory capture.
An alternative model, where the owner/proposer owns complete liability of dangers and damages proved in the future, is also not fully satisfactory.
I think some shared ownership of liability is the best solution but no business will touch it.
Privatisation of profit socialization of liability is where things are at.
> I think you are right and the Upton Sinclair quote might have cut too close to home.
I think you might be taking the wrong lesson from GP. While they were agreeing with you on the substance, they were pointing out that your way of presenting your point was undercutting your message.
Your response comes off as roughly, "Yeah, the truth hurts," which continues that tonal problem GP was talking about.
There aren't any really long term studies of it to show what other effects it might have, though.
Oh also it’s super lethal for dogs.
I only chew gum if it has xylitol in it.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsn3.2904
Doesn't immediately taste horrific like Stevia.... I'm glad the fashion for shoving that in everything has passed.