The challenge you have here is that aspartame isn't just one of most widely studied substances in the food chain, but that it's also one of the most widely and vigorously consumed. People drink a lot of diet soda; a lot of people drink it to the exclusion of all other liquids. So it's going to be tricky to get the epidemiology to match up with the claim here: if aspartame is meaningfully carcinogenic (meaning: more than by the trace amounts all sorts of other things in the food supply are, from small quantities of mold due to spoilage to acrylamide forming in almost anything we cook), we'd expect to see a pretty obvious effect in case rates.
The article mentions a French study showing a "slight" increase, over 100,000 pts, in an observational study that used self-reporting to control for other risk factors. I can't find it; has anyone else?
kortex 669 days ago [-]
The other big challenge is from a SAR (structure-activity relationship) point of view, it's completely benign looking from just about any way you look at it. It's two peptides, and a methanol (which yes, gets converted to formaldehyde, but so does fruit pectin). There's nothing zany about its structure, it's not particularly lipophilic, no receptor bindings of note, no spicy reactive groups, no alkylators, no intercalators, no redox sites. If it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't quack, doesn't waddle, doesn't fly, doesn't hang out in ponds, and hasn't shown ducklike activity over 50 years, what are the odds it's secretly a duck?
jeffcox 669 days ago [-]
So you're telling me there's a chance?
Warnings like these quickly hit the Prop 65 problem - the notices are so ubiquitous you go blind to them.
kortex 669 days ago [-]
Prop 65 is especially dumb because it doesn't make producers say what the risky ingredient(s) are or how potent it is. I got some fish sauce from the Asian grocer which has a p65 warning. What is it? Are there heavy metals in the fish? Nitrites? Is it smoked and thus has trace PAH? Did they find PFAS? I have no clue, but it's goddang fish sauce and so potent I put like two drops in my stir-fry (which would itself probably warrant prop 65), so idgaf.
When you put the exact same warning on food as lead-containing special solder, cadmium paints, and other very obvious "don't eat this" industrial materials, it loses all efficacy.
xpe 669 days ago [-]
These notices are ineffective to say the least. Saying “everything causes cancer” is pointless because it ignores the key questions of “how often?” and “with what severity?”
boxed 669 days ago [-]
Or maybe they are extremely effective, because the purpose is for the companies who sell REAL cancer inducing chemicals to muddy the waters so they can keep doing business.
xpe 668 days ago [-]
Product warning labels are indeed subject to all manners of nonscientific meddling, often with a barely disguised goal of protecting a powerful industry. History is not usually kind when evaluating these kinds of compromises made to appease powerful corporations.
And now, a short conversation between two people to illustrate the rhetoric in play:
Person 1: “Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!”
Person 2: “Except the top three players in that industry are quite profitably killing people.”
Person 1: “But how can the industry recover if we act too drastically?”
Person 2: I will quote what you said just above: <<Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!>> You were just saying that the market is adaptable! It seems like you are conflating the idea of protecting bad actors with the idea of setting the conditions for a healthy market. A healthy market does not kill its consumers.
david-gpu 669 days ago [-]
And if something was truly dangerous then I hope they would ban it outright rather than stick a label on it. Especially when they have been sticking those same labels everywhere.
arthur2e5 668 days ago [-]
The IARC lists do not answer these two questions on their own either, but with the "evidence level" groups there's at least some separation from alcohol down to aspartame. These levels are still insufficient for at-a-glance risk assessment: putting mustard gas and alcohol both at level 1 can send you into a bit of a spin until you realize what the grouping is about.
colordrops 669 days ago [-]
You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.
xpe 669 days ago [-]
Common writing, even from well-regarded sources, is often unnecessarily vague wrt statistics.
Claim: we would benefit by building a culture where basic probability ranges are expected and used.
Idea: Serious publications could:
A. Set basic guidelines for talking about probability estimates; something akin to what you see in government or business intelligence publications. For example, maps terms to ranges:
“highly likely”: > 90%
“likely”: 70% - 90%
“somewhat likely”: 50% - 70%
…
B. Update their editorial standards to not allow pure vagary around probabilities and impacts.
Could authors write more quantitatively? At the levels of the top 100 publications, I’d guess that 80% could, with the help of research and editing staff.
Would some readers be scared off? I’d guess than 80% of a college educated audience could handle it. The rest might complain, but could level up with a little peer pressure.
Would articles become more rigorous? Over time, I’d hope most would. Shift the expectations and make the vocabulary less forgiving to vaguery and fudgery, and I think the incentives point in the right direction.
dcomp 669 days ago [-]
I thought there was already common terminology for probability of side effects [0]
Very common = greater than 1 in 10
Common = 1 in 100 to 1 in 10
Uncommon [formerly 'less commonly' in BNF publications] = 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100
Rare = 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000
Very rare = less than 1 in 10 000
Frequency not known = frequency is not defined by product literature or the side-effect has been reported from post-marketing surveillance data
Perhaps, but… How many publications have any such guidelines? Make them public? How well do they follow them?
dsign 669 days ago [-]
I work with readers and editors sometimes. They get swollen and puffy when they see numbers, though they will swallow their pain if it’s a scientific article. Otherwise they will complain loudly and the editors will use their red pens a lot.
With that said, I consider your idea has merit and should be implemented.
xpe 667 days ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. To these folks I would ask: what about numbers is problematic? To the degree that it has to be with current reader perceptions, I understand and empathize.
But in terms of where we want to go, we can do better. Great writers care about precision, and wisely chosen numbers and ranges are able to provide that. It may be appropriate to situate them in footnotes or endnotes, depending on the context. But the numbers matter.
dmckeon 669 days ago [-]
Explore the Associated Press "AP Stylebook" (pay-walled, sadly),
and propose a mapping to them. It would take a few years to
get accepted and more to propagate throughout the working press.
Maybe it's because I'm tired but I don't see what that has to do with what I said. Did you reply to the wrong comment?
xpe 668 days ago [-]
Perhaps :) Point taken. Re-reading, it looks like I skipped a transition sentence from the comment to what I wrote. (Or maybe the parent comment got edited? Not sure.)
> You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.
I agree with the comment as written, though it strikes me that virtually no mainstream publications use writing that clarifies or quantifies these kinds of indirect relationships.
I see a lot of intellectual laziness or dumbing down. Two categorical errors happen often:
(A) writing “everything is connected”. This can be true in some sense while also being useless. The more interesting framing is to ask “to what degree” and under what modeling assumptions.
(B) Writing about various linkages without clarifying probability and impact dilution.
The connecting idea in my head was something like this: when most publications talk about cancer they tend to lack even a basic statistical language.
Backstory: Having hundreds of interactions with ChatGPT, which is trained on much mainstream writing, made this interaction pattern obvious and tiresome.
Another way of saying my complaint: It feels like otherwise intelligent people hit a barrier where they start speaking vaguely. They pretend like this is the best we can do. It ideally isn’t; we have extensive scientific and statistical studies. There is no reason why we as a culture have to accept such statistical phobia as quality writing.
kortex 669 days ago [-]
Sure, but the more links in the chain, the more control you need in order to prove the causative agent. In the absence of direct experimental evidence (give animals aspartame, they get cancer, which we haven't seen), you need to rely on huge observational studies. And these are exactly where you run into all kinds of confounders, like
Patient has standard American diet and is overweight but not obese -> that leads to sleep apnea -> chronically tired -> they develop a diet Coke habit -> slight increase in cancer risk. What's causing the cancer here, the diet, the adiposity, the sleep apnea, the lack of quality sleep, the soda itself, the effect of soda on teeth leading to gingival inflammation, or the aspartame in the soda?
alfiedotwtf 669 days ago [-]
What? That's the first I've ever heard of this... dang
tptacek 668 days ago [-]
I had fun reading this comment to my son (early-career biochem) pretending I was coming up with it as I went along. "Does it have any alkylators? NO."
hilbert42 668 days ago [-]
Right, I'm more worried about Sucralose with all those chlorines hanging about.
nostrademons 669 days ago [-]
I remember reading back in the early 90s a number of studies that showed elevated risks of certain brain cancers from aspartame. The evidence was pretty strong - it wasn't conclusive (hence the "possibly" qualifier in this label), but it was enough that I was personally convinced. The link between aspartame and cancer is much stronger than the one between cyclamate (banned in 1970 but legal in the EU) and cancer. My parents never let me chug Sweet'n'Low packets the same way I chugged sugar packets because of it.
IIRC, the only reason aspartame was not banned was because saccharine had just been, and if you banned aspartame there would have been literally no artificial sweeteners on the market. That is no longer the case, with sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Coke Zero and other diet sodas), Stevia, sorbitol, and several other sweeteners now on the market.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
The claim you're making here is that there are studies that present strong evidence that aspartame causes brain cancer, but that they've been suppressed this long because otherwise there'd be no artificial sweeteners, a concern we're saying IARC would have had, and that as a result, in 2023, the only way we can move aspartame into Group 2B --- the possible carcinogens nobody takes seriously --- is an observational study in France showing a barely significant increase in cancer rates.
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Sucralose (Splenda) has been linked to cancer quite convincingly last week. It's the only artificial sweetener that I used, and now there are no options except sugar alcohols. Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.
annexrichmond 669 days ago [-]
Source?
Perhaps this is outdated but this page says otherwise: “range of studies have found no evidence that sucralose causes cancer in humans”
I think this is the source of the more recent concerns around sucralose.
nostrademons 669 days ago [-]
Would be interesting to see sugar linked to cancer too. Alcohol already has been (with a much stronger link than aspartame).
Frost1x 669 days ago [-]
Sugar being a readily metabolized energy source is almost undoubtedly a cancer source because increase in energy results in increase in cellular production one way or another, which leads to higher risk of mutated cancerous cells, period. Hence the link of obesity to cancer as well.
The fact is that anything that increases the amount of you or the rate of you over time over the bare minimum needed for survival is an increased cancer risk... there are other causes like exposure to radiation that actually damage cells and so on as well.
Ultimately the question isn't if there's a link to cancer, it's how much something is increasing your risk of cancer relative to the alternatives. I suspect artificial sweeteners are in general for most less risk than consuming vast amounts of sugar, gaining lots of weight, becoming inactive, and increasing their cancer risk that way but who knows. Obviously if you ommit everything but consume the bare minimum sugar you need for survival you'll have a lower risk... good luck with that in modern society and diets
jiggywiggy 669 days ago [-]
Diet drink consumption gone up, but doesnt seem to have made a dent in the obesity crisis.
Your point is only valid if it actually lowers sugar and other carbs intake. Which isn't the case for most people.
Next to that. With diet drinks people drink more since they feel like they can get a way with, some do with sugar variants as well, but seems like more people binge drink diet versions which could lead to higher exposure relatively.
The has been processing sugar for millennia, these chemicals are pretty new.
tracker1 669 days ago [-]
Most people drinking diet soda aren't limiting other carbs... and we've had about half a century of people thinking that "low fat" diets are the solution and snacking on low-fat, but high carb foods.
More people need to stop consuming garbage that wouldn't have been considered food 250+ years ago.
valval 669 days ago [-]
Eating fruit and honey alone for anything “sweet” has worked great for me. Never get any cravings for anything else. It seems to me like these things truly are the carb sources we are “meant” to eat.
tracker1 669 days ago [-]
Worth noting, that fruit would generally only be available a few weeks out of the year, and natural varieties not nearly as sweet as what's in the stores. Honey was also in much more limited supply. We consume a multiple of fructose and glucose of what would have been consumed just a couple hundred years ago.
valval 668 days ago [-]
Highly dependent on where your ancestors have lived, but in my case they’ve probably got along with meat and potatoes since no fruit really grows here. Maybe my body is somehow less prepared to handle fructose than someone with roots in south-east Asia, but I digress.
tracker1 669 days ago [-]
Fructose often in concert with Glucose is generally less readily metabolized (only by the liver) and can have the same/similar negative effects of heavy alcohol consumption on the body.
chrstfer 669 days ago [-]
Pretty sure it's been conclusively shown that sugar overconsumption does cause cancer, but i think its more because of metabolic issues than directly causing a certain cell type to become cancerous.
fellowniusmonk 669 days ago [-]
Yeah, I looked as well and couldn't find anything, limiting the search to this last weel pulled up this very thread, with all the dietary disinformation and active bad actors call me skeptical until at least google has a result.
tjohns 669 days ago [-]
> Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.
Do you have a citation for that? Google search is telling me the exact opposite, that it seems to reduce cancer growth.
astrange 669 days ago [-]
That's not a good reason to eat something either - reducing cancer growth typically means something is poisonous.
hgomersall 669 days ago [-]
Or it's an immunomodulator in some sense.
maksimur 669 days ago [-]
Any way (or source) for you or anybody else to back up this claim?
astrange 669 days ago [-]
It's obvious. That's how chemo works, by poisoning the cancer before the rest of you.
Similarly though, antioxidants are often sold as a health food but can promote cancer because they benefit the cancer more than the rest of you, and some of them directly shut off chemo drugs. There's plenty of evidence of that one.
elif 669 days ago [-]
My Peruvian climbing guide turned me onto stevia which doesn't fall into any of your categories. It is really a wholesome plant extract instead of something chemists have invented which leads me to have confidence in its (so far as we know) lack of carcinogenicity.
selcuka 669 days ago [-]
> It is really a wholesome plant extract instead of something chemists have invented which leads me to have confidence in its (so far as we know) lack of carcinogenicity.
This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy [1]. A naturally occurring substance is not automatically less carcinogen, or harmful, than a manufactured one. Coffee is associated with elevated risk for bladder cancer. Cycad trees are known to be highly carcinogenic. Mycotoxins (mold) are toxic and carcinogenic. Aflatoxin from peanuts is found to be carcinogenic.
I'm not saying that stevia is not safe, but safety has nothing to do with being natural or not.
I don't think it's a fallacy to conclude generally that consuming plants which coevolved with humans is safer than consuming chemicals which are completely exogenous to any stage of the human body's development.
It would be a fallacy to suggest that one group or the other were unconditionally safer, but I find no dilemma in generalizing that the human body is more capable of processing plant-based substances. Just like I would generalize that consuming plant-based substances is healthier than consuming paint. Sure you can nit pick outliers, safe paint or oleander or whatever, but the heuristic is still of value.
Mordisquitos 669 days ago [-]
I have no reason to believe that stevia increases the risk of cancer, but I'm afraid that arguing it is likely to be safe because it "coevolved" with humans is basically falling into the naturalistic fallacy with extra steps.
For stevia to be arguably safer due coevolution with humans, the following would need to be true:
1. There is a selective pressure for stevia to not increase the risk of cancer in humans.
2. There is a selective pressure on humans to not have an increased risk of cancer from consuming stevia.
In other words, it is firstly to argue that a stevia plant which had a tendency to increase cancer risk in humans would be significantly less likely to reproduce. This effect would be hard enough even if the hypothetical carcinogen were to be otherwise selectively neutral, but it could have a selectively positive pressure if it were an essential hormone or defence against insects, pathogens, competitors, etc.
Secondly, it is to argue that if stevia were potentially carcinogenic, then humans that were susceptible to its effects were significantly less likely to reproduce. This fails on two levels. First, consider that even in the cut-and-dried cause of cancer that is smoking, lung cancer is still extremely rare among young smokers. Lung cancer patients are virtually always well past their reproductive age, meaning that even if a genetic mutation to be immune to tobacco were to appear (or indeed it may well already exist) then said mutation still has no selective advantage with regards to the consumption of tobacco. Second, even if a hypothetically-carcinogenic stevia[0] could exert selective pressure on humans to become unaffected by it, then that effect would only have taken place on the populations which consumed significant amounts of stevia over generations and not humanity as a whole.
[0] Which I insist, I don't believe is the case.
buu700 669 days ago [-]
Selective pressure doesn't need to be perfectly foolproof to be valid.
Humans are pretty observant, and have decent odds of noticing over time when particular things correlate with health problems. A plant known to cause health problems is less likely to become and remain a dietary staple. A plant that isn't a dietary staple misses out on a wealth of opportunity for propagation.
I think you're also hyperfocusing on the issue of evolution. The point isn't that stevia is a plant which merely exists, but rather its longevity in human culture[0].
What you're saying makes sense for random plants picked up in the woods; less so for plants that have been consumed by humans since antiquity. By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.
A small long-term increase in cancer risk is really hard to notice.
And lots of cultivated plants have downsides.
> By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.
No, that's a strawman. Nobody is suggesting that "random research chemicals" should be considered safe. And extracting random chemicals out of plants would also be dangerous!
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Tobacco coevolved with humans. So did areca nuts. And bracken ferns.
Natsu 669 days ago [-]
I believe that more when humans have had a long history of consuming the thing without noticeable problems. And even then, sometimes traditional ways of preparing it turn out to be rather important:
It makes me wonder if some of the things like, e.g. the supposed success of the Mediterranean diet, are due to bits of food culture like this that we've lost or never fully understood.
KMag 669 days ago [-]
> I don't think it's a fallacy to conclude generally that consuming plants which coevolved with humans is safer than consuming chemicals which are completely exogenous to any stage of the human body's development.
An optimal organism doesn't imply an optimal environment.
fitness(org, food) = -2 org^2 + org * food + 7
If evolution had optimized fitness by adjusting "org" while keeping "food" constant, that wouldn't imply holding "org" constant and changing "food" wouldn't yield improvement.
Evolution doesn't optimize the environment for the organism. Evolution performs stochastic gradient descent, improving the organism for the environment, which can easily get stuck at global optima. More importantly, it improves the organism for the environment/food/etc. The idea that the food is optimal for the organism gets the improvement mechanism backward.
669 days ago [-]
berniedurfee 669 days ago [-]
Though, there are many plants that coevolved with humans that are toxic in various ways.
XorNot 669 days ago [-]
Cocaine is a natural plant extract as well.
elif 669 days ago [-]
Actually he was recommending stevia to chew with coca leaves at the time. As I said, this was high altitude climbing in Peru where that is a cultural norm.
happymellon 669 days ago [-]
It's also the cultural norm in Hollywood.
Doesn't make it a good idea.
DontchaKnowit 669 days ago [-]
yeah and it aint that bad for you until you extract the pure cocaine from it. the leaf is fine, I think
zafka 669 days ago [-]
And of course copious use of cocaine is known to prevent cancer.... Now the way it prevents cancer is probably not optimal......
KMag 669 days ago [-]
Appeal to nature[0] is a poor mental shortcut. There are tons of natural carcinogens, notably aflatoxins and cycacins.
Clothes, refrigeration, and Pasteurization are all extremely recent on an evolutionary timescale. They're all artificial and extremely beneficial to human well-being.
Also, the idea that something is good because we've evolved with it gets the mechanism of evolution backward. Even if it were true that evolution's stochastic gradient descent had found the global maximum 15k years ago (instead of perhaps approximating a local maximum), that would imply no changes to the human would improve human reproductive success. It would not imply that no changes to the environment (such as available foods) would improve human reproductive success.
It is, but IIRC for a nonsensical reason. They're lumping it in with a completely unrelated sweetener, erythritol, because some products on the market combine the two sweeteners. Using pure stevia is completely safe, as far as any research I've seen would indicate.
Liquid stevia is my go-to sweetener for most purposes, or if I'm baking I'll use a stevia-monk-inulin mix that measures 1:1 for sugar.
More recently, I've been using freeze dried miracle berries as a sweetener for low-sugar fruits. They essentially convert sour taste signals to sweet, which works great for strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, kiwi, passion fruit, and citrus. Also has a bit of an effect on blackberries and dragon fruit, and starfruit is on my list to try.
Related LPT: most of the fruits I eat are frozen with a few minutes of thawing at room temperature. Easier to store, easier to prep, and turns out to be pretty similar to Italian ice.
Cthulhu_ 669 days ago [-]
Frozen fruits are usually fresher and cheaper as well, win-win.
elif 669 days ago [-]
That is a conditional recommendation pending the formation of actual guidelines.
kelnos 669 days ago [-]
By that logic, burning tobacco shouldn't be carcinogenic either.
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zhte415 669 days ago [-]
I wouldn't propose apple seeds as a sweetener simply because they naturally grow inside apples.
rowanG077 669 days ago [-]
Cyanide is also one of those "wholesome plant extract". Not entirely sure why that would even qualify as an argument.
Nursie 669 days ago [-]
Stevia is nasty though!
I can’t stand the taste, I’d rather go without than have a product with stevia.
valval 669 days ago [-]
Why use artificial sweeteners in the first place? Honey is a great sweetener.
Broken_Hippo 669 days ago [-]
Sure, in the right things - but I wouldn't want the taste.
Besides, honey doesn't really do what the artificial sweeteners does. "Just use honey" is horrible advice for diabetics, for example. It isn't going to help folks that are looking to avoid carbs. And so on.
Realistically, if you aren't supposed to be eating added sugar, honey isn't going to do the job either. It is just a different form of sugar.
valval 669 days ago [-]
Carbs are essential for good health and any sort of exercising. Why would someone want to avoid carbs entirely?
Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave. Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
542354234235 669 days ago [-]
>Why would someone want to avoid carbs entirely?
People aren't literally eating zero carbs, they are minimizing their carb intake for various reasons (like being diabetic). With almost any variety in your diet, you are getting enough carbs to function. People "avoid carbs" because with our modern world of abundance, it is too easy to over consume carbs. If you are diabetic, honey is more likely to put you in an early grave than artificial sweeteners.
>Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
Just because something is "artificial" doesn't mean bad. And rarely is one thing universally "better". it depends on the situation. Again, a diabetic looking for a soda-like drink is looking for different things than a vegan looking for dessert recipes.
>Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave.
Source?
valval 668 days ago [-]
> Just because something is "artificial" doesn't mean bad.
I’d be willing to bet in more than 50% of cases it does.
> Source?
Didn’t WHO or some similar organisation just start officially recommending against them? I haven’t actually read any of the research on this, I’ve just taken my advice from people who have. My personal source is an argument from nature along the lines of “if we didn’t need artificial sweeteners for 300,000 years, we probably won’t need them now”.
Broken_Hippo 669 days ago [-]
Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave.
I mean, good luck avoiding them and liking chewing gum. Or good luck if you are diabetic and want a soda from time to time.
Folks on keto diets avoid a lot of carbs, and diabetics tend to watch them. Artificial sweeteners help folks do this. Honey has similar woes to actual sugar, and if you are using the artificial stuff to avoid the effects of real sugar, honey is no solution.
Choosing between the two - artificial or "natural" - is really just a question of risk. You aren't in the position of considering that a soda might kill you. Or trying to explain your diabetic grandmother with memory problems that she simply can't have soda at all: I'm not sure giving an artificially sweetened drink really is going to be what puts them in an early grave.
valval 668 days ago [-]
I suppose you can exclude metabolically unhealthy people from the span of my advice. To be fair, the diabetes was probably caused by not following my advice in the first place too.
CyberDildonics 669 days ago [-]
Honey is sweet because it has sugar in it, the same reason people would be using an artificial sweetener in the first place.
valval 669 days ago [-]
Sure, it just doesn’t have the health disadvantages of the alternatives. It might even be good for you.
CyberDildonics 669 days ago [-]
It has the health disadvantages of sugar, because it contains sugar (fructose). Don't be fooled by sugar in a different form.
valval 668 days ago [-]
Evidence [0][1] suggests that the fructose in honey acts differently from fructose in table sugar, and seems to have some unexplained metabolic benefits.
Sucralose saw a recent study on effects of DNA that are more compelling than Aspartame. Acesulfame-K messes with pancrease and insulin signalling, Stevia has other detractors iirc... etc. etc.
In the end, it's all a mixed bag, and who knows if it's actually better or worse than consuming more than 25-40mg of fructose or alcohol in a day. There are massive corporate interests in all directions with deep revolving doors in regulatory and research bodies. It's effectively impossible to know.
Is it a variety/strain of food that was considered "food" 250+ years ago? Probably safe. Is it a new strain that has a multiplier of hystamine or other negative hormonal responses, or in a consumption that is a multiple of 250+ years ago? Probably not safe. That's my take.
delian66 668 days ago [-]
Why 250+ years?
tracker1 668 days ago [-]
Crops as industry. Most of the changes are more recent. But selective breeding for appeal en mass is not the same as for nutrition.
mohaine 669 days ago [-]
Sweet'n'Low doesn't contain aspartame. It is Saccharin.
berniedurfee 669 days ago [-]
Wasn’t saccharine one of the first to be shown to be a likely carcinogen?
quags 668 days ago [-]
I remember warnings in the 90s on labels that saccharine causes cancer in high doses in lab mice on gum - over time ace k / Splenda and aspartame were used instead.
tamrix 669 days ago [-]
Sadly the marketing just works too well and now you're a conspiracy theorist for questioning the narrative.
Spivak 669 days ago [-]
What marketing? Everyone I know who drinks diet soda myself included basically assumes we're getting cancer from it eventually. It's like the most common meme about it.
systemvoltage 669 days ago [-]
??? I’m hearing this first. Know a lot of people who drink Diet Coke.
agos 669 days ago [-]
at least in my part of the world (southern Europe) the Aspartame causes cancer meme has been floating around since the 90s at least
quags 668 days ago [-]
I drink diet soda sometimes and have a strong idea it is unhealthy so I limit intake. I switched from full sugar soda which has its own risks. I tend to now drink flavored selzter with out sweeteners although there is a question what natural flavors may be. I also imagine the same risks apply to hot dogs and processed lunch meats that diet soda has.
wkat4242 669 days ago [-]
Yeah I drink a lot of Pepsi Max. I just love it especially in summer. I've drank it for decades.
Would this make me worry a lot? Not really. I have worse health risks like being overweight, pfas etc.
The "if it was that dangerous we'd see the effect" is a pretty decent argument IMO considering it's been heavily used for almost 40 years.
AnomalousBean 669 days ago [-]
Well, aspartame has been shown more recently and by studies not funded by the food industry to impair glucose tolerance in obese people. And soda cans are lined with plastic, so there's your PFAS intake.
checkyoursudo 669 days ago [-]
Have you seen the maps that show where there is PFAS contamination in ground water and surface water? You would be doing reasonably well if soda cans were the primary source of your exposure to PFAS.
Also, here in Germany, I can get my aspartame in glass bottles, fortunately.
wkat4242 669 days ago [-]
Yeah I'm sure it's bad but all things are "bad for you" these days.. I just don't really care that much.
I mainly drink my sodas from PET bottles by the way because cans cost twice as much per litre over here.
peteradio 669 days ago [-]
What effects from the last 40 years might be missing attribution?
throwawaymaths 669 days ago [-]
Atmospheric nuclear testing
labster 669 days ago [-]
Not in the last 40 years, it was all before then.
throwawaymaths 668 days ago [-]
radioactive fallout never has long-lasting effects on the places they fall.
grecy 669 days ago [-]
Cancer rates are rising rapidly. Soon 50% of people will have cancer. I’d say something is going on
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Aren't you a Google search away from seeing that this is the opposite of the truth? I'm asking because I didn't look very hard, but I'm on IARC's dataviz site right now looking at a graph of cancer rates --- all causes excluding non-melanoma skin cancer --- sharply down since the '50s (no surprise, tobacco), and also down since the 1990s. You can find cancer sites that break that trend, like bladder cancer, but (for instance) that's down in the period between the introduction of aspartame and the mid-2000s.
Moreover, if you specialize on GI cancers, it looks like you see the opposite of what you'd expect if aspartame was a potent carcinogen: the rates are lower in places where Diet Coke is more prevalent.
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but I really think this is a result some people on message boards just want to see.
kelipso 669 days ago [-]
Do you want to post that link if you're on the site? I'm guessing you're looking at cancer mortality rates rather than cancer diagnosis rates. Because while the former has decreased since 1950 due to improvements in treatment, I'm pretty sure the latter has risen since 1950.
tptacek 668 days ago [-]
I closed the tab since last night, but if you Google "IARC dataviz" you're probably going to get it as the first Google search result. It's a site IARC runs itself, with historical data visualizations.
kelipso 668 days ago [-]
Right it was as I thought. Cancer incidence rate was increasing since 1960
* Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data). This is no where near 50% of people "having cancer".
* The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 442.4 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 cases). (.442%)
* The cancer death rate (cancer mortality) is 158.3 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 deaths) (.158%).
Regardless, these numbers are very scary.
XorNot 669 days ago [-]
Those numbers are context-less. Cancer is what happens to you if something else doesn't kill you first.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
Exactly this. The prevalence of cancer in my family is pushing 100%. However, the onset is almost always in the mid/upper 80s to early 90s. So it's not really that cancer is a problem for my family as much as it seems like living long enough to get killed by it is.
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Those numbers have been about the same in the last two decades. The numbers have always been that high.
mvkel 660 days ago [-]
This just says we're living longer, not that cancer is suddenly becoming an epidemic.
Live long enough and you will get cancer.
Nathanba 669 days ago [-]
40% is definitely near 50%
mtmickush 669 days ago [-]
"will have" infers a future present though. 40% will have at some point in their life is substantively different than 50% having at a single moment in time
hunson_abadeer 669 days ago [-]
Something is bound to get ya. As we get better at managing other diseases and risks, cancer - which is seldom truly curable - gets a larger share.
The progress on other fronts really is staggering. Forget pre-industrial times: global child mortality is half of what it was in the 1980s. The same is true for vehicle deaths in the US.
uejfiweun 669 days ago [-]
Well, I'd also say that as society continues to get more complex we're exposed to more and more previously-unknown substances, chemicals, and compounds. Kids used to play in the DDT mist sprayed by trucks. How many DDTs are there right now that we don't know about? I'd guess a whole lot.
rnk 669 days ago [-]
Ultra and highly processed foods are terrible for us. Consuming so much more sugar than in nature seems to be bad for glucose intolerance. I love bacon but I try to resist ever having any. Don't buy meats with nitrates.
We do have way more cancers, a big reason we know about is our food choices. We don't even know the impact of hard things to measure yet, like the impact of all these things on our gut biology. It's not a new discovery that eating a lot of sugary foods leads to greatly increased diabetes, and now we are learning more about how artificial sugars have their own impact. So basically, it's increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are not good for you too, maybe in different ways than "natural sugars".
jorvi 669 days ago [-]
> I love bacon but I try to resist ever having any. Don't buy meats with nitrates.
That is no way to live.
In general, you should think about risk management, not exclusion. Have your bacon as a bi-monthly treat, and splurge for some high quality bacon at the butcher.
I remember seeing a video of a talk where the host asked who was managing their health by going partially or fully vegetarian. Lots of raised hands. Then he asked who was sitting or standing still for extended amounts of time. Even more raised hands, including almost all of the previous group. And that’s a higher cancer risk than meat eating :)
xpe 669 days ago [-]
In the name of sanity, let’s all avoid “biweekly” and “bimonthly”. Just say twice a X to be clear. Pretty funny how the dictionary claims to be largely neutral by only reflecting the cultural ambiguity. I want an f-ing opinionated dictionary that says: avoid this ambiguous word!
antod 669 days ago [-]
If you mix the definitions, biweekly and bimonthly can even be the same timeframe!
tech2 669 days ago [-]
Or, since we have a word already, we could use that... Fortnightly. Biweekly needs to mean, specifically, twice a week.
xpe 668 days ago [-]
I like that. And we could use halfweekly to mean twice a week. And halfmonthly to mean somewhere between 14 and 15.5 days.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
It is not increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are bad for you, and the cancers linked to nitrates are also down significantly in the US over the last 40 years. That's certainly not because people are eating less bacon, or because grocery store bacon has less nitrates in it ("nitrate-free bacon" is a fraud).
erfgh 669 days ago [-]
You're seeing half the picture. Cancer is, in the large majority of cases, a preventable disease. It is caused mainly by environmental factors, i.e. the modern way of a sedentary obese lifestyle.
rowanG077 669 days ago [-]
A Cancer maybe preventable. Cancer in general is most certainly not a preventable disease. The only thing you can do is stall it. There is no lifestyle that ensures you will not get cancer.
bruce511 669 days ago [-]
Its worth noting that we all die of something. When I see stats that rank cause of death, I'd love to see it adjusted for age.
It would be interesting if death rates had a cut-off. Don't tell me that 50% die of heart disease, rather exclude everyone over 70, then tell me percentages.
For most of my life the largest causes of death are accidents and suicide, but equally the age-group either the highest rate are over 75s.
Sure there ways to improve both quantity, and quality, of life. Smoking pretty obviously reduces both - its a good habit to quit, or not start. Chugging DDT is bad for you. But linking foods to longevity, where there is unconvincing evidence, isn't helpful to me.
Especially when that food has significant quality-of-life benefits.
Ultimately we all die of something. A death "saved" here, is a death "gained" there.
robjan 669 days ago [-]
We're getting fatter and sitting in a chair all day. It's pretty well known that lack of exercise is a significant cancer risk.
willis936 669 days ago [-]
Does this correlate with life expectancy?
gonzo41 669 days ago [-]
We're better at seeing cancer now. Maybe people used to get small cancers that just went away. Which sounds insane I know! But you can be perfectly health, get a body scan, find a lump of something doing nothing and then you're on the big C train all of a sudden.
stopping 669 days ago [-]
Citation?
cheekibreeki2 669 days ago [-]
And if sweeteners were at play (sucralose also has scary new research) I couldn't see why the food industry, the paid off gov regulators and insurance companies would cover this up and short the involved companies.
copperx 669 days ago [-]
The latest figures point to 1/3 of people in the world will die due to cancer, and the statistics always have been close to that. Where are you getting the 50% figure from?
cookiengineer 669 days ago [-]
I don't think it's a decent argument.
You are using the "I was at the train station and I was never mugged there, therefore mugging never happens at train stations" extrapolated argument.
People still think that smoking doesn't cause cancer, even when they are in the hospital because of not being able to breathe.
People still deny that climate change exists because of that one bought study in the 60s.
People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world, even though it is proven that this increases cancer rates 2x as much.
As the devil's advocate I'd argue that people will only change their behaviour if a person within their personal influence radius dies because of it.
If they just read about it, they don't care.
freshpots 669 days ago [-]
"People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world..."
What biological cleaning process are you referring to? How does it prevent bacterial growth in the water distribution system?
cookiengineer 669 days ago [-]
This [1] and [2] are a pretty good primer on how Kläranlagen are built in Germany where we use a biological water treatment process and are recycling 96% of sewage water.
The remaining ~4% (the Schlacke) usually are used as fertilizers for farming or are burned in biogas energy plants. The latter happens when the quality is not good enough or the sewege plant doesn't have a stage 4 filtration system.
The German wikipedia entry is actually also pretty good [4]
Admittedly I don't read German, but I read the translated version and ... it looks very much like a typical sewage treatment plant in the US? What's unique about it?
Not adding any chlorine is an interesting choice in any case, you can start out with perfectly pure water and still end up with contamination along the way to your tap. A tiny amount of chlorine prevents that, and it evaporates quickly after the water leaves the tap.
freshpots 664 days ago [-]
That's a sewage treatment plant treatment process. We don't typically drink treated wastewater, but some places recycle the water after a intensive purification process. Chlorine in drinking water treatment is used for disinfection and a small amount is added after treatment to keep bacteria from growing in the distribution system. Your information is not really relevant but interesting.
tomcam 669 days ago [-]
Microscopic chloroforms. I’m pretty sure they’re related to midi-chlorians.
</joke>
freshpots 669 days ago [-]
Thank you for telling everyone that you are not even remotely involved in water treatment, especially for those that are. No matter the treatment method, absolutely purified water can encounter pathogens. The water treatment process uses various methods to make water safe for consumption but the distribution system requires a residual for any biological contaminants that can enter, or be harbored within, and low concentrations of free chlorine (<2 ppm) provide that while carrying very little risk. Especially compared to most risks in modern life, like being in a passenger vehicle. Safe drinking water, partially due to chlorination is the greatest public health achievement of humanity so far. You are spreading misinformation.
tomcam 669 days ago [-]
It was low-quality humor. I figured the midi-chlorian reference gave it away, due to the high density of Star Wars fandom on this site. Sorry to trigger you. I added a joke indicator, and I hope your blood pressure will decrease.
It was obvious. Don't waste everyone's time talking way outside your level of expertise and then trying to make jokes when you're called out. It's juvenile.
happymellon 669 days ago [-]
It was CookieEngineer who made the original comment about something to do with biological cleaning of water.
You may have caught that, but it was Tomcan who made the "joke" comment. I just read it as they responded to your question, but added the terrible humour to imply that they didn't take it seriously.
tomcam 669 days ago [-]
Man it seems like you’re having a rough week. I hope you can enjoy your weekend! Cheers.
freshpots 664 days ago [-]
Thanks and I was, I'm sorry that I acted like that.
valec 669 days ago [-]
ok, but if 10,000 people go to the train station and 2 get mugged instead of 1 at the bus stop, is it not fair to say it's still pretty safe?
wkat4242 669 days ago [-]
It's not that argument.
It's more like "1 million people were at the train station and were never mugged there".
cookiengineer 669 days ago [-]
I doubt that you asked and verified the statements of 1 million people before you made that comment.
that_guy_iain 669 days ago [-]
There has been 1,300+ studies in to aspartame. Pretty much all of them trying to prove that aspartame is bad for you. The fact, they've consistently tried and failed to prove a risk after so much testing yet continue to say it may be harmful just leads me to think this is more of a story line being pushed. It is impossible to prove a negative, you can't prove it can't give you cancer. And any attempt to prove it can cause you cancer fails. Not just 100 attempts, not 500, not 1000 attempts over 1,300 attempts have failed.
If someone tried to prove an airplane design can fly 1,300 times and all it did was come off the ground for a centimeter for half a second, would you say "this airplane design can possibly fly"? I doubt any reasonable person would. But with aspartame there is an idea in people's heads that it's harmful and should be avoided therefore people continue to go with the theory that even though they've failed to prove it's harmful 1,300 times they may do so in the future.
theshrike79 669 days ago [-]
My anecdata is that at one point Aspartame and/or Asesulfame K did something to my gut flora.
Now both or either one (can't say which) give me gas. And not funny gas but "this is a war crime" -gas.
Sugary drinks don't do this. Also this is how I discovered that Scandinavian Pepsi started replacing sugar partially with Aspartame. Took me a while to read the label and find out. I switched from Pepsi to Coke (still full sugar) and the issues went away.
Even though a substance is studied extensively, there might still be adverse effects that people don't attribute to it. I'm not afraid it would give me cancer but bioweapon levels of gas is something I can't live with. Sadly it's getting harder and harder to find drinks that don't have Aspartame in it...
creamyhorror 669 days ago [-]
Might be this paper from Mar 2022, which got me to reduce my aspartame & acesulfame-K consumption when it came out last year: Artificial sweeteners and cancer risk: Results from the NutriNet-Santé population-based cohort studyhttps://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
n=102,865 adults were followed for a median 7.8 years, using 24-hour dietary records collected via web including some photographic validation. Key results:
> In particular, higher cancer risks were observed for aspartame (HR = *1.15* [95% CI 1.03 to 1.28], P = 0.002) and acesulfame-K (HR = *1.13* [95% CI 1.01 to 1.26], P = 0.007).
+13~15% raised cancer risk in high consumers of aspartame and acesulfame-K (controlling for many factors, including sugar intake, BMI and weight gain, physical activity, etc.).
> In particular, no difference was detected between the categories ‘higher artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake below the official recommended limit’ and ‘no artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake exceeding the recommended limit’
So the raised cancer risk was statistically the same for both categories (though possibly slightly worse for artificial sweeteners). No real win for sugar there (but we also have to look at their performances in the area of CVD and diabetes).
(I will say that the 100g/day cutoff for high vs low sugar consumption is kind of high, even if it includes sugars in fruit and other whole foods. The key question imo is: how would low sugar + low sweetener consumption fare against the equivalent amount of sugar?)
Overall, definitely an interesting study, considering that they adjusted for a lot of factors including BMI/weight gain, and that it's the more health-conscious types who would consume artificial sweeteners. Even the lower-consumption category was associated with a statistically significant +14% raised cancer risk vs non-consumers (for the same level of sugar intake).
One point to note was that sucralose intake didn't seem associated with raised cancer risk, the caveat being that the sucralose sample size was about half those of aspartame and acesulfame-K. This could possibly reflect sucralose being a sweetener used by the most health-conscious participants, since it's less commonly used in mass-market products. Still, would be interesting if sucralose might not contribute to cancer risk. Overall, this paper is a non-loss for sucralose on the cancer front.
guerby 669 days ago [-]
If you look at page 15 of the S1 annex of the study
Figure C: Cancer risk associated with the combined exposure to artificial sweetener and sugar intakes, NutriNet -Santé cohort, France, 2009-2021 (n=102,865)
For me the two interesting cases are:
"Sugar above nutritional guidelines" and "no artificial sweetener" => 1.09 (0.97 - 1.22) P=0.158
nutritional guidelines are 10% max energy intake from sugar, about 50 gram of sugar per day for a 2000 kCal diet (62 gram for 2500 kCal for adult male).
A 330ml coke can has 35g of sugar, so we're talking one or two max per day to keep below the guideline.
If I read this correctly if one makes the switch from sugary beverage to artificial sweetened ones and it lowers your total sugar intake below the dieteray guidelines then your relative risk factor doesn't change (at about +10% vs low sugar and no articial sweetener).
Important to remember that IARC just talks about the quality of the evidence, and not the strength of the effect. If they know that something does cause cancer it'll go into group 1, even if it only causes an additional 1 case of cancer per 100,000 population.
So we need other dimensions. Thanks for that article you wrote, made it easy to understand 2b etc.
We need something like the danger of getting cancer from it. Tobacco doesn't make everyone get some kind of cancer, but it hugely increases the risk. What are other cancer dangers in terms of some measurable risk, compare that to this new risk.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Per the article, they're planning on Group 2B.
DanBC 669 days ago [-]
Yes, and the rest of this thread shows a few people confused about the meaning of "possibly causes cancer" and how to interpret that wrt their own behaviour.
IARCs comms strategy isn't great, and science journalism isn't great either.
girishso 669 days ago [-]
Makes me wonder if some new (sweetener) molecule is around the corner?
chiefalchemist 669 days ago [-]
I have no food allergies. Except to aspartame, if you consider it a food.
I don't drink a lot of soda so I picked up on the reaction sooner rather than later. From then on I avoided it. Until one day it was in something and I wasn't aware of that. My chest hurt so much I thought I was having a heart attack. Maybe I was.
So while that isn't cancer, it's still not a good sign. Standard sugar will do.
cykros 667 days ago [-]
I suspect it's more that aspartame indirectly causes cancer, which is why it doesn't look, walk, or quack like a duck, but it DOES have a habit of feeding the ducks. What I mean by that is that candida LOVES aspartame, and candida, a fungus that lives in the human gut and feeds on sugars, alcohols, preservatives, and a few other things Americans in particular eat a ton of, HAS been seen to cause cancer. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24963692/
2devnull 669 days ago [-]
Cancer can take 50 years to develop. Aspartame is from the 80s, so maybe we’d only now be noticing the beginning of the wave of cancers, assuming our ability to notice is not limited, which I think the pandemic should make you wonder about. And how many other things started in the 80s. Cigarettes were relatively easy to notice, but even great minds like Fischer couldn’t see it. A 50 year lag makes a lot of things hard to notice.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
We're not noticing a wave of new cancers; for most cancers, broadly including those implicated by ingesting Diet Coke, we're seeing decreases; where we're seeing increases, they don't track country-by-country consumption patterns for aspartame.
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Yes, but hasn't there been also a big increase in certain cancers such as colorectal in young people, and researchers don't have good guesses at what could be causing them? The studies that I read ruled out screenings because it is happening in people decades younger than the first screening recommendations.
kortex 669 days ago [-]
Meat consumption is way up and fiber consumption is way down over the past 50 years. Those two factors alone are very big contributors.
the WHO definition of "possible carcinogen" implies only minor evidence, despite enormous numberse of studies, the schedule of this class includes such things as "Aloe Vera", "carpentry and joinery", "low frequency magnetic fields", and lots of medicines.
It's barely newsworthy and yet here we are, frontpage.
beached_whale 669 days ago [-]
It’s also got over 50 years in the food chain.
aaron695 669 days ago [-]
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throwawaylinux 669 days ago [-]
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TheBlight 669 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
I don't consume caffeine, but Dave Arnold of the (unimpeachable) Cooking Issues podcast has a whole spiel about how Diet Coke drinkers use it as a primary source of hydration.
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
Im kinda that way with coffee. Eventually I switch to water but sometimes its the only thing I drink in the day.
In fact I think many people primarily drink something other than water. And im not saying thats good. But between pop, coffee, tea, juice, alcohol and an aversion to tap water, you have a lot of people who rarely drink water.
wkat4242 669 days ago [-]
There's not a terribly high amount of caffeine in it anyway compared to coffee.
tannernelson 669 days ago [-]
I feel seen
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
What’s your point? This is a very low effort, meme comment.
Seems like a good argument to me. If aspartame is cancerous and people drink a shit ton of it wouldnt we have clear evidence? What could explain it being cancerous and not having a clear link despite its prevalence? At the very least this is an interesting point that doesnt deserve a reddit-like meme comment.
DanBC 669 days ago [-]
There's a big difference between "this causes cancer" and "this causes lots of cancer". IARC look at the quality of the evidence to put things into one of four groups. Some things definitely do cause cancer, but they don't cause very much cancer.
Don't forget that there are several multi-billion dollar companies who sell aspartame who are vigorously campaigning to promote the safety of their products. It's entirely unsurprising that the data is unclear when you have that level of interference in the research. It's also really tricky to do diet research on humans - we can't lock people up for a year to give them a controlled diet, so we end up asking them to write down what they've eaten and drunk. This means the data researchers have is pretty bad. Looking for a small signal in very noisy data is hard.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
I didn't read it as a barb! There really are Diet Coke fiends. If you don't drink a lot of diet soda, the idea of drinking it to the exclusion of all other liquids might seem pretty wacky.
TheBlight 667 days ago [-]
>I didn't read it as a barb!
Didn't intend it as one! Just misidentified a member of my own tribe is all.
In 1984 the year after aspartame's approval for soft drinks, the company that held the exclusive patent on it, sold $600 million worth (1984 dollars) of it.
Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...
cameldrv 670 days ago [-]
> Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...
True for human food as well. Maybe it’s not rancid, but food science can make terrible ingredients taste great. Take Doritos. It’s just cornmeal (animal feed) plus a ton of artificial flavoring that is incredibly well dialed in to make them delicious and even addictive.
SketchySeaBeast 670 days ago [-]
I think it's disingenuous to say that cornmeal is just animal feed. Polenta has been a thing for a long time.
Cerium 669 days ago [-]
Since you don't even have to add the flavors to make corn meal taste good. Look at Fritos - corn + oil + salt.
IshKebab 669 days ago [-]
Yeah that's like saying "sandwiches are just ground up wheat, plus a ton of delicious filling to make them taste good"
xormapmap 669 days ago [-]
Most bread you get from a supermarket (even outside the US) is highly processed garbage, as are many common sandwich fillings (mayo, salami, margarine). The typical sandwich is probably up there with many of the other least healthy things you could eat, so yeah, ground up wheat with filling to make it taste good is probably fair.
newaccount74 669 days ago [-]
I'm so tired of people using "processed" as a negative attribute.
First of all, it implies that industrial processes are less healthy than manual processes. But in my opinion, it makes no difference if sodium nitrate is added in a meat processing plant, or by an artisanal butcher on locally sourced hand made organic bacon. The health effects are going to be the same.
Secondly, it implies that there is something bad about "processing" in general, whatever is meant by that. But I think that most people would agree that pasteurizing milk is a good thing for our health, even though it is a form of "processing".
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
I don’t see how that’s the case except for a fear of “processing”. I plug two slices of commercial whole wheat store bought bread into Cronometer and it has an impressive mineral breakdown and 14% of the day's nutrient needs.
fatfingerd 669 days ago [-]
Lack of bioavailability analysis and links between processed meat and cancer are fears... of the established scientific community.
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
Sure. This thread is talking about bread. Processed wheat products like bread and seitan are nutrient dense foods usually caught in the social media meme diet crossfire.
669 days ago [-]
ahoka 669 days ago [-]
Bread is ultra processed.
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
Yes, so is chocolate and tofu. Why should I care unless it's bad for me?
Using processing as an end-all heuristic loses sight of the characteristic that the heuristic is trying to approximate.
maxk42 669 days ago [-]
Bioavailability isn't the while story: some foods can be too bioavailable (and not great for you when consuming too much) such as sugars which can cause your body to form inappropriate hormonal signals and disrupt normal satiety. (Looking at you, fructose!) Additionally, there are literally thousands of antinutrients, toxins, carcinogens, and endocrine disruptors that simply aren't accounted for in normal nutritional analyses.
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
To make things even worse, on the other side of your last sentence, a lot of so called toxins and antinutrients are just orthorexic memes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600777/ ("Is There Such a Thing as “Anti-Nutrients”? A Narrative Review of Perceived Problematic Plant Compounds")
And an example of a nutrient that can be too bioavailable for some people is heme-iron, yet if you were to follow nutrition influencers online you might think that heme-iron was essential. A young man doesn't necessary want it. Yet anemic women might.
Very confusing space to navigate which I think is one of the main reasons we tend to get sucked into diet camps, all of them promising to cut through the BS while coming to vastly different conclusions.
SamoyedFurFluff 669 days ago [-]
Mayo is processed garbage?? Please explain. It’s whipped egg with lemon and oil, maybe some salt.
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
Helmans also uses Calcium Disodium EDTA for shelf life.
Im not saying its bad, or being processed is bad, but its manufactured at scale with additional ingredients to make it shelf stable. Its not the same thing you make at home. Frankly I think thats fine.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
> Helmans also uses Calcium Disodium EDTA for shelf life.
Maybe it has helped remove built up lead from long term exposure before unleaded gasoline was mandated.
hedora 669 days ago [-]
Being processed is definitely bad on average, if only due to foods having lower fiber content and higher salt content.
vladvasiliu 669 days ago [-]
It may depend on the brands, but one big brand of mayo here in France (Amora) has all kinds of weird crap, apart from "whipped egg with lemon and oil".
It has rapeseed oil, which to me seems dubious since it requires special processing to make it non-toxic.
It only has 5.1% eggs (according to the label).
It also has "flavorings", thickeners and coloring agents.
So yeah, it's nothing like the homemade mayo I make, which only has olive oil, a bunch of eggs, mustard, and indeed some salt. Mine doesn't need any sort of coloring and is thick enough.
ahoka 669 days ago [-]
Source on rapeseed on being toxic, please.
vladvasiliu 669 days ago [-]
The rapeseed oil isn't considered toxic anymore, since they take steps to remove the erucic acid from it, by growing canola bred to contain very little of it.
While it says it's "generally considered safe", I prefer not to take any chances, just like I prefer to avoid plastic containers for my food, especially if hot (even though some plastics are "microwave safe").
---
I realize wikipedia isn't the greates of sources. Here are two more
Mayo is mostly oil. Usually the cheapest oil the manufacturer can source. That oil is highly refined, which usually involves dissolving ground up seeds in some solvent like hexane, then some high heat process to extract and de-odor the oil. Given that seed oils usually comprises polyunsaturated oils which due to their multiple double bonds are more reactive, the chemical processes probably tend to create more undesirable by products.
I mean, unless you prefer to drink the cheapest cooking oil you can find in your supermarket, you might want to avoid the mayo as well. (disclaimer: I occasionally drink EVOO directly)
hedora 669 days ago [-]
For a while it was loaded with trans fat and artificial flavors.
These days, it’s actually listed as compatible with heart healthy diets (the oil is typically a “good fat”, and the eggs raise cholesterol levels data is weak at best)
nielsbot 669 days ago [-]
Not quite--I assume sandwich fillings are food. Doritos are coated w flavor powder.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
> flavor powder
Which seems to qualify as food, as well. Cheese, whey, milk, buttermilk, onion powder, MSG, etc. Nothing too scary on the list.
nielsbot 668 days ago [-]
Fair point!
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Mexico also consumes millions of tortillas every day made of exactly that.
ahoka 669 days ago [-]
Not all maize are created equal.
cassianoleal 670 days ago [-]
And it's awesome, especially fried!
solardev 669 days ago [-]
Who needs food science when you've got hot liquid fat?
Waterluvian 669 days ago [-]
Or HP sauce.
Honestly I see it as a feature if we can move product that’s otherwise garbage, as long as it’s not dangerous. Reminds me of “omg do you know what’s in hotdogs?!” Hotdogs are a success story.
ramblenode 669 days ago [-]
Tricking people's bodies into consuming garbage is a feature? For whom?
scubbo 669 days ago [-]
For people, if the "garbage" still has positive nutritional value that would otherwise be wasted due to taste.
ramblenode 669 days ago [-]
What is an example of the good garbage that would otherwise be wasted? It seems like nutrient deficient junk food is the main beneficiary of these appetizing agents.
Globally, we produce a huge surplus of calories but a deficit of micronutrients, fruits, and vegetables. The appetizing agents are mostly convincing people to eat more of the former, beyond what they need.
akiselev 669 days ago [-]
> What is an example of the good garbage that would otherwise be wasted? It seems like nutrient deficient junk food is the main beneficiary of these appetizing agents.
Most of a cow, honestly.
From a 1,300 lbs steer you'll get something like 600-650 pounds of usable meat (maybe a little more, depending on the breed). About a third of that resulting meat will be ground meat that'll best be used in burgers, sausages, hotdogs, and stuff like vienna sausages - which I would consider junk food. The rest of the carcass will be rendered into tallow, boiled down to produce gelatin for candy and jellies or bone broth for other dishes, and otherwise processed for human or animal consumption.
It's not as extreme as the junk food you're thinking of but ever since industrialization the amount of effort put into making food from slaughterhouse waste is incredible.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
> burgers, sausages, hotdogs, and stuff like vienna sausages - which I would consider junk food
Heretic!
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
Harmless garbage, mind you
ericd 669 days ago [-]
Nitrate laden meat consumption is heavily correlated with colon cancer, no?
hedora 669 days ago [-]
Yes.
Also, “sodium nitrate free” and “uncured” meat typically contains celery salt, which is chemically identical to sodium nitrate, except that the maximum safety levels don’t apply, so sometimes it has more nitrate in it than would otherwise be legal.
The misleading “uncured” and “sodium nitrate free” language on labels is mandated by labeling standards in the US, so keep that in mind when directing your rage.
rightbyte 669 days ago [-]
Cornmeal is just corn flour but with courser grinding? But glutamate and stuff, sure. Doritos have the same "fake" feel as Pringles according to my taste.
poisonarena 669 days ago [-]
I eat tortilla chips of all kinds outside of the dorito sphere, dont need anything besides a little salt, let alone engineered powders
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
Doritos really are an amazing case. They are tortilla chips. It took me so long to realize this because that delicious dust is so transformational. It it’s literally a tortilla chip underneath that salt, msg, and spices. For the longest time I assumed it was some other novel type of chip.
lexandstuff 669 days ago [-]
Can't you buy plain Doritos where you live? In Australia, you can buy "Original Salted" Doritos, which is just oil, corn and salt: regular old Tortilla chips.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
Generally not, at least in the US. When we buy plain tortilla chips here, it's usually Mexican. Given the lack of a Mexico on the border of Australia, I can understand why you might not get the same variety of tortilla chips.
fbdab103 669 days ago [-]
Is there price parity vs flavored Doritos?
lexandstuff 668 days ago [-]
Usually, exactly the same price. Though the plain ones are often on special, as I guess they're less popular.
TheCleric 669 days ago [-]
Not from Doritos.
joezydeco 669 days ago [-]
Dortitos is a tidal wave of glutamate. Not just the added MSG but the cheese extracts that add even more.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
MSG is right up there with aspartame of vilified ingredients with zero evidence to back up the claims. My own mother claims to get terrible headaches from MSG, but she loves tomatoes. And nuts. And peas. And mushrooms. Turns out the headaches are dependent on knowing the food has MSG.
iLoveOncall 669 days ago [-]
> Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...
What's the difference between that and humans eating a pizza but not eating the raw ingredients of a pizza? If it's not inedible anymore I don't see the issue...
shrubble 669 days ago [-]
Not quite following you... do you mean the difference between cooked and raw, or something else?
iLoveOncall 669 days ago [-]
I'm saying that you don't find it distasteful that we add sweeteners to raw cocoa powder to make chocolate edible for humans, so what's distasteful in adding sweeteners to animal feed to make it edible for animals?
shrubble 669 days ago [-]
People do however eat raw cocoa. And rancid or spoiled food is quite different from 'bitter' food.
joecool1029 669 days ago [-]
They eat unsweetened chocolate (usually marked 100% cacao these days) not so much cocoa powder which has the cocoa butter portion removed. Cocoa powder is pretty rough on its own. Unsweetened chocolate is an amazingly stable food source high in saturated fat which is way more stable and resistant to rancidity than seed oils or milk solids.
rootusrootus 669 days ago [-]
> People do however eat raw cocoa
That's quite rare. My kid did it once, thinking it was basically chocolate. I really wish I had taken a picture.
To clarify, this doesn't mean aspartame in food is harmful, it means that in certain circumstances it's possible for the chemical to cause cancer. For example, workers exposed to extremely high levels during manufacturing, or breakdown products formed during improper storage.
penneallagricia 669 days ago [-]
What about the mass of people who in order to drink liters of soda every day ingest large amounts of aspartame? Is it about "circumstances" or concentration?
j45 669 days ago [-]
Is litres of soda the bar for Aspartame to be bad for someone?
What about a few cans a week?
wahnfrieden 669 days ago [-]
theyre just saying the stakes are high because there is both broad and regularly high consumption
Spivak 669 days ago [-]
Yes but a can of coke is ~200mg of aspertame. You would have to drink conservatively 30 cans a day to even get close to known dangerous levels.
hedora 669 days ago [-]
If you’re worried about cancer, then maybe it takes that much.
If you’re worried about it causing weight gain and/or metabolic syndrome, one serving a day is more than enough to be dangerous.
saiya-jin 669 days ago [-]
It literally doesn't matter if its causing cancer or not, that's outright a very bad decision to do so, you will 100% fuck up your health long term. It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so?
Nobody apart from maybe sales folks ever claimed these things are safe to drink in such amounts regularly. Just like nobody ever claimed that consuming say 100g of pure salt every day would be OK, yet you can buy endless amounts of 1kg bags if you want.
Do folks really need some government agency to come to them personally to tell them how to live their lives, babysit every single decision they make, steer them away from their addictions on sugar etc? That's not how game of life works.
red_trumpet 669 days ago [-]
> It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so?
Isn't the point that diet coke doesn't have calories[1]? This is why it uses aspartame as an artificial sweetener.
Silica can cause cancer, in the form of asbestos fibres or silica dust. Yet, it’s safe to drink from a glass, have windows at home, and walk on sand. A lot of factors matter besides chemical composition.
fluidcruft 670 days ago [-]
Are you suggesting that aspartame in food has a different physical form that prevents it from entering the body?
kergonath 669 days ago [-]
For example. I cannot provide any insight because I don’t with in that field, but it would not be necessarily surprising that e.g. inhaled powders could have different effects than ingested compounds diluted in something else. Quantity would matter a lot as well.
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
Its OK to drink kool aide but not snort it.
dogma1138 670 days ago [-]
It’s not only if it enters the body but also how, for example inhaling aspartame can be very different to ingesting it.
graypegg 669 days ago [-]
It’s the dose that makes the poison maybe?
maxk42 669 days ago [-]
Sand is not a different physical form than that which causes cancer. (See: toxic silicosis) Often it's dosage that leads to concern. A typical walk on the beach will not result in cancer from sand exposure.
nomel 669 days ago [-]
> Sand is not a different physical form than that which causes cancer.
This is incorrect. Sand is larger, rounded, particles. Toxic silicosis is caused by small (like 10um) particles. The physical form is what makes it possible to inhale one and walk on the other.
The chemical form is identical.
xeromal 670 days ago [-]
That's not the only option there. It also could be the amount of exposure.
cogman10 670 days ago [-]
It should.
There are plenty of chemicals that you regularly consume which, in high dosages, are fatal but are required at low dosages.
Too much calcium will causes osteopetrosis (too little does as well).
Too much vitamin K causes liver damage
Too much vitamin B1 causes hypertension
Plenty of stuff is dangerous at high levels and safe at low levels. Our kidneys and liver exist to filter and eliminate excess.
j45 669 days ago [-]
Too little or too much of many foods will be bad
Where Aspartame is unhealthy in soda could use more detailed light shed on it.
There may be some issue with how it’s used for food and soda in second and third world countries compared to First world.
nomel 669 days ago [-]
> Where Aspartame is unhealthy in soda could use more detailed light shed on it.
I have also heard carbonated beverages during eating may affect stomach acid. Need to find some research clarifying it one way or the other.
berniedurfee 669 days ago [-]
Plug for ChubbyEmu on YouTube for more examples!
cogman10 668 days ago [-]
Pretty fun watch. Thanks for sharing.
SketchySeaBeast 670 days ago [-]
As is often noted, being exposed to too much or improperly stored (heated, cooled, contaminated) water can also be hazardous to your health and that shit's in everything.
670 days ago [-]
netbioserror 670 days ago [-]
Water in the stomach isn't harmful, but water in the lungs absolutely is.
If the human digestive system can trivially break down the amounts of aspartame found in a diet coke, it's fairly pointless for just about anyone to entertain the scenario of inhaling a bucket of pure aspartame crystals.
Nathanba 669 days ago [-]
You make a perfectly valid point, if something is used in food production that is only safe in trace quantities then a simple mistake on the assembly line could easily lead to larger quantities ending up in your food and suddenly you have cancer. I prefer having food that doesn't have any in itself cancer causing ingredients.
astrange 669 days ago [-]
I don't think it's possible to do that or the food would obviously not be the product anymore. It's like saying you bought a red car but then found out it was secretly blue due to a production mistake.
HelixEndeavor 670 days ago [-]
Water isn't dangerous but if you were dropped into the middle of the ocean you would probably drown. Does that mean you must swear off water because it's proven to be dangerous since people drown in it?
quickthrower2 669 days ago [-]
Not a fair analogy since in one case the water is acting chemically and in the other it is physically obstructing. Potatoes are good for you but if someone
shot one out of a cannon at your face it might not be.
670 days ago [-]
pleb_nz 669 days ago [-]
Can you find aspartame naturally in the environment in non processed and manufactured foods? E.g steak, fruit, milk whatever? If yes, then I'm a little more lenient on your answer. If not, personally I would rather not see artificial man made ingredients in foods I consume. I did a quick Kagi search and it looks like it's completely synthetic?
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 670 days ago [-]
Reminder that bacon is already a known carcinogen for those worrying about artificial sweeteners but happily eating processed meats.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Why stop with nitrates and nitrites? Acrylamide is a known human carcinogen, and occurs in a huge variety of cooking processes (including baking, frying, and grilling). If you eat potatoes, you're almost certainly putting yourself at more risk than aspartame is: we've got epidemiology and mechanism of action to back up the potato risk.
likpok 669 days ago [-]
I believe California even helpfully warns you about any location that has acrylamide.
nonethewiser 669 days ago [-]
So… restaurants?
maxk42 669 days ago [-]
Literally yes. Every Starbucks in California has a little placard with that stupid warning to the point where people tune it out.
sacnoradhq 669 days ago [-]
WARNING: This location contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Prop 65. It's everywhere in California and it's completely useless.
scubbo 669 days ago [-]
> Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse.
> The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.
> In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it.
> People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.
What's the danger with potatoes? Can you point me towards a study or something?
gilgoomesh 669 days ago [-]
I think the poster meant "fried/roasted potatoes" (boiled are not included). Most Maillard reaction cooking involves a risk of creating potential carcinogens like acrylamide.
Which is what I figured and is a wholly disingenuous argument. Would love to see any research showing unseasoned boiled or baked potatoes being bad for you.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Acrylamide has nothing at all to do with seasoning, and baking potatoes forms acrylamide (as will anything that browns a potato --- or that browns bread!).
grvdrm 669 days ago [-]
Serious question: do you have kids and if so, what do you feed them if you avoid acrylamide? I’m constantly looking for alternatives for my kids and it feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole such that they do, sometimes anyways, eat the processed things because I can’t eradicate the junk from everything.
tptacek 668 days ago [-]
I don't avoid acrylamide! How would I? :)
(I have 2 kids, but both are in their early 20s.)
Fezzik 670 days ago [-]
My understanding is that bacon itself is not the culprit of the possible (note — possible) carcinogen. The sodium nitrate that is often used as a preservative is. Nitrate-free bacon is easy to find though.
malnourish 670 days ago [-]
Nitrate-free (or, "no nitrates added") bacon still contains nitrates. About the same amount as standard bacon, and in some cases, more.
To what everybody else is saying, I'll add that by the US definition, that's not bacon; it's back bacon, which is a loin cut, radically different than American bacon, which I believe you lot call "streaky bacon".
pleb_nz 669 days ago [-]
Being a global community, would we assume bacon means all types of bacon cut? I have been but maybe I've been wrong. Surely we're not just referring to streaky bacon or American bacon
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Yes, we would assume here that bacon means pork belly bacon. The reason nitrates are such a big deal with American bacon is that they're an important part of the flavor of the bacon (nitrates create "hammy" flavor). If there's genuinely un-cured pork loin "bacon" in Germany or New Zealand or whatever, that's great, but it's a less interesting claim than that there's real nitrate/nitrite-free American bacon (I don't believe there is).
pleb_nz 668 days ago [-]
Sorry my question wasn't about nitrates. It was about the use of the term bacon being used to define all bacon's as we're a global community or whether people in general on this community would think of bacon being used for only streaky bacon.
tptacek 668 days ago [-]
I totally understand. I know "bacon" is a thing everywhere, and it doesn't mean cured strips of pork belly everywhere. I guess I'd say "bacon" in popular culture refers to the American product, whose flavor is heavily derived from the interaction of sodium nitrite with pork belly. To tell an American "you can get bacon without the nitrites" is a little like saying "you could just go eat an apple". True, but irrelevant! :)
CMCDragonkai 669 days ago [-]
Interesting, I didn't realise that but I always preferred the non-streaky kind.
toolz 670 days ago [-]
I don't see anything on that site that says anything other than nitrates weren't added. Where are you seeing that it's actually nitrate free?
malnourish 670 days ago [-]
Under "Dietary information" at the bottom of the page, it says "Nitrite-free, Gluten-free, Dairy-free,[sic]"
toolz 670 days ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if that's misleading considering the other article was suggesting nitrite precursors are usually what's in the food later to be turned into nitrite, but I'd love to be wrong.
You could simply measure the levels of nitrite before any exists and the end product might still have just as much.
maxerickson 669 days ago [-]
The one article is talking about celery juice being stealth nitrates. It's not something that is in the pork itself.
The only candidate would be natural flavors, and I sort of doubt that they would get away with that.
hedora 669 days ago [-]
In the US, they are required by law to write nitrate free if they add celery salt, which is 100% nitrates.
That site lists “natural flavors” as an ingredient. I wonder if celery salt counts as a natural flavor in the UK.
Contains the weasel words I pasted in below, which are verbatim what the US producers that use celery salt claim. Also, they don’t list the natural flavors. I’d bet they’re using celery salt, but that UK labeling laws don’t make them break it out as a separate ingredient:
> Primal Cut free-from naked bacon contains only fresh organic fruit sugars and nitrates present in the natural raw organic seasonings.
malnourish 670 days ago [-]
I'm intrigued. That seems a fair bit different than the uncured bacon I'm familiar with in the US [0], but I would certainly give it a try.
(Note that this product is actually cured with nitrates via the celery powder in the ingredients list.)
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Ah, the magic of marketing.
It's exactly the same, except one uses celery. No, in fact, if I remember correctly, the nitrates used in the "uncured" process were even higher than the normal process.
nomel 669 days ago [-]
A big problem with the these "nitrate free" forms is that Vitamin C was required in the "nitrate" versions, to prevents the formation of some of the carcinogens [1]. In the "nitrate free" versions, it is not! I make sure to drink orange juice, or take a vitamin C, with any form of bacon.
Orange juice is a huge spike to the insulin levels. As the saying goes, eat your juice, don't drink it.
tracker1 670 days ago [-]
Better stop eating celery or anything containing it if you're really concerned about nitrates.
01100011 669 days ago [-]
Green leafy vegetables contain a hell of a lot more nitrate than cured meat does.
Sure, there's less protein in vegetables, so less chance of nitrosamines forming, unless you're eating a complete meal, in which case... figure it out.
Also, vegetables contain anti-oxidants and things which offset some of the nitrates, but this just seems like a reason to eat some vegetables with your cured meats.
hosteur 669 days ago [-]
I cute and smoke my own bacon. I do not use nitrite. Also in my country organic bacon has zero nitrate in it.
loeg 669 days ago [-]
Nitrate-free bacon isn't bacon. The stuff that is marketed as nitrate-free isn't -- it's a dubiously moral marketing gimmick that is essentially untrue.
penneallagricia 669 days ago [-]
With bacon you know what you get, so you can dose it and take your risks. Aspartame has been sold to us as the healthy alternative to sugar. People literally use aspartame as an excuse to chug liters of soda every day.
Aachen 669 days ago [-]
Isn't it a healthy alternative to sugar? If you have a one in five chance to live ten years longer because you don't develop cardiovascular issues from obesity, but one in a million develops cancer, I mean...
It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.
favorited 669 days ago [-]
The WHO recently conditionally recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control. Their stance is that we should be reducing sweetened food/beverage intake in general, rather than trying to find healthier ways to sweeten what we eat.
If we shift the context just a little bit, everyone would ridicule this kind of abstinence-only approach.
hedora 669 days ago [-]
Aspartame causes weight gain, so abstinence-only isn’t a great analogy.
If you are trying to lose weight, then just use less sugar. That’s actually pretty easy, since artificial sweeteners and sugary drinks desensitize you to sweet stuff.
If you taper off for a week or so, you’ll find that the stuff you were previously drinking is cloyingly sweet.
For instance, reading a starbucks menu makes me shudder. I can’t even drink their non-dairy lattes anymore because they are too sweet.
CoastalCoder 669 days ago [-]
"Everyone" might be a stretch.
Depending on the topic, I'm in camp abstinence.
mannykannot 669 days ago [-]
While that is their stance, it is conditioned on what they seem to consider to be good evidence that using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control does not work (at the level of public health, that is; for individuals, YMMV.)
Shorel 668 days ago [-]
I am personally trying to achieve that.
Liquid chocolate, the kind we drink as a hot beverage in Central and South America, was difficult for me to get used to without any sweet taste.
Nowadays I prefer it that way.
Coffee is a bit more difficult for me.
cheekibreeki2 669 days ago [-]
Nothing is safer than sugar if you're just talking about a few grams for your coffee.
fbdab103 669 days ago [-]
Can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar. Diet cokes has 0.2 grams of aspartame.
669 days ago [-]
copperx 669 days ago [-]
You listed two isolated facts. You forgot to make a point.
penneallagricia 669 days ago [-]
This was downvoted but Is correct, relative amounts mean nothing.
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Using artificial sweeteners for coffee is completely unnecessary, unless you're drinking a lot.
The amount of calories in two teaspoons of sugar is minuscule.
Matumio 669 days ago [-]
Two teaspoons is already one sixth of the WHO recommended daily sugar intake, and that was just the coffee. And WHO claims there are additional health benefits expected if you can do half of what they recommend.
Spivak 669 days ago [-]
The caffeine will get you before the aspartame if you actually chug liters a day so
you can't really do that in practice.
Source: My dad has a heart attack from drinking liters
of diet soda every day.
LegitShady 670 days ago [-]
It’s actually sodium nitrite that’s carcinogenic (after being exposed to high heat), and I can find bacon without sodium nitrite here pretty much at every grocery store.
galangalalgol 670 days ago [-]
If it is completely uncured sure, but usually niteite/nitrate free bacon has an asterisk saying something like "beyond what is naturally found in the added celery juice". If you heat those nitrites in the bacon it doesn't the same thing as the synthetic stuff would. Luckily trichinosis is largely a thing of the past, so why heat it? Uncooked bacon tastes awesome. Also, in stews I believe it does reach the dangerous temps?
malnourish 670 days ago [-]
Adding to what remote_phone said, and repeating another comment of mine, that nitrite free bacon still has the same amount of nitrites (in some cases, more).
There’s one place near me that sells actual nitrate/nitrite free bacon but its super expensive - $10-12 Canadian for 250grams or so. It like double bacon in the store and its an hour drive away.
Sad to learn about the celery nitrite thing. I’ve been overpaying for it for a while now, apparently. It literally says “contains no preservatives” but has “cultured celery extract” in the ingredients, so its a lie.
copperx 669 days ago [-]
Yup. You were overpaying for a worse product. Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm in processed products branded as healthy.
It's better to stick the the regular version; the kinks have been probably worked out. Still unsafe, but unsafe in a known quantity.
remote_phone 670 days ago [-]
If you read carefully, it still contains sodium nitrite except as powdered celery. So the source of the sodium nitrate is “natural” but the dose is still the same.
LegitShady 670 days ago [-]
Fml so I’ve been paying more for nitrite free bacon that still has nitrite in it?
It feels like saying something contains no nitrites or preservatives and then including them in the form of cultured celery extract should be fraud/false advertising and a crime.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
You extremely have been conned by the "nitrite-free bacon" labeling, yes. This is something that food writers have been complaining about for over a decade.
Shorel 668 days ago [-]
I buy raw pork belly. Doesn't taste the same after being cooked, but surely it has no nitrites. ;)
This is why Vitamin C was a required additive, with "nitrate" cured meats. Unfortunately, it is not with the "nitrate from celery" forms, which should lead to more cancer.
670 days ago [-]
susysink 669 days ago [-]
But without sodium nitrite you instead run the risk of increased bacterial growth, and in the worse case: botulinum toxin which is like instant death compared to dying of cancer at 70+.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Sodium nitrate converts to sodium nitrite over the course of a cure; that's why Prague Powder #2 is used for long-term cures.
adrr 669 days ago [-]
Or drinking hot tea. Working graveyard shift. Drinking alcohol.
93po 669 days ago [-]
Breathing air in any city.
sacnoradhq 669 days ago [-]
That's why I have a BlueAir air filter running continuously that spits out 0 ppm air and swapped my A/C's filters for the highest MERV ones available.
93po 668 days ago [-]
I had to remove the ionizer from my blueair, ionizers plus terpenes (what essential oils are made of, and in virtually all cleaning products) creates formaldehyde, which I'm allergic to, and is linked to cancer and kids developing asthma.
It's always surprising to me how quick we are to go from discovering a chemical to mass-producing it. We're only just figuring out all of the negative externalities of things like PFAS, and they're in absolutely everything (packaging, clothes, pizza box linings, food cans, cookware...)
aio2 670 days ago [-]
Yes, "We've" figured out the dangers of PFAS just now, but when companies started producing them back over 50 years ago, company 3M knew it (to say the least) wasn't good.
I'm pretty sure the scientists who dealt with these chemicals even warned against using it, but some higher ups still let it pass
flashback2199 670 days ago [-]
Leaded gasoline will really blow your mind, at least it did for me
Edit: Figuratively not literally, haha!
wcedmisten 670 days ago [-]
Interestingly, the inventor of leaded gasoline also invented freon.
It was known to be harmful back in 1920s when it was introduced
justinator 670 days ago [-]
But it solved a problem that got in the way of selling you things!
It's also still used in most every prop engine that flies over my house everyday at a normal schedule, so we still haven't solved the problem of leaded gas. We never will (in my lifetime).
wkat4242 669 days ago [-]
Scheduled flights almost all use turbine engines, even prop ones (turboprop). They use Jet-1 which is unleaded kerosine.
Only the smallest GA planes like Cessna 172s still use leaded fuel. Turbodiesel alternatives are present aftermarket but they need to be replaced every once in a while unlike the old gas engines which can be revisioned. Unlike a car engine an aircraft engine spends a lot of its life at 100% power which makes them age quicker.
freedomben 669 days ago [-]
> It's also still used in most every prop engine that flies over my house everyday at a normal schedule, so we still haven't solved the problem of leaded gas. We never will (in my lifetime).
Do you know why? I was under the impression that avgas (aka leaded gas for airplanes) was being forced out (albeit slowly) by EPA
sacnoradhq 669 days ago [-]
The problems are a lack of leadership to subsidize it at the pump and a timeline to ban it. G100UL currently costs 70% more than 100LL. A certification process is required to fuel with G100UL (no engine changes are required, but it's the aviation industry and it creates an orderly transition process with more paperwork) and it's currently difficult to find. If you want to get G100UL now, look for general aviation flight schools.
Untrue. G100UL is a drop-in replacement for 100LL. TEL should be banned because 70% of all airborne lead is a result of piston-driven general aviation.
justinator 668 days ago [-]
It probably works as drop-in replacement, but until there's actual QA, we can't be sure enough.
Unless you want planes falling from the sky.
Maybe a little more on the table than releasing something to prod and finding a speling mistake.
And to be clear: I don't want the dozens of airplanes that fly over me daily to be running leaded gas. Politics is gunna politics I guess.
flashback2199 667 days ago [-]
I don't want planes falling out of the sky, but currently lead is falling out of the sky instead, and I don't want that, either :/
justinator 667 days ago [-]
The smart thing to do would be to ground airplanes that use leaded fuel, but we don't do that because?
Worrying about aspartame is bikeshedding about minutia. The arbitrary grandfathering of thousands of chemicals under TSCA and lack of precautionary principle are far bigger risks to public health in America.
Multiple companies knew about the health dangers of certain "forever chemicals" including PFAS and intentionally did nothing because money. It's a repeat of the cigarette debacle.
justinator 670 days ago [-]
3M knew about the negative "externalities" of PFAS 50 years ago, they just decide YOU didn't nee to know.
It's the same with oil companies having studies on climate change privately, while discounting climate scientists publicly.
Profits over People is the way of Capitalism!
no_butterscotch 670 days ago [-]
I'm always surprised by this when it's "50 years ago".
Certainly the scientists and analysts at 3M who collected and analyzed the data would have thereafter known of it's extremely harmful effects.
And I don't mean to open this up to "heh yea well they made bank!" I don't think they did relatively speaking.
My main question, is that certainly those scientists would have been advising their friends and families to stay away from X, Y, and Z products because they contain PFAS?
ethanbond 670 days ago [-]
It's pretty easy to accidentally convince yourself of things when you get a big payday by doing so.
This is why analyzing clinical trial data is so obscenely hard. There are bad actors, there are liars, and there are scientists who are really, really hoping to achieve a breakthrough. All of them are liable to end up putting forth bad information.
justinator 670 days ago [-]
> It's pretty easy to accidentally convince yourself of things when you get a big payday by doing so.
Is it easy to turn a blind eye, when factory workers in your own company were dying, or is what we're describing called at best criminal, and at worst psychotic?
They were literally just dumping these chemicals down the river. They were fined a small fraction of their profits (of billions) and told pretty please to not do it again. This is obvious corruption on so many levels.
cmdli 669 days ago [-]
According to Wikipedia at least (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_sub...), it looks like 3M had a $10b settlement around PFASs, which seems like a pretty big chunk of their $50b company, given how many different products they have. Do you have a source for how much they made off of just PFASs?
ethanbond 670 days ago [-]
This happened at 3M? What are you referring to?
nightski 670 days ago [-]
Thats interesting. All the recent scientific evidence I have been seeing has been saying that Aspartame really isn't bad. This seems suspect. It's so hard to trust science today since it has become so intertwined with politics and corporate agendas.
carimura 670 days ago [-]
agreed, it's really hard with lobbyists, captured agencies, flawed studies, social media noise, political narratives, etc etc etc. We try our best to just go back to first principles: as close to the food source as possible, as few added ingredients as possible, organic, etc.
tptacek 669 days ago [-]
Ahh, the naturalist fallacy. But the natural substitutes for artificial sweeteners are markedly worse for you, and more primitive, less industrial cooking and food preparation techniques often can be as well.
carimura 658 days ago [-]
huh, there's a fallacy for everything these days. well yes, some mushrooms are as close to nature as possible but would kill us. but believing in nature more than pepsico is usually a decent choice.
astrange 669 days ago [-]
If you find everything is hard to trust, that likely just means you're not good at trusting things.
For instance, this is a known symptom of being Gen X.
hulitu 670 days ago [-]
AFAIK it can cause diarrhea.
vore 669 days ago [-]
Aspartame is not a sugar alcohol like the other artificial sweeteners that do cause diarrhea due to incomplete digestion.
sgbeal 670 days ago [-]
The weird thing about this is that i stopped drinking Diet Coke, specifically because of aspartame, after reading this same thing in 1996 or perhaps early 97. WHO's decision to wait nearly 30 years before backing that just makes them look impotent.
lotsofpulp 670 days ago [-]
FYI, according to the linked article, the WHO is not claiming what you think it is claiming.
>It is preparing to label the sweetener as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, Reuters reported on Thursday. That would mean there is some evidence linking aspartame to cancer, but that it is limited. The IARC has two more serious categories, “probably carcinogenic to humans” and “carcinogenic to humans”.
>It previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its probably cancer-causing class, and listed using mobile phones as possibly cancer-causing.
>The IARC safety review was conducted to assess whether or not aspartame is a potential hazard, based on all the published evidence, a person familiar with the matter told the Guardian. However, it does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume.
Some pretty weak claims. Especially weak considering the risk of aspartame (which are not confirmed, and not at amounts regularly consumer) relative to the risk sugar it replaces (which are guaranteed at amounts regularly consumed - see type 2 diabetes).
ranger_danger 670 days ago [-]
Where's the proof that drinking Diet Coke causes literally any health issue that is a direct relation to the aspartame itself specifically? Because I don't think that has ever existed because it's not actually harmful in this way... meanwhile your post reads like FUD.
Diet sodas with aspartame contain a warning for this reason. Now of course, most of us do not have this condition.
But how do we know if it is safe? I decided 20+ years ago that artificial sweeteners were a crutch with no nutritional value and unknown risks, so I stopped consuming them.
lotsofpulp 670 days ago [-]
Considering that sugar and excess consumption of carbohydrates is the number 1 health problem around the world, is it possible that the risks of low calorie sweeteners are not sufficient to outweigh the benefits of low calorie sweeteners?
dham 669 days ago [-]
I was just explaining this to my wife while we've been on keto. Yes, artificial sweeteners are bad, let's try to avoid them if possible, but if consuming some aspartame in jello helps us stay on keto and lose belly fat, then the benefits outweigh the risk.
monkpit 669 days ago [-]
Artificial sweeteners may[0] adversely affect the gut microbiome.
However, other studies suggest that artificial sweeteners break down so quickly that they never reach the gut.
It needs more research, but personally I choose to favor sugar over sweeteners, and just limit my consumption of sugar.
Where's your proof that gravity exists and that we fully understand all of its effects?
Science doesn't work that way. Meanwhile aspartame has been linked to many health problems.
astrange 669 days ago [-]
"Linked" doesn't mean anything because correlation is not causation.
lkuty 670 days ago [-]
We got to stay actively informed to be eating good stuff way sooner than the official position of the government about various foods. There are so much bad stuff in the typical supermarket. One way is reading the "right" books.
gnulinux 670 days ago [-]
How can a layman determine the right book? Anti-vax kooks also think they're reading the right sources.
adriand 670 days ago [-]
You don't need to read a book. I think you can get away with three steps:
1) This maxim from Michael Pollan: "Eat food [1]. Mostly plants. Not too much." (I personally follow an adjusted version of this: "Eat food. Only plants. Not too much.")
2) Review daily nutrient requirements to ensure your diet is providing you with adequate macro (protein, carbs, fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals).
3) A few months after adopting your new diet, get a high quality blood test that covers markers like iron, B12, etc., and make any required adjustments to what you're eating.
1: "Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize." https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/
skummetmaelk 670 days ago [-]
And if you eat too many of the wrong plants you get kidney stones etc. etc.
Emphasizing variety is very important.
It's almost like a second job to keep up with what you _should_ do. Reviewing daily nutrients is way too much effort for most folks.
saiya-jin 669 days ago [-]
No its not, thats the perspective of sedentary person who sees somebody running their 5k every day and is eager to give up before even starting.
Once you grok some trivially simple stuff (macro and micronutrients), few extremely trivial requirements (enough good sleep, stay away from sweet stuff in principle which may be hard in beginning but gets much easier over time, eat to stave off hunger and not to feel full, eat less in the evening), you are at least 90% there which is already enough. You really don't need to study constantly labels, you already know whats good and bad and its an effortless background process in the back of the mind.
It really is trivial and very quick to grok. The hard part for many is discipline, thats a mind game everybody has to fight with themselves and find ways how to manage it without frustrating oneself constantly, and thus give up eventually on whole effort.
People often compensate some deep mental issues, ie anxiety with overeating or eating junk food. Obviously this needs to be tackled first if any long term success can be claimed.
Also, for parents, please don't condition your kids on sweet stuff as some sort of reward. If you have to, use some great fruits like forest fruits and not cakes, ice cream etc. You are not being a good parent at all by doing this, just conditioning them mentally that sweet junk is something special, a prize deserved, which creates pretty bad mental patterns for rest of our lives.
NovaDudely 669 days ago [-]
It is like jumping into a TV series that has 10 seasons or a podcast that has 300 back episodes, it seems daunting at first but taken one step at a time it can become very manageable to learn what to be done and how to manage it.
It isn't so much managing daily nutrients but ensuring there is a decent variety of nutrients available at home. There is a lot of trial and error but long term it works out well. And like you said, variety is key!
count 670 days ago [-]
"You don't need to read a book".
Immediately cites a book.
I don't disagree with your assertion on steps, to be clear, just that you aren't answering the actual question. How can you trust Pollan (I'm not saying you can't, just...that's the core question the OP was asking).
Spivak 669 days ago [-]
The idea is from a recipe book but the advice is just that quote and nothing more.
rcme 670 days ago [-]
I disagree with the GP that staying informed about nutrition can be done with books. There is very little generally accepted science when it comes to nutrition. I try to use the "test of time" approach. If we haven't figured out that something was bad after at least 500 years, then it probably isn't that bad. If we've been eating a food for less than 500 years, then it should be considered suspect.
stcroixx 670 days ago [-]
I'm with you. Sad there's so little knowledge or trust in that knowledge that we have to just observe over a long time scale like this.
chimeracoder 670 days ago [-]
> If we haven't figured out that something was bad after at least 500 years, then it probably isn't that bad. If we've been eating a food for less than 500 years, then it should be considered suspect.
While I agree with the spirit of this, I'll point out that tobacco was brought to Europe over 500 years ago, and only recently discovered to be one of the most unhealthy products available. Not to mention that it was widely used in the Americas for long before that.
In fact, 450 years after Columbian contact, the medical consensus was that tobacco was good for health.
jjoonathan 670 days ago [-]
Tobacco is an all-natural plant product backed by longstanding tradition! How could it possibly be bad for your health?
Ugh, if we hadn't banned them from advertising they would absolutely be using this angle and it would absolutely be working.
saalweachter 670 days ago [-]
Isn't this essentially part of the not-quite-marketing for marijuana? It's not highly processed like tobacco cigarettes, it's just natural?
taeric 669 days ago [-]
Well, it is more than a little insane how much worse cigarettes were from the things that were added to it. Even more crazy, to me, to consider how nicotine is by and large not what made them bad. Such that I'm honestly not clear on why there aren't more uses of that.
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
That doesn't mean those foods optimize for longevity.
Why not just look at the balance of evidence for various dietary patterns today?
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
Consider a classic like Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Eating by Walter Willett. All evidence-based. No fad crap you usually get in this space. You won't be surprised by any of the advice, but it's nice to see it all collated in one place.
It's impossible for a layman to know because most people in accredited positions of authority lie without cessation.
Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best.
You might still get it wrong. Such is life.
skrtskrt 670 days ago [-]
I've recently noticed on TikTok a big trend of food scientists, and chemists that basically just aggressively "debunk" anyone saying any sort of preservative or processed food ingredient is bad for you, and they always fall back on "proven safe for human consumption" which is just like circular reasoning that the FDA is perfect, righteous, and good.
There is of course a lot of kooky beliefs out there about food. But it seems like there is a very intentional social media campaign to associate ANY claim that the stuff in our food is not in our best interest with the kooks that believe the only safe thing to eat is raw goat balls or whatever.
For books anyway, I found The Hundred-Year Lie to be incredibly in depth, but there's a lot of chemistry so it's verrry dense.
failbuffer 670 days ago [-]
That's not enough: you should also read the critics and opponents of what you think is true. That is, if you're truly trying to figure out reality and not just seeking psychological security.
Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.
SV_BubbleTime 669 days ago [-]
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
iopq 670 days ago [-]
Or you just read a scientific paper. It's called a review and it goes over several studies and uses statistics to determine probability of claims. For example,
Personally I'm taking the WHO announcement as an implicit signal that they are no longer so tightly controlled/held captive by corporate interests as they have been for the past ... three, four decades?
Better late than never, I guess.
systemvoltage 669 days ago [-]
Why? I don’t understand. You can imagine a scenario where executives at WHO have shorted the CocaCola stock or bought Aspartame alternatives stock? Many such scenarios possible.
tap-snap-or-nap 669 days ago [-]
Government bodies took a lot more responsibility before the 90's after 90's they rather fund the private sector than be blamed for being authoritarian and monopolistic.
nerdponx 670 days ago [-]
As a kid in the 90s I remember seeing health warnings on things like artificially-sweetened chewing gum. I have a very specific memory of asking my dad about it at the local deli.
indymike 669 days ago [-]
That was saccharin. I remember the label on my granddad's Tab cola.
It caused bladder cancer in lab animals at high doses, and it was later found that the metabolic pathway that caused the cancer did not exist in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin
mhanberg 670 days ago [-]
Literally read halfway down the article before they say that "working overnight" is also in the "probably carcinogenic" category and that the organization is known for publishing confusing results that cause panic.
FFS
fortenforge 669 days ago [-]
Actually "working overnight" is "probably carcinogenic" which is a higher evidentiary standard than Aspartame which is "possibly carcinogenic".
Basically these WHO cancer guidelines are entirely useless in terms of public health and have probably done as much harm as Prop 65 has in California.
tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that did find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.
tekla 670 days ago [-]
> The "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields" associated with using mobile phones are "possibly cancer-causing"
Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer
marginalia_nu 670 days ago [-]
The word "possibly" does a lot of heavy lifting in having this make sense.
umeshunni 669 days ago [-]
Did you know that sunlight causes cancer?
beders 670 days ago [-]
Yeah, with billions of cell phone users humankind is practically dead now....
cameronh90 669 days ago [-]
They do: "Group 4: probably not carcinogenic"
The list is empty...
jcutrell 670 days ago [-]
Honestly, what I want to know in a headline like this is "what changed?"
As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in many studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.
So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?
recursive 670 days ago [-]
Right here, in this very thread, are comments suggesting that there is no credible evidence that aspartame is a carcinogen.
klabb3 669 days ago [-]
The most obvious substitute for aspartame is sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. In liquid form, and the quantities that people drink soda, the health risks are immense. Cardiovascular decease kills a comparable amount of people as cancer overall, from all sources. For aspartame to end up a net negative, it’d have to be massively carcinogenic.
Certainly its better to replace Diet Coke with water, all else equal, but the effort in changing habits is much higher. There is a ton of preventable decease due to bad diet and lack of exercise, despite well known causes. So why is that?
Health discussions have this psychological bias where people think “be more like me” is effective (don’t do drugs, just go out and meet people, exercise more, just stop smoking). The fact that people think like this, despite the war on drugs disaster, is madness. Especially when the solution is so simple: throw the moralism away and focus solely on harm reduction – also known as “whatever works”. Just good old empiricism.
throwaway1777 670 days ago [-]
Ok I’ll be that guy. The study says there’s no risk unless you drink equivalent of 70 cokes per day. So I think I’m ok. Barely.
jjulius 670 days ago [-]
You're not wrong, but the full quote from the article is:
>“Back in 1981 they established an acceptable daily intake of aspartame, of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. To consume over that limit would require a very large daily consumption of Diet Coke or similar drinks. On 14 July, Jecfa may change that risk assessment, or they may not.”
Emphasis mine. I'd be curious to see if this understanding has shifted in the past 42 years.
benatkin 670 days ago [-]
That doesn't mean it's good for you. I agree with the labeling of it as a neurotoxin, whether or not the rubber meets the pavement at a psychological level. There are better ways of calming for the vast majority of people than satisfying a sweet tooth so often. For one thing it can reduce the overall satisfaction of eating sweet things, through the law of diminishing returns.
kagakuninja 670 days ago [-]
I've been hearing that type of argument since the 70s, after they banned saccharine.
Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?
We often test chemicals on rats, but the problem is that they only live a few years. No one wants to wait 20+ years to see the results of an expensive study on longer lived mammals anyway.
The solution is we feed the rats excessive amounts of the chemical and see if it causes problems. This isn't a great way to do it, but what other option would you suggest?
hombre_fatal 669 days ago [-]
> Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?
The same way we know cigarettes are unsafe. You look at human cohort data and run variable adjustment models on it and control for confounders. How do cigarette smokers or diet soda drinkers do over time, especially in older cohorts? Are there any other products out there with aspartame that we can look at as well until we've isolated a risk model for aspartame by itself?
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Chemically, it doesn't make sense that there would be any harm in the first place. With properly functioning kidneys, the resultant chemicals get filtered out extremely quickly through the urine. It helps that most diet colas are also diuretic. The resulting methanol and/or formaldehyde don't stick around to cause harm. This is empirically backed up by the lack of adverse effects over massive populations and over decades.
throwaway1777 670 days ago [-]
I would simply suggest we stop making any strong claims until we do know.
miika 670 days ago [-]
Mobile phones, WiFi etc a have been under the same classification by WHO since 2011. The industry didn’t take it too seriously, and probably this one doesn’t mean anything either.
A few of the conspiracy nutters that I know firmly beleive that "Big Aspartame" is responsible for suppressing information about its dire negative effects.
But when you consider:
- how many doctors and scientists are personally/professionally motivated to research this
- how many gov't organizations are concerned about this
- how many industry competitors would benefit from discovering this
- how many lawyers would get rich from exploiting this
...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.
samtho 670 days ago [-]
To expand on point number 3, the sugar industry is one of the most notorious at utilizing motivated research to its own benefit. If aspartame had even slightest chance of causing illness or cancer, you could bet on the inevitable, unrelenting smear campaign that Big Sugar would be waging against it.
vosper 670 days ago [-]
Who are the players in Big Sugar who would exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.
freedomben 669 days ago [-]
Corn farmers are a huge part (because their product makes high fructose corn syrup) and they are highly effective lobbyists.
They are also the ones that pushed ethanol on us and told us it wouldn't hurt our engines (even though it absolutely did. Most engines now are designed with ethanol in mind, but ethanol gas destroyed a lot of otherwise perfectly fine engines before people realized it was a huge lie. By then it was too late anyway)
With the presidential primaries coming up we'll get another big reminder about how disproportionately influential the Iowa corn farmers are.
samtho 670 days ago [-]
You’re correct that soft drink providers have no horse in this race as they are mere consumers of sweetening agents, and the their product output depends on customer demand. It would hardly make much difference to them if 90% of consumers started to prefer Diet Coke over Coca-Cola, they would just make more Diet Coke.
The sugar industry’s escapades are well known. Most notably, the SRF’s (Sugar Research Foundation) war on dietary fats[0][1].
They need to sell something, if people believe sugar is bad, sweeteners are bad, even disposable plastic bottles are bad, what's left?
Edit to add something more concrete, we already have the "sugar tax" in the UK, to avoid it soft drinks went mostly sugar free or reduced sugar substantially, and replaced it with sweeteners.
Who are the players in Big Sugar who works exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.
kelipso 670 days ago [-]
And yet it took 40+ years for its danger to be widely acknowledged. Forgive me but for thinking there is something suspicious going on... Frankly, the Big Aspartame should be the default explanation and any other explanation be under more scrutiny.
samtho 670 days ago [-]
Big Aspartame does not exist in a vacuum, however. The sugar industry is arguably bigger, more powerful, and has even more budget to fund motivated research. I don’t trust Big Aspartame to prove to is that it is safe, but I put my full faith in Big Sugar to tell us if something is wrong with Aspartame.
glonq 670 days ago [-]
I'm not sure that I even beleive in "Big Aspartame". The patents have expired, so there are dozens of companies who manufacture it globally. I doubt that they all meet at their global secret cabal hideout to align their plans to extinguish all research.
throw6666667 669 days ago [-]
That's not how things work, at all. Most of the things you consider conspiracy theories are done completely in the open and there's nothing conspiratorial nor theoretical about it. These huge companies have hundreds of lawyers and lobbyists, sometimes they work together to push or prevent legislation. They are doing their job, nothing illegal about it, companies are also allowed to do it.
Just to give you a recent/techy example, I'm sure Meta and Google lawyers and lobbyists worked together to deal with the ridiculous Canada news law. Same with Epic and others pushing alternative payments in the App Store.
Not everything is a "secret cabal hideout" jeez
qup 669 days ago [-]
How much longer are the sugar patents still in effect that allow Big Sugar to exist?
abhaynayar 669 days ago [-]
It's kind of similar to finding a trivial security bug in a critical piece of software after a decade of it being introduced into code. You would think it would not be possible because the software is being used everywhere for extremely important stuff, and so many highly-skilled security researchers would have already looked out for it due to incentives. But there are many examples of this happening. I have heard of many instances where a critical security bug was already reported many years ago, but no one bothered to look at it and fix it until someone else rediscovered it.
User23 669 days ago [-]
> ...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.
Have you ever heard of tobacco? Suppressing information about the harmful effects of a popular consumer product for decades is observably within the capabilities of at least some who might wish to do so.
I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.
LegitShady 670 days ago [-]
Caffeic acid may be a carcinogen but I do not think any decent studies have found a connection between drinking coffee and cancer, and in fact some have found the opposite.
codr7 670 days ago [-]
A bigger problem is likely caffeine inhibiting uptake of vitamin D and disrupting sleep.
tacocataco 669 days ago [-]
Plus stress and high cortisol levels from burnout.
dghughes 670 days ago [-]
Weird to have Coke in the Reuters headline when it's not just Coke that uses aspartame.
And this is interesting may be related?
>Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid.
>When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. ...The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate ... they ‘excite’ or stimulate the neural cells to death.
>Methanol is highly toxic; it is gradually released in the small intestine when the methyl group of the aspartame encounters the enzyme chymotrypsin. It has been pointed out that some fruit juices and alcoholic beverages contain small amounts of methanol.
Diet Coke is undoubtedly America's biggest source of aspartame. Diet Coke has massive market share.
quechimba 669 days ago [-]
Regular coke is probably my biggest source of aspartame now that they changed the recipe to contain 30% less sugar compensated by aspartame and acesulfame-k. I bought a Sprite a while ago and it tasted different so I checked and it doesn't even contain any sugar even though the bottle looks just like before and says "100% saborizantes naturales" (although the sweeteners are artificial). Here's the product page, https://www.coca-cola.com.pe/marcas/sprite
carimura 670 days ago [-]
I had a computer science professor who drank so much diet coke that she had a wall of empty cans stacked up from floor to ceiling in her office. Even then, 20 years ago now, I was so grossed out with that level of artificial intake I wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. But that wouldn't have helped my grade.
lotsofpulp 670 days ago [-]
What is “artificial intake”? Would it have been preferable to “real” intake of sugar from regular Coke?
carimura 658 days ago [-]
I suppose that's the big debate. Although one can safely say it would have probably been preferable to stack cans of sparkling water. or maybe perri-air.
vore 669 days ago [-]
Why? Why does it matter to you?
carimura 658 days ago [-]
eh, because... empathy? I like to see people make decent choices.
Meh, I'd sooner believe it treats depression. Try having a Diet Coke and report on the 24h after ;)
nicole_express 670 days ago [-]
I hope this questionable categorization doesn't result in aspartame being removed from sodas; I much prefer it to other artificial sweeteners. Can definitely tell when Diet Coke is formulated to include them.
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
We don't discuss the dark times when Pepsico switched from aspartame to sucralose in the 2010s.
sacnoradhq 669 days ago [-]
Another "eggs are bad" article. Wake me when there's something other than a nothingburger here.
tahoeskibum 670 days ago [-]
Coffee is a known carcinogen (due to formation of acrylamides in roasting). Ripe fruits emit small amounts ethylene that is carcinogenic.
The current system (especially CA Prop 65) makes it impossible for these pronouncements to carry any meaning whatsoever.
6510 669 days ago [-]
The US research history has to be one of the weirdest possible. Large financial incentive, actual fraud, repeated animal trials where everything goes wrong.
Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)
But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.
marvel_boy 670 days ago [-]
Curiously the share value of COKE has not plunged today. (+0.21% as we speak)
pessimizer 670 days ago [-]
Coke owns most sodas, so if you're switching, you're likely to end up switching to another Coke product.
Why would it? If it's a carcinogen for Coke then it's a carcinogen for Pepsi or everyone else.
blibble 670 days ago [-]
they'll just swap it out for the next artificial sweetener
and that'll be found to be bad in 20 years time, then they repeat again
670 days ago [-]
gumby 669 days ago [-]
A bit of background (from an unlikely source). The Tl;DR:
\* Group 1: carcinogenic (this includes cigarettes, the HPV viruses that cause cervical cancer, and ionizing radiation)
\* Group 2A: probably carcinogenic (this includes red meat, hot beverages, and working as a hairdresser)
\* Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic (this is the group aspartame reportedly may end up in)
\* Group 3: not classifiable
\* Group 4: probably not carcinogenic (this list contains zero items; a chemical called caprolactam was previously on it, but was moved to group 3)
These are not designations of cancer *risk*, but of *the chance that there is a detectable link of some kind*.
Nice! I can't wait for cheap obsolete sweeteners like aspartame and acesulfam-k to begone from my beloved energy drinks to be replaced with relatively modern and supposedly prebiotic alternatives like steviol glycosides, xylitol etc. Unfortunately even the most expensive energy drink manufacturers still use aspartame and acesulfam-k.
femboy 670 days ago [-]
I wish there was a switch in the mass production of products to contain neither sugar or sweeteners.
But it feels like that is never going to happen.
SoftTalker 670 days ago [-]
You can do it yourself. I used to drink a lot of sweetened soda. I switched to diet, then stopped. Regular sugar-sweetened drinks taste sickeningly sweet to me now, and diet drinks taste like chemicals.
Once you break the habit, your sense of taste recovers and you realize how nasty these drinks are. Most people get started on them as kids when you don't have a nuanced sense of taste and really crave sweet stuff.
brewdad 670 days ago [-]
Same. I used to drink multiple Cokes a day. I switched to Diet Coke sometime in my late 20s. In my 30s I cut back to one Diet Coke a day and about 4 years ago in my mid 40s I switched over to carbonated water when I crave something fizzy but still limit myself to one a day most days. Coffee and plain water have replaced the soda I used to drink.
This was all done over time as I realized I needed to change my diet to keep weight off and I wasn't really enjoying my daily soda(s) anyway. With an actual intent, one could drop soda within a few months easily and never miss it.
nwienert 669 days ago [-]
Until you realize caffeine has long term negative effects on sleep even at low doses. Only the pure water drinkers can claim any moral high ground! (I’m not one of them)
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stronglikedan 670 days ago [-]
Why would there be? Sugar is good. Products with sugar are good. Self control is also good. People can like products with sugar and exercise self control, so there will always be a demand for mass produced products with sugar, and that's a good thing.
sp332 670 days ago [-]
Self control doesn't reduce the amount of sugar that's already added to the soda I would like to drink. It just means I don't get to drink it. I have to go find low-sugar sodas. I would like to have more options.
dham 669 days ago [-]
We have to stop putting sugar in dumb things first, like ketchup and bacon. We have to get a grip.
time0ut 670 days ago [-]
No chance there would be a switch. Consumer tastes and eduction aren't going to change.
Short of that, I wish there was clearer and more consistent labeling. I avoid sugar and sweeteners. Its annoying to be in the mood for a flavored drink, see something that claims to be zero sugar/all natural/etc, grab it in a hurry, then discover on the first sip its got erythritol in it. I read the label, but sometimes I miss it. My preferred options are unsweetened iced tea, coffee, or flavored water. Those are reliable, but can get boring.
Food is generally easier. I just avoid anything that has (or should have) a lot of carbs as a rule when looking for convenient pre-packaged food. No point in sweetening a can of sardines...
kagakuninja 670 days ago [-]
I just started brewing my own tea and coffee, unsweetened. Snack foods are a bit harder, but we are better off eating whole fruits and vegetables anyway.
SirMaster 670 days ago [-]
There are plenty of products that have an unsweetened version, at least in my experience.
cheekibreeki2 670 days ago [-]
Just returned from Ireland and every 'regular' soda was full of disgusting artificial sweeteners. In the usa these would be labeled diet. And of course sucralose was pretty common and we're now finding scary things about its harm to the human body. Sugar really isn't that bad..
OkayPhysicist 670 days ago [-]
Sugar in the amount put in soda absolutely is terrible for you. The problem definitely is with people drinking too much soda, period, but replacing your average Americans's diet soda consumption with sugar soda consumption works out to an average increase of ~73 calories/person/day. Of course, most of that consumption is being done by the subset of the population currently primarily drinking diet soda, which multiples that number by 2-5 depending on what study you refer to. Which would definitely be an alarming increase in caloric consumption in a significant block of the population.
bamfly 670 days ago [-]
It's really weird that we've normalized consuming huge amounts of what's effectively an exceptionally-sweet dessert drink with most non-fancy restaurant or fast-food meals. Shit made a lot more sense when standard serving size was like 7oz and free soda refills weren't a common thing (so: the 1950s or whenever, for the former, and before some time in the '90s, for the latter). 20+oz glasses (and 32oz "medium-size" to-go cups—JFC) and free refills pushed by servers are just nuts. That's so very much sugar.
Imagine consuming a pile of 37 Pixy Stix (sugar equivalent of 24oz of Coca Cola) to accompany a hamburger. WTF. That's plainly nasty as hell, and anyone doing that in public would rightly feel ashamed. And that's not even a large serving of soda, by modern standards.
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Gotta do something with all that corn.
lfowles 670 days ago [-]
The cups are usually 3/4 full of ice to start with, heh
taeric 670 days ago [-]
73 calories actually sounds misleadingly low? How is that calculated?
I think this is what you are correcting in the rest of the post? In that a single soda is typically double that. And many folks drink more than a single soda. Considerably more.
OkayPhysicist 670 days ago [-]
The average American consumes 38.87 gallons of soda year. 43% of Coke sales are Diet, I extrapolated that across the market, since Coke has a pretty dominant market share anyway. That's 16.7 gallons of diet soda per American, or 178 cans of soda. Multiply that by 150 calories/can, divide by 365, you get the 73 calories.
As I mentioned before, that's a side effect of averaging across all Americans, a fraction of who don't drink soda, and a (much larger, in both senses of the word) who drink sugared soda. The population that those calories would realistically be distributed over, the diet soda drinkers, is somewhere between 20% and 40% of the population, hence the "multiply by 2-5".
taeric 670 days ago [-]
Makes sense; but I think it is odd to include folks that aren't relevant in the increase, though. Really, it is just weird to see a number that the only way to see an increase of 78 calories is to swap over into a half of a drink.
Granted, you work with what you have. :D
OkayPhysicist 669 days ago [-]
Yeah, I suspect it works out closer to the "350 more calories per day in 20% of the population" number, but again, sources were rough.
biomcgary 670 days ago [-]
As a biologist, I can tell you that sugar really is bad. All sorts of nasty effects (e.g., look at the RAGE gene and pathway). Of course, that doesn't mean artificial sweeteners are a good alternative. Limiting added sweeteners of any kind is a good idea, just hard to follow.
kushan2020 670 days ago [-]
You are making it sound like alcohol - where the warning is no amount of alcohol is safe.
Sugar is a naturally occurring substance and is totally safe for consumption. However, purified added sugar is bad for you because in nature you cannot find a fruit that contains that many sugars per gram.
mcdonje 670 days ago [-]
Just because we're finding out many sugar replacements are bad doesn't mean that sugar isn't bad in high doses as with sugary drinks.
beebeepka 670 days ago [-]
Don't consume high doses of anything. Sugar is fantastic.
mandmandam 670 days ago [-]
Sugar is pretty bad. Glucose spikes cause a huge amount of stress in the body.
But yeah, Ireland's drinks are like that because of a 'sugar tax', and now it's quite hard to find fizzy drinks without gross sweeteners. Even brands that were quite high quality before are kinda rancid now.
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Nah, sugar is way worse.
skellyclock 669 days ago [-]
One of my favourite all-time comments on HN was the guy that was constantly trying new experimental sweeteners just for fun and ended up with something that bound to his tastebuds for months. I can't find it.
xvilka 669 days ago [-]
It's better to not use sweetener at all, nor sugar. After some withdrawal period body stops to crave either. The only good amount of either is zero.
liampulles 669 days ago [-]
I got off the sugar addiction (which I am very happy about) but still need something to sweeten my tea and coffee addiction, which I use sweetener for
I am a Luddite when it comes to tastes, no two ways about it. I suspect many people are, and so some tradeoff has to be made.
mrabcx 670 days ago [-]
Perhaps this will finally increase the popularity of Stevia.
RamblingCTO 669 days ago [-]
Just live healthy. I hate the addition of stevia and other sweeteners to everything. Please give me cane sugar. I'm a grown up, I can handle my intake, thanks. (Especially anything in the direction of soylent, green shakes etc. No need for stevia.)
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Nah, it tastes worse.
nuc1e0n 669 days ago [-]
Maybe. But is this like how Bananas are radioactive? i.e. almost not at all? How carcinogenic would the equivalent amount of sugar be?
jncfhnb 669 days ago [-]
Do other people feel like aspartame introduces a tangible viscosity into drinks? I feel like it’s like drinking slime
CydeWeys 669 days ago [-]
The opposite. Real sugar makes a drink much more viscous. Fake sugar leaves the mouth feel thin.
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Nope. The amount you need in a drink is so small it wouldn't substantially affect the viscosity at all. Source: me, who mixes soda syrups and did piles of informal experiments on syrup ingredients.
vvilliamperez 669 days ago [-]
I think what you experiencing is an overproduction of saliva to dissolve what your body thinks is sugar.
MetricExpansion 668 days ago [-]
This (Group 2B) is the same list that includes mobile phone radiation. I think I’ll take my chances.
cm_silva 669 days ago [-]
As an experiment, sprinkle some aspartame-based artificial sweetener over an ant and watch what happens.
brink 670 days ago [-]
That stuff gives me migraines. I can't even chew most gum without a headache because it's full of it.
moogly 670 days ago [-]
Isn't it mostly Xylitol in chewing gum?
ajhurliman 670 days ago [-]
Xylitol is actually pretty rare as the main sweetener in gum, it’s a lot more expensive. If gum mentions that it contains xylitol, check the ingredient list to see if there are other sweeteners listed first.
Xylitol is preferable because of its oral hygiene benefits, but most consumers are choosy enough to make sure their gum is exclusively xylitol.
There are some brands on Amazon that sell 100% xylitol gum if you go out of your way to find it though. Be careful with it around dogs though, xylitol is insanely toxic to them.
TeaBrain 669 days ago [-]
I just checked the gum in my backpack. Both Trident and Mentos gum have xylitol, sorbitol, acesulfame K, mannitol and sucralose. Mentos gum also has aspartame and maltitol syrup in addition to the others.
rootusrootus 670 days ago [-]
The ones I'm familiar with mostly use sorbitol. Though it's not uncommon to find aspartame on the 'less than 2% of the following' part of the ingredients list.
brink 670 days ago [-]
On the list of gums that give me a headache, it's aspartame on the ingredients list. Believe me, I check. :)
myshpa 670 days ago [-]
Some gum bases are made from non-degradable plastic polymers ... another reason to stay away.
hobomatic 669 days ago [-]
Being 'declared possible' seems meaningless. Isn't it already implicitly possible?
SirMaster 670 days ago [-]
Existing... is a possible cancer risk.
jeegsy 670 days ago [-]
One would have hoped for a more definitive statement (either way) than 'possible'
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
It is definitive. It doesn't cause any measurable harm.
hedora 669 days ago [-]
I wish they’d just force all products with a non nutritional sweetener to have a big cigarette-style warning label on the front of the packaging.
I still haven’t gotten over the rise of “organic” artificial sweeteners. That must have involved some N-th level regulatory capture with the product labeling regulators.
cheekibreeki2 669 days ago [-]
The eu slaps these sweeteners in drinks not marked as artificially sweetened, it's maddening.
tracker1 669 days ago [-]
It seems within the past month we've seen the WHO warn about non-sugar sweeteners general, aspartame in particular, and looks like sucralose in particular. I'm not generally one to support conspiracy theories, but given the number of countries placing limits on added sugar, sugar taxes and the like, what are the odds the sugar/hfcs industries are funding these studies.
Not to mention that with aspartame in particular, the evidence is sparse and low quality. The verbiage regarding Sucralose in actual human terms of consumption are much more alarming. I generally try to keep any sweet drink consumption with meals, or otherwise sweetened with stevia (which has seen it's own detractors). Given a century and a half of food industry lies, disinformation, misinformation and tethers with regulatory bodies, it's really hard to believe anything and just defer to if it was considered "food" a couple hundred years ago.
670 days ago [-]
669 days ago [-]
Etrnl_President 669 days ago [-]
But the FDA approved it. It is safe. Silly WHO.
670 days ago [-]
leashless 669 days ago [-]
Is Stevia evil these days?
Tastes less toxic. Is it?
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
It tastes worse.
dimitar 670 days ago [-]
This is awful reporting.
Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria.
So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
marcosdumay 670 days ago [-]
AFAIK, most lists of "possible carcinogenic" are just lists of things people want to cause cancer but the evidence disagrees.
There's something to say about lists where people put substances we don't know a lot, to call attention for studying more. But I haven't actually seen one of those, it's always lists of substances people study a lot, and publication bias set them marginally into statistical relevancy.
autoexec 669 days ago [-]
I doubt very many people want any substance to cause cancer. People want the things they eat to be healthy and wholesome but they've learned that they can't trust the people making our food or our regulatory agencies to protect them. That's caused people to be cautious and distrustful even when there is little cause for it.
cm2012 670 days ago [-]
Aspartame is one of the must trustable things we eat. Very few foods have been studied as much as it has. Both quality and quantity of studies.
This is part of how the medical regulation leaders in every country are the most insanely cautious, neurotic people on earth. They all recommend not to eat steaks rare. Everything is a carcinogen. When they have such a low tolerance for danger, it just means everyone learns not to listen to their advice.
EA-3167 670 days ago [-]
I file it under the same category as, "The Daily Mail trying to divide every known substance into ones which cause cancer, and ones which cure it."
mrguyorama 670 days ago [-]
This venn diagram is just a circle
EA-3167 670 days ago [-]
And the label for that diagram is that "I'm not saying it's aliens" guy, but instead of 'aliens' he's saying, "CHEMICALS".
sodathrowaway 670 days ago [-]
Well, is it good or neutral for you? I've always felt like these diet drinks were just marketing to make you think everything was fine, feel free to drink as many as you want. I've worked with a few people that would go through 4-6 Coke Zeros every day. In no world can I imagine that that wouldn't have negative long term effects on a human -- all things in moderation, right?
Personally, I'll drink a Mexican Coke with cane sugar maybe once or twice a year, knowing it's not great for me and treating it as a dessert.
But I do agree, it's not good reporting. Pretty much no info on the actual scientific research, but hopefully WHO will give more in depth data.
mjburgess 670 days ago [-]
> In no world can I imagine that that wouldn't have negative long term effects on a human -- all things in moderation, right?
Why on earth would you think that?
It's carbonated water with a tiny amount of food dye, sweeter and caffeine. The latter of which, iirc, has generally positive effects.
[1] shows that artificial sweeteners lead to higher insulin resistance. It is so because they provoke insulin level increase due to their sweet taste.
Caffeine is a tricky one.
If you can drink 6 cups of espresso a day, you have 50% less chance developing dementia. But, how can you drink 6 cups of coffee per day if you do not have good health? It can be that the "small positive effects of caffeine" are due to caffeine consumers have a little better health overall and these with worse health have to consume less caffeine.
For an anecdote, I once went completely off caffeine for a month and haven't noticed a thing after first three days, when I was unusually sleepy. Even training results followed the same progression.
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Exactly. I mixed soda syrups for my small business and had to learn what actually goes into it all. Soda is generally 80% soda water, and the syrup is usually only 50 °Bx (roughly 50% sugar by mass). Of course with sweetners the syrup is almost entirely water since you need a tiny amount of the sweetner to get the same level of sweetness. In an average soda drink, the flavor and dye is about 0.6% by volume of the syrup (again, more water since it's in solution), and the preservative is 0.2%. The amounts are so tiny you would have to consume a completely unreasonable amount to even get sick, let alone do lasting harm (except for the sugar, obviously).
crooked-v 670 days ago [-]
Well, the mild acidity is bad for your teeth. Other than that there doesn't seem to be much that stands out as an issue, at least from what we know so far.
enlyth 670 days ago [-]
Can it be called mild? Diet coke has a pH of 3, which is the same as vinegar
TheRealPomax 670 days ago [-]
But what does California's proposition 65 say about it?
pinkmuffinere 670 days ago [-]
I know this is a joke, but if anyone’s curious:
Prop65 says you have to tell people if your product contains chemicals from a list of carcinogenic substances. The list is kept up-to-date by California. Prop65 has no punishment for over-reporting though - you can slap on a warning “just for fun” if you want.
Unless California has aspartame on its list, prop65 says nothing about this.
api 670 days ago [-]
Saw a California shirt once that was a prop65 warning: "This shirt has been determined by the state of California..."
> So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
Saying it's "partially responsible" in essence is ridiculous, though, when it's also a critical nutrient we eat in virtually every food. Aspartame is not. It's the sheer volume of sugar ingested that's the issue.
garbagecoder 670 days ago [-]
High fructose corn syrup is not a critical nutrient.
jeron 670 days ago [-]
effectively this is pick your poison: aspartame or sugar
Pepsi stopped using sucralose in favor of aspartame several years ago due to customer backlash.
tehnub 670 days ago [-]
I choose Stevia
gjsman-1000 670 days ago [-]
Why is it awful reporting? The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer) is labeling it as being, quite literally, a “possible carcinogen.” That’s the actual name of the category. It’s either “Not classified,” “Possible Carcinogen,” “Probable Carcinogen,” or “Carcinogen.”
LONDON, June 29 (Reuters) - One of the world's most
common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a
possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health
body, according to two sources with knowledge of the
process, pitting it against the food industry and
regulators.
[…13 paragraphs later…]
The IARC's decisions have also faced criticism for
sparking needless alarm over hard to avoid substances or
situations. It has four different levels of
classification - carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic,
possibly carcinogenic and not classifiable. The levels
are based on the strength of the evidence, rather than
how dangerous a substance is.
Using a term with a technical definition that isn't remotely close to the plain english meaning of the composing words, in a headline—and not explaining the gag in the first paragraph—is terrible reporting
sampo 670 days ago [-]
> The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer)
IARC is only nominally under WHO. It is a weird French agency founded by some French activists and politicians in the 1960's.
They use a 5 class classification
Group 1: The agent is carcinogenic to humans.
Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans.
Group 2B: The agent is possibly carcinogenic to humans.
Group 3: The agent is not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.
Group 4: The agent is probably not carcinogenic to humans.
But out of the 1042 chemicals and things they have classified, none are in Group 4. (Historically, there once was one single chemical in Group 4, but they have reclassified it.)
For IARC, everything is either at least possibly carcinogenic, or there is insufficient evidence (Group 3) to yet declare it carcinogenic.
Also:
"In 2019 IARC was accused of cooperation with "toxic tort law firms" who make profit of suing companies for compensation for alleged health issues based on IARC classification. IARC was accused from hiding conflicts of interest impacting a few invited experts, especially those related to large-scale cash flows from US law firms."
Many countries have perfectly capable chemicals agencies and food safety agencies, who are much more reliable than the IARC.
mrguyorama 670 days ago [-]
Isn't this the same list that says Cellphones are a possible carcinogen despite mountains of evidence that they cause no cancer and also zero known mechanism of action?
rowanG077 669 days ago [-]
That list doesn't even contain "Not a carcinogen". So basically I don't take it seriously at all.
ravenstine 670 days ago [-]
Purely anecdotal, but I used to drink insane amounts of aspartame in the form of Crystal Lite. I don't know what that's made of now, but decades ago it was made with aspartame, and I'd guzzle gallons upon gallons of that stuff because it could be mixed with tap water and was therefore cheaper than buying drinks in cans. Maybe in the long term it will cause my butt to fall off in my 60s, IDK, but if aspartame causes cancer, then it must be incredibly weak given the unglodly amounts I was consuming on a daily basis.
Today, I'd still avoid aspartame, but also sucralose, because it's unnecessary and may even cause insulin to be artificially raised in response to the sweetness. And I also just don't drink nearly as much as I used to now that I'm metabolically healthy.
asfgidonhio 670 days ago [-]
It's a common fallacy that increasing the dose necessarily increases the effects. There are a whole lot of chemicals where the relationship is more complex. There are drugs where negative effects only occur when the drug is discontinued, where the effect of the drug increases or decreases as it it taken continuously, where the effect rapidly saturates and does not increase with increasing dose, and so forth.
I know enough about pharmacology to know that I know nothing.
ravenstine 669 days ago [-]
> It's a common fallacy that increasing the dose necessarily increases the effects.
Can you provide an example of a chemical which has effects on the human body that are completely unrelated to the size of the dose? Just because the effects of a carcinogen may be non-linear in relation to the dosage, that doesn't mean that a greater risk of cancer incidents with a greater dose is an unreasonable expectation. Some thing can be assumed unless an exception is identified.
Tokkemon 669 days ago [-]
Mercury or radioactive material come to mind.
neonsunset 670 days ago [-]
When I accidentally ingest food or drinks containing aspartame, it takes me out for at least 24h with a hellish migraine.
kyriakos 670 days ago [-]
I suffer from migraines. Usually related to exposure to sun and sleep patterns, I found out that drinking diet coke during a day that I already experienced one of my other triggers, gives me a migraine almost immediately. Any other day it has no effect.
h2odragon 670 days ago [-]
being a statistical outlier means you don't count. Good luck explaining that to your doctors.
neonsunset 670 days ago [-]
Statistical outlier? Aspartame is known to be linked to migraine triggering:
Fruit is sweet enough for me already. Some granola and Greek yogurt to cut that down a bit more.
mvdtnz 670 days ago [-]
Every now and then I get car parts delivered from USA and without fail they come with a label telling me they cause cancer. I can't take this kind of labeling seriously when it comes from an American source.
l0ngyap 662 days ago [-]
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halfjoking 670 days ago [-]
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beebeepka 670 days ago [-]
The whole war on sugar is baffling to me. After I had my first glass of soda in a decade, my impression is that artificial sweeteners are garbage. Poisonous, too. But this has been known for decades, hasn't it. It's cheap, though.
As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes
The article mentions a French study showing a "slight" increase, over 100,000 pts, in an observational study that used self-reporting to control for other risk factors. I can't find it; has anyone else?
Warnings like these quickly hit the Prop 65 problem - the notices are so ubiquitous you go blind to them.
When you put the exact same warning on food as lead-containing special solder, cadmium paints, and other very obvious "don't eat this" industrial materials, it loses all efficacy.
And now, a short conversation between two people to illustrate the rhetoric in play:
Person 1: “Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!”
Person 2: “Except the top three players in that industry are quite profitably killing people.”
Person 1: “But how can the industry recover if we act too drastically?”
Person 2: I will quote what you said just above: <<Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!>> You were just saying that the market is adaptable! It seems like you are conflating the idea of protecting bad actors with the idea of setting the conditions for a healthy market. A healthy market does not kill its consumers.
Claim: we would benefit by building a culture where basic probability ranges are expected and used.
Idea: Serious publications could:
A. Set basic guidelines for talking about probability estimates; something akin to what you see in government or business intelligence publications. For example, maps terms to ranges:
“highly likely”: > 90%
“likely”: 70% - 90%
“somewhat likely”: 50% - 70%
…
B. Update their editorial standards to not allow pure vagary around probabilities and impacts.
Could authors write more quantitatively? At the levels of the top 100 publications, I’d guess that 80% could, with the help of research and editing staff.
Would some readers be scared off? I’d guess than 80% of a college educated audience could handle it. The rest might complain, but could level up with a little peer pressure.
Would articles become more rigorous? Over time, I’d hope most would. Shift the expectations and make the vocabulary less forgiving to vaguery and fudgery, and I think the incentives point in the right direction.
Very common = greater than 1 in 10
Common = 1 in 100 to 1 in 10
Uncommon [formerly 'less commonly' in BNF publications] = 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100
Rare = 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000
Very rare = less than 1 in 10 000
Frequency not known = frequency is not defined by product literature or the side-effect has been reported from post-marketing surveillance data
[0] https://bnf.nice.org.uk/medicines-guidance/adverse-reactions...
With that said, I consider your idea has merit and should be implemented.
But in terms of where we want to go, we can do better. Great writers care about precision, and wisely chosen numbers and ranges are able to provide that. It may be appropriate to situate them in footnotes or endnotes, depending on the context. But the numbers matter.
> You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.
I agree with the comment as written, though it strikes me that virtually no mainstream publications use writing that clarifies or quantifies these kinds of indirect relationships.
I see a lot of intellectual laziness or dumbing down. Two categorical errors happen often:
(A) writing “everything is connected”. This can be true in some sense while also being useless. The more interesting framing is to ask “to what degree” and under what modeling assumptions.
(B) Writing about various linkages without clarifying probability and impact dilution.
The connecting idea in my head was something like this: when most publications talk about cancer they tend to lack even a basic statistical language.
Backstory: Having hundreds of interactions with ChatGPT, which is trained on much mainstream writing, made this interaction pattern obvious and tiresome.
Another way of saying my complaint: It feels like otherwise intelligent people hit a barrier where they start speaking vaguely. They pretend like this is the best we can do. It ideally isn’t; we have extensive scientific and statistical studies. There is no reason why we as a culture have to accept such statistical phobia as quality writing.
Patient has standard American diet and is overweight but not obese -> that leads to sleep apnea -> chronically tired -> they develop a diet Coke habit -> slight increase in cancer risk. What's causing the cancer here, the diet, the adiposity, the sleep apnea, the lack of quality sleep, the soda itself, the effect of soda on teeth leading to gingival inflammation, or the aspartame in the soda?
IIRC, the only reason aspartame was not banned was because saccharine had just been, and if you banned aspartame there would have been literally no artificial sweeteners on the market. That is no longer the case, with sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Coke Zero and other diet sodas), Stevia, sorbitol, and several other sweeteners now on the market.
Perhaps this is outdated but this page says otherwise: “range of studies have found no evidence that sucralose causes cancer in humans”
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d....
I think this is the source of the more recent concerns around sucralose.
The fact is that anything that increases the amount of you or the rate of you over time over the bare minimum needed for survival is an increased cancer risk... there are other causes like exposure to radiation that actually damage cells and so on as well.
Ultimately the question isn't if there's a link to cancer, it's how much something is increasing your risk of cancer relative to the alternatives. I suspect artificial sweeteners are in general for most less risk than consuming vast amounts of sugar, gaining lots of weight, becoming inactive, and increasing their cancer risk that way but who knows. Obviously if you ommit everything but consume the bare minimum sugar you need for survival you'll have a lower risk... good luck with that in modern society and diets
Your point is only valid if it actually lowers sugar and other carbs intake. Which isn't the case for most people.
Next to that. With diet drinks people drink more since they feel like they can get a way with, some do with sugar variants as well, but seems like more people binge drink diet versions which could lead to higher exposure relatively.
The has been processing sugar for millennia, these chemicals are pretty new.
More people need to stop consuming garbage that wouldn't have been considered food 250+ years ago.
Do you have a citation for that? Google search is telling me the exact opposite, that it seems to reduce cancer growth.
Similarly though, antioxidants are often sold as a health food but can promote cancer because they benefit the cancer more than the rest of you, and some of them directly shut off chemo drugs. There's plenty of evidence of that one.
This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy [1]. A naturally occurring substance is not automatically less carcinogen, or harmful, than a manufactured one. Coffee is associated with elevated risk for bladder cancer. Cycad trees are known to be highly carcinogenic. Mycotoxins (mold) are toxic and carcinogenic. Aflatoxin from peanuts is found to be carcinogenic.
I'm not saying that stevia is not safe, but safety has nothing to do with being natural or not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
It would be a fallacy to suggest that one group or the other were unconditionally safer, but I find no dilemma in generalizing that the human body is more capable of processing plant-based substances. Just like I would generalize that consuming plant-based substances is healthier than consuming paint. Sure you can nit pick outliers, safe paint or oleander or whatever, but the heuristic is still of value.
For stevia to be arguably safer due coevolution with humans, the following would need to be true:
1. There is a selective pressure for stevia to not increase the risk of cancer in humans.
2. There is a selective pressure on humans to not have an increased risk of cancer from consuming stevia.
In other words, it is firstly to argue that a stevia plant which had a tendency to increase cancer risk in humans would be significantly less likely to reproduce. This effect would be hard enough even if the hypothetical carcinogen were to be otherwise selectively neutral, but it could have a selectively positive pressure if it were an essential hormone or defence against insects, pathogens, competitors, etc.
Secondly, it is to argue that if stevia were potentially carcinogenic, then humans that were susceptible to its effects were significantly less likely to reproduce. This fails on two levels. First, consider that even in the cut-and-dried cause of cancer that is smoking, lung cancer is still extremely rare among young smokers. Lung cancer patients are virtually always well past their reproductive age, meaning that even if a genetic mutation to be immune to tobacco were to appear (or indeed it may well already exist) then said mutation still has no selective advantage with regards to the consumption of tobacco. Second, even if a hypothetically-carcinogenic stevia[0] could exert selective pressure on humans to become unaffected by it, then that effect would only have taken place on the populations which consumed significant amounts of stevia over generations and not humanity as a whole.
[0] Which I insist, I don't believe is the case.
Humans are pretty observant, and have decent odds of noticing over time when particular things correlate with health problems. A plant known to cause health problems is less likely to become and remain a dietary staple. A plant that isn't a dietary staple misses out on a wealth of opportunity for propagation.
I think you're also hyperfocusing on the issue of evolution. The point isn't that stevia is a plant which merely exists, but rather its longevity in human culture[0].
What you're saying makes sense for random plants picked up in the woods; less so for plants that have been consumed by humans since antiquity. By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.
0: https://www.britannica.com/plant/stevia-plant#ref350513
And lots of cultivated plants have downsides.
> By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.
No, that's a strawman. Nobody is suggesting that "random research chemicals" should be considered safe. And extracting random chemicals out of plants would also be dangerous!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
It makes me wonder if some of the things like, e.g. the supposed success of the Mediterranean diet, are due to bits of food culture like this that we've lost or never fully understood.
An optimal organism doesn't imply an optimal environment.
If evolution had optimized fitness by adjusting "org" while keeping "food" constant, that wouldn't imply holding "org" constant and changing "food" wouldn't yield improvement.Evolution doesn't optimize the environment for the organism. Evolution performs stochastic gradient descent, improving the organism for the environment, which can easily get stuck at global optima. More importantly, it improves the organism for the environment/food/etc. The idea that the food is optimal for the organism gets the improvement mechanism backward.
Doesn't make it a good idea.
Clothes, refrigeration, and Pasteurization are all extremely recent on an evolutionary timescale. They're all artificial and extremely beneficial to human well-being.
Also, the idea that something is good because we've evolved with it gets the mechanism of evolution backward. Even if it were true that evolution's stochastic gradient descent had found the global maximum 15k years ago (instead of perhaps approximating a local maximum), that would imply no changes to the human would improve human reproductive success. It would not imply that no changes to the environment (such as available foods) would improve human reproductive success.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...
Liquid stevia is my go-to sweetener for most purposes, or if I'm baking I'll use a stevia-monk-inulin mix that measures 1:1 for sugar.
More recently, I've been using freeze dried miracle berries as a sweetener for low-sugar fruits. They essentially convert sour taste signals to sweet, which works great for strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, kiwi, passion fruit, and citrus. Also has a bit of an effect on blackberries and dragon fruit, and starfruit is on my list to try.
Related LPT: most of the fruits I eat are frozen with a few minutes of thawing at room temperature. Easier to store, easier to prep, and turns out to be pretty similar to Italian ice.
I can’t stand the taste, I’d rather go without than have a product with stevia.
Besides, honey doesn't really do what the artificial sweeteners does. "Just use honey" is horrible advice for diabetics, for example. It isn't going to help folks that are looking to avoid carbs. And so on.
Realistically, if you aren't supposed to be eating added sugar, honey isn't going to do the job either. It is just a different form of sugar.
Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave. Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
People aren't literally eating zero carbs, they are minimizing their carb intake for various reasons (like being diabetic). With almost any variety in your diet, you are getting enough carbs to function. People "avoid carbs" because with our modern world of abundance, it is too easy to over consume carbs. If you are diabetic, honey is more likely to put you in an early grave than artificial sweeteners.
>Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
Just because something is "artificial" doesn't mean bad. And rarely is one thing universally "better". it depends on the situation. Again, a diabetic looking for a soda-like drink is looking for different things than a vegan looking for dessert recipes.
>Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave.
Source?
I’d be willing to bet in more than 50% of cases it does.
> Source?
Didn’t WHO or some similar organisation just start officially recommending against them? I haven’t actually read any of the research on this, I’ve just taken my advice from people who have. My personal source is an argument from nature along the lines of “if we didn’t need artificial sweeteners for 300,000 years, we probably won’t need them now”.
I mean, good luck avoiding them and liking chewing gum. Or good luck if you are diabetic and want a soda from time to time.
Folks on keto diets avoid a lot of carbs, and diabetics tend to watch them. Artificial sweeteners help folks do this. Honey has similar woes to actual sugar, and if you are using the artificial stuff to avoid the effects of real sugar, honey is no solution.
Choosing between the two - artificial or "natural" - is really just a question of risk. You aren't in the position of considering that a soda might kill you. Or trying to explain your diabetic grandmother with memory problems that she simply can't have soda at all: I'm not sure giving an artificially sweetened drink really is going to be what puts them in an early grave.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12421854/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21621801/
It's literally true and fundamental to what you're claiming.
Care to provide contradicting studies?
That sugar is bad for you? Here is a presentation with lots of studies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
In the end, it's all a mixed bag, and who knows if it's actually better or worse than consuming more than 25-40mg of fructose or alcohol in a day. There are massive corporate interests in all directions with deep revolving doors in regulatory and research bodies. It's effectively impossible to know.
Is it a variety/strain of food that was considered "food" 250+ years ago? Probably safe. Is it a new strain that has a multiplier of hystamine or other negative hormonal responses, or in a consumption that is a multiple of 250+ years ago? Probably not safe. That's my take.
Would this make me worry a lot? Not really. I have worse health risks like being overweight, pfas etc.
The "if it was that dangerous we'd see the effect" is a pretty decent argument IMO considering it's been heavily used for almost 40 years.
Also, here in Germany, I can get my aspartame in glass bottles, fortunately.
I mainly drink my sodas from PET bottles by the way because cans cost twice as much per litre over here.
Moreover, if you specialize on GI cancers, it looks like you see the opposite of what you'd expect if aspartame was a potent carcinogen: the rates are lower in places where Diet Coke is more prevalent.
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but I really think this is a result some people on message boards just want to see.
https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...
while cancer mortality rate was decreasing since 1980
https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...
* Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data). This is no where near 50% of people "having cancer".
* The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 442.4 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 cases). (.442%)
* The cancer death rate (cancer mortality) is 158.3 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 deaths) (.158%).
Regardless, these numbers are very scary.
Live long enough and you will get cancer.
The progress on other fronts really is staggering. Forget pre-industrial times: global child mortality is half of what it was in the 1980s. The same is true for vehicle deaths in the US.
We do have way more cancers, a big reason we know about is our food choices. We don't even know the impact of hard things to measure yet, like the impact of all these things on our gut biology. It's not a new discovery that eating a lot of sugary foods leads to greatly increased diabetes, and now we are learning more about how artificial sugars have their own impact. So basically, it's increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are not good for you too, maybe in different ways than "natural sugars".
That is no way to live.
In general, you should think about risk management, not exclusion. Have your bacon as a bi-monthly treat, and splurge for some high quality bacon at the butcher.
I remember seeing a video of a talk where the host asked who was managing their health by going partially or fully vegetarian. Lots of raised hands. Then he asked who was sitting or standing still for extended amounts of time. Even more raised hands, including almost all of the previous group. And that’s a higher cancer risk than meat eating :)
It would be interesting if death rates had a cut-off. Don't tell me that 50% die of heart disease, rather exclude everyone over 70, then tell me percentages.
For most of my life the largest causes of death are accidents and suicide, but equally the age-group either the highest rate are over 75s.
Sure there ways to improve both quantity, and quality, of life. Smoking pretty obviously reduces both - its a good habit to quit, or not start. Chugging DDT is bad for you. But linking foods to longevity, where there is unconvincing evidence, isn't helpful to me.
Especially when that food has significant quality-of-life benefits.
Ultimately we all die of something. A death "saved" here, is a death "gained" there.
You are using the "I was at the train station and I was never mugged there, therefore mugging never happens at train stations" extrapolated argument.
People still think that smoking doesn't cause cancer, even when they are in the hospital because of not being able to breathe.
People still deny that climate change exists because of that one bought study in the 60s.
People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world, even though it is proven that this increases cancer rates 2x as much.
As the devil's advocate I'd argue that people will only change their behaviour if a person within their personal influence radius dies because of it.
If they just read about it, they don't care.
What biological cleaning process are you referring to? How does it prevent bacterial growth in the water distribution system?
The remaining ~4% (the Schlacke) usually are used as fertilizers for farming or are burned in biogas energy plants. The latter happens when the quality is not good enough or the sewege plant doesn't have a stage 4 filtration system.
The German wikipedia entry is actually also pretty good [4]
[1] https://umwelt.provinz.bz.it/wasser/wie-funktioniert-eine-kl...
[2] https://av-selbitztal.de/klaeranlage-naila/funktionsweise
[3] https://industryeurope.com/sectors/energy-utilities/how-germ...
[4] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kl%C3%A4ranlage
Not adding any chlorine is an interesting choice in any case, you can start out with perfectly pure water and still end up with contamination along the way to your tap. A tiny amount of chlorine prevents that, and it evaporates quickly after the water leaves the tap.
</joke>
https://www.starwars.com/news/so-what-the-heck-are-midi-chlo...
You may have caught that, but it was Tomcan who made the "joke" comment. I just read it as they responded to your question, but added the terrible humour to imply that they didn't take it seriously.
It's more like "1 million people were at the train station and were never mugged there".
If someone tried to prove an airplane design can fly 1,300 times and all it did was come off the ground for a centimeter for half a second, would you say "this airplane design can possibly fly"? I doubt any reasonable person would. But with aspartame there is an idea in people's heads that it's harmful and should be avoided therefore people continue to go with the theory that even though they've failed to prove it's harmful 1,300 times they may do so in the future.
Now both or either one (can't say which) give me gas. And not funny gas but "this is a war crime" -gas.
Sugary drinks don't do this. Also this is how I discovered that Scandinavian Pepsi started replacing sugar partially with Aspartame. Took me a while to read the label and find out. I switched from Pepsi to Coke (still full sugar) and the issues went away.
Even though a substance is studied extensively, there might still be adverse effects that people don't attribute to it. I'm not afraid it would give me cancer but bioweapon levels of gas is something I can't live with. Sadly it's getting harder and harder to find drinks that don't have Aspartame in it...
n=102,865 adults were followed for a median 7.8 years, using 24-hour dietary records collected via web including some photographic validation. Key results:
> In particular, higher cancer risks were observed for aspartame (HR = *1.15* [95% CI 1.03 to 1.28], P = 0.002) and acesulfame-K (HR = *1.13* [95% CI 1.01 to 1.26], P = 0.007).
+13~15% raised cancer risk in high consumers of aspartame and acesulfame-K (controlling for many factors, including sugar intake, BMI and weight gain, physical activity, etc.).
> In particular, no difference was detected between the categories ‘higher artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake below the official recommended limit’ and ‘no artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake exceeding the recommended limit’
So the raised cancer risk was statistically the same for both categories (though possibly slightly worse for artificial sweeteners). No real win for sugar there (but we also have to look at their performances in the area of CVD and diabetes).
(I will say that the 100g/day cutoff for high vs low sugar consumption is kind of high, even if it includes sugars in fruit and other whole foods. The key question imo is: how would low sugar + low sweetener consumption fare against the equivalent amount of sugar?)
Overall, definitely an interesting study, considering that they adjusted for a lot of factors including BMI/weight gain, and that it's the more health-conscious types who would consume artificial sweeteners. Even the lower-consumption category was associated with a statistically significant +14% raised cancer risk vs non-consumers (for the same level of sugar intake).
One point to note was that sucralose intake didn't seem associated with raised cancer risk, the caveat being that the sucralose sample size was about half those of aspartame and acesulfame-K. This could possibly reflect sucralose being a sweetener used by the most health-conscious participants, since it's less commonly used in mass-market products. Still, would be interesting if sucralose might not contribute to cancer risk. Overall, this paper is a non-loss for sucralose on the cancer front.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003950.s002
Figure C: Cancer risk associated with the combined exposure to artificial sweetener and sugar intakes, NutriNet -Santé cohort, France, 2009-2021 (n=102,865)
For me the two interesting cases are:
"Sugar above nutritional guidelines" and "no artificial sweetener" => 1.09 (0.97 - 1.22) P=0.158
"Sugar below nutritional guidelines" and "high artificial sweetener" => 1.12 (1.00-1.25) P=0.046
nutritional guidelines are 10% max energy intake from sugar, about 50 gram of sugar per day for a 2000 kCal diet (62 gram for 2500 kCal for adult male).
A 330ml coke can has 35g of sugar, so we're talking one or two max per day to keep below the guideline.
If I read this correctly if one makes the switch from sugary beverage to artificial sweetened ones and it lowers your total sugar intake below the dieteray guidelines then your relative risk factor doesn't change (at about +10% vs low sugar and no articial sweetener).
Important to remember that IARC just talks about the quality of the evidence, and not the strength of the effect. If they know that something does cause cancer it'll go into group 1, even if it only causes an additional 1 case of cancer per 100,000 population.
The IARC categories (1, 2a, 2b, 3) aren't that confusing, but they do seem to cause a lot of confusion. Here's a short summary I wrote in another place: https://tildes.net/~food/1774/aspartame_may_be_declared_a_po...
We need something like the danger of getting cancer from it. Tobacco doesn't make everyone get some kind of cancer, but it hugely increases the risk. What are other cancer dangers in terms of some measurable risk, compare that to this new risk.
IARCs comms strategy isn't great, and science journalism isn't great either.
I don't drink a lot of soda so I picked up on the reaction sooner rather than later. From then on I avoided it. Until one day it was in something and I wasn't aware of that. My chest hurt so much I thought I was having a heart attack. Maybe I was.
So while that isn't cancer, it's still not a good sign. Standard sugar will do.
It's barely newsworthy and yet here we are, frontpage.
In fact I think many people primarily drink something other than water. And im not saying thats good. But between pop, coffee, tea, juice, alcohol and an aversion to tap water, you have a lot of people who rarely drink water.
Seems like a good argument to me. If aspartame is cancerous and people drink a shit ton of it wouldnt we have clear evidence? What could explain it being cancerous and not having a clear link despite its prevalence? At the very least this is an interesting point that doesnt deserve a reddit-like meme comment.
Don't forget that there are several multi-billion dollar companies who sell aspartame who are vigorously campaigning to promote the safety of their products. It's entirely unsurprising that the data is unclear when you have that level of interference in the research. It's also really tricky to do diet research on humans - we can't lock people up for a year to give them a controlled diet, so we end up asking them to write down what they've eaten and drunk. This means the data researchers have is pretty bad. Looking for a small signal in very noisy data is hard.
Didn't intend it as one! Just misidentified a member of my own tribe is all.
In 1984 the year after aspartame's approval for soft drinks, the company that held the exclusive patent on it, sold $600 million worth (1984 dollars) of it.
Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...
True for human food as well. Maybe it’s not rancid, but food science can make terrible ingredients taste great. Take Doritos. It’s just cornmeal (animal feed) plus a ton of artificial flavoring that is incredibly well dialed in to make them delicious and even addictive.
First of all, it implies that industrial processes are less healthy than manual processes. But in my opinion, it makes no difference if sodium nitrate is added in a meat processing plant, or by an artisanal butcher on locally sourced hand made organic bacon. The health effects are going to be the same.
Secondly, it implies that there is something bad about "processing" in general, whatever is meant by that. But I think that most people would agree that pasteurizing milk is a good thing for our health, even though it is a form of "processing".
Using processing as an end-all heuristic loses sight of the characteristic that the heuristic is trying to approximate.
And an example of a nutrient that can be too bioavailable for some people is heme-iron, yet if you were to follow nutrition influencers online you might think that heme-iron was essential. A young man doesn't necessary want it. Yet anemic women might.
Very confusing space to navigate which I think is one of the main reasons we tend to get sucked into diet camps, all of them promising to cut through the BS while coming to vastly different conclusions.
Im not saying its bad, or being processed is bad, but its manufactured at scale with additional ingredients to make it shelf stable. Its not the same thing you make at home. Frankly I think thats fine.
Maybe it has helped remove built up lead from long term exposure before unleaded gasoline was mandated.
It has rapeseed oil, which to me seems dubious since it requires special processing to make it non-toxic.
It only has 5.1% eggs (according to the label).
It also has "flavorings", thickeners and coloring agents.
So yeah, it's nothing like the homemade mayo I make, which only has olive oil, a bunch of eggs, mustard, and indeed some salt. Mine doesn't need any sort of coloring and is thick enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil#Erucic_acid
While it says it's "generally considered safe", I prefer not to take any chances, just like I prefer to avoid plastic containers for my food, especially if hot (even though some plastics are "microwave safe").
---
I realize wikipedia isn't the greates of sources. Here are two more
NIH https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9962393/
Says it doesn't seem to be toxic in low quantities, but should be investigated more. To me, that means "rather avoid if possible".
--
European Food Safety Authority says roughly the same:
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/4593
I mean, unless you prefer to drink the cheapest cooking oil you can find in your supermarket, you might want to avoid the mayo as well. (disclaimer: I occasionally drink EVOO directly)
These days, it’s actually listed as compatible with heart healthy diets (the oil is typically a “good fat”, and the eggs raise cholesterol levels data is weak at best)
Which seems to qualify as food, as well. Cheese, whey, milk, buttermilk, onion powder, MSG, etc. Nothing too scary on the list.
Honestly I see it as a feature if we can move product that’s otherwise garbage, as long as it’s not dangerous. Reminds me of “omg do you know what’s in hotdogs?!” Hotdogs are a success story.
Globally, we produce a huge surplus of calories but a deficit of micronutrients, fruits, and vegetables. The appetizing agents are mostly convincing people to eat more of the former, beyond what they need.
Most of a cow, honestly.
From a 1,300 lbs steer you'll get something like 600-650 pounds of usable meat (maybe a little more, depending on the breed). About a third of that resulting meat will be ground meat that'll best be used in burgers, sausages, hotdogs, and stuff like vienna sausages - which I would consider junk food. The rest of the carcass will be rendered into tallow, boiled down to produce gelatin for candy and jellies or bone broth for other dishes, and otherwise processed for human or animal consumption.
It's not as extreme as the junk food you're thinking of but ever since industrialization the amount of effort put into making food from slaughterhouse waste is incredible.
Heretic!
Also, “sodium nitrate free” and “uncured” meat typically contains celery salt, which is chemically identical to sodium nitrate, except that the maximum safety levels don’t apply, so sometimes it has more nitrate in it than would otherwise be legal.
The misleading “uncured” and “sodium nitrate free” language on labels is mandated by labeling standards in the US, so keep that in mind when directing your rage.
What's the difference between that and humans eating a pizza but not eating the raw ingredients of a pizza? If it's not inedible anymore I don't see the issue...
That's quite rare. My kid did it once, thinking it was basically chocolate. I really wish I had taken a picture.
What about a few cans a week?
If you’re worried about it causing weight gain and/or metabolic syndrome, one serving a day is more than enough to be dangerous.
Nobody apart from maybe sales folks ever claimed these things are safe to drink in such amounts regularly. Just like nobody ever claimed that consuming say 100g of pure salt every day would be OK, yet you can buy endless amounts of 1kg bags if you want.
Do folks really need some government agency to come to them personally to tell them how to live their lives, babysit every single decision they make, steer them away from their addictions on sugar etc? That's not how game of life works.
Isn't the point that diet coke doesn't have calories[1]? This is why it uses aspartame as an artificial sweetener.
[1 https://www.dietcoke.com/products/diet-coke
This is incorrect. Sand is larger, rounded, particles. Toxic silicosis is caused by small (like 10um) particles. The physical form is what makes it possible to inhale one and walk on the other.
The chemical form is identical.
There are plenty of chemicals that you regularly consume which, in high dosages, are fatal but are required at low dosages.
Too much calcium will causes osteopetrosis (too little does as well).
Too much vitamin K causes liver damage
Too much vitamin B1 causes hypertension
Plenty of stuff is dangerous at high levels and safe at low levels. Our kidneys and liver exist to filter and eliminate excess.
Where Aspartame is unhealthy in soda could use more detailed light shed on it.
There may be some issue with how it’s used for food and soda in second and third world countries compared to First world.
I imagine it's complex, with indirect affects, with its ability to modulate the gut: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/artificial-sweete...
I have also heard carbonated beverages during eating may affect stomach acid. Need to find some research clarifying it one way or the other.
If the human digestive system can trivially break down the amounts of aspartame found in a diet coke, it's fairly pointless for just about anyone to entertain the scenario of inhaling a bucket of pure aspartame crystals.
Prop 65. It's everywhere in California and it's completely useless.
> The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.
> In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it.
> People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sesame-allergy-sufferers-wanted...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2118565-are-potatoes-no...
(I have 2 kids, but both are in their early 20s.)
https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...
You could simply measure the levels of nitrite before any exists and the end product might still have just as much.
The only candidate would be natural flavors, and I sort of doubt that they would get away with that.
That site lists “natural flavors” as an ingredient. I wonder if celery salt counts as a natural flavor in the UK.
This UK producer:
https://www.primalcut.co.uk/post/nitrate-free-bacon-bringing...
Contains the weasel words I pasted in below, which are verbatim what the US producers that use celery salt claim. Also, they don’t list the natural flavors. I’d bet they’re using celery salt, but that UK labeling laws don’t make them break it out as a separate ingredient:
> Primal Cut free-from naked bacon contains only fresh organic fruit sugars and nitrates present in the natural raw organic seasonings.
[0]: https://applegate.com/products/natural-thick-cut-bacon
It's exactly the same, except one uses celery. No, in fact, if I remember correctly, the nitrates used in the "uncured" process were even higher than the normal process.
[1] https://locavoredelivery.com/blog/some-facts-about-bacon-wit...
Sure, there's less protein in vegetables, so less chance of nitrosamines forming, unless you're eating a complete meal, in which case... figure it out.
Also, vegetables contain anti-oxidants and things which offset some of the nitrates, but this just seems like a reason to eat some vegetables with your cured meats.
It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...
If you are trying to lose weight, then just use less sugar. That’s actually pretty easy, since artificial sweeteners and sugary drinks desensitize you to sweet stuff.
If you taper off for a week or so, you’ll find that the stuff you were previously drinking is cloyingly sweet.
For instance, reading a starbucks menu makes me shudder. I can’t even drink their non-dairy lattes anymore because they are too sweet.
Depending on the topic, I'm in camp abstinence.
Liquid chocolate, the kind we drink as a hot beverage in Central and South America, was difficult for me to get used to without any sweet taste. Nowadays I prefer it that way. Coffee is a bit more difficult for me.
The amount of calories in two teaspoons of sugar is minuscule.
Source: My dad has a heart attack from drinking liters of diet soda every day.
https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...
Sad to learn about the celery nitrite thing. I’ve been overpaying for it for a while now, apparently. It literally says “contains no preservatives” but has “cultured celery extract” in the ingredients, so its a lie.
It's better to stick the the regular version; the kinks have been probably worked out. Still unsafe, but unsafe in a known quantity.
It feels like saying something contains no nitrites or preservatives and then including them in the form of cultured celery extract should be fraud/false advertising and a crime.
This is why Vitamin C was a required additive, with "nitrate" cured meats. Unfortunately, it is not with the "nitrate from celery" forms, which should lead to more cancer.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/classic/research/...
I'm pretty sure the scientists who dealt with these chemicals even warned against using it, but some higher ups still let it pass
Edit: Figuratively not literally, haha!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
"One Man Invented Two of the Deadliest Substances of the 20th Century" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-man-two-deadly...
https://youtu.be/4og8wG8VQWM
It's also still used in most every prop engine that flies over my house everyday at a normal schedule, so we still haven't solved the problem of leaded gas. We never will (in my lifetime).
Only the smallest GA planes like Cessna 172s still use leaded fuel. Turbodiesel alternatives are present aftermarket but they need to be replaced every once in a while unlike the old gas engines which can be revisioned. Unlike a car engine an aircraft engine spends a lot of its life at 100% power which makes them age quicker.
Do you know why? I was under the impression that avgas (aka leaded gas for airplanes) was being forced out (albeit slowly) by EPA
https://stc.g100ul.com
Unless you want planes falling from the sky.
Maybe a little more on the table than releasing something to prod and finding a speling mistake.
And to be clear: I don't want the dozens of airplanes that fly over me daily to be running leaded gas. Politics is gunna politics I guess.
Multiple companies knew about the health dangers of certain "forever chemicals" including PFAS and intentionally did nothing because money. It's a repeat of the cigarette debacle.
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...
It's the same with oil companies having studies on climate change privately, while discounting climate scientists publicly.
Profits over People is the way of Capitalism!
Certainly the scientists and analysts at 3M who collected and analyzed the data would have thereafter known of it's extremely harmful effects.
And I don't mean to open this up to "heh yea well they made bank!" I don't think they did relatively speaking.
My main question, is that certainly those scientists would have been advising their friends and families to stay away from X, Y, and Z products because they contain PFAS?
This is why analyzing clinical trial data is so obscenely hard. There are bad actors, there are liars, and there are scientists who are really, really hoping to achieve a breakthrough. All of them are liable to end up putting forth bad information.
Is it easy to turn a blind eye, when factory workers in your own company were dying, or is what we're describing called at best criminal, and at worst psychotic?
They were literally just dumping these chemicals down the river. They were fined a small fraction of their profits (of billions) and told pretty please to not do it again. This is obvious corruption on so many levels.
For instance, this is a known symptom of being Gen X.
>It is preparing to label the sweetener as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, Reuters reported on Thursday. That would mean there is some evidence linking aspartame to cancer, but that it is limited. The IARC has two more serious categories, “probably carcinogenic to humans” and “carcinogenic to humans”.
>It previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its probably cancer-causing class, and listed using mobile phones as possibly cancer-causing.
>The IARC safety review was conducted to assess whether or not aspartame is a potential hazard, based on all the published evidence, a person familiar with the matter told the Guardian. However, it does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume.
Some pretty weak claims. Especially weak considering the risk of aspartame (which are not confirmed, and not at amounts regularly consumer) relative to the risk sugar it replaces (which are guaranteed at amounts regularly consumed - see type 2 diabetes).
Diet sodas with aspartame contain a warning for this reason. Now of course, most of us do not have this condition.
But how do we know if it is safe? I decided 20+ years ago that artificial sweeteners were a crutch with no nutritional value and unknown risks, so I stopped consuming them.
However, other studies suggest that artificial sweeteners break down so quickly that they never reach the gut.
It needs more research, but personally I choose to favor sugar over sweeteners, and just limit my consumption of sugar.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8156656/
Science doesn't work that way. Meanwhile aspartame has been linked to many health problems.
1) This maxim from Michael Pollan: "Eat food [1]. Mostly plants. Not too much." (I personally follow an adjusted version of this: "Eat food. Only plants. Not too much.")
2) Review daily nutrient requirements to ensure your diet is providing you with adequate macro (protein, carbs, fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals).
3) A few months after adopting your new diet, get a high quality blood test that covers markers like iron, B12, etc., and make any required adjustments to what you're eating.
1: "Real food doesn’t have a long ingredient list, isn’t advertised on TV, and it doesn’t contain stuff like maltodextrin or sodium tripolyphosphate. Real food is things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize." https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/how-to-eat/
It's almost like a second job to keep up with what you _should_ do. Reviewing daily nutrients is way too much effort for most folks.
Once you grok some trivially simple stuff (macro and micronutrients), few extremely trivial requirements (enough good sleep, stay away from sweet stuff in principle which may be hard in beginning but gets much easier over time, eat to stave off hunger and not to feel full, eat less in the evening), you are at least 90% there which is already enough. You really don't need to study constantly labels, you already know whats good and bad and its an effortless background process in the back of the mind.
It really is trivial and very quick to grok. The hard part for many is discipline, thats a mind game everybody has to fight with themselves and find ways how to manage it without frustrating oneself constantly, and thus give up eventually on whole effort.
People often compensate some deep mental issues, ie anxiety with overeating or eating junk food. Obviously this needs to be tackled first if any long term success can be claimed.
Also, for parents, please don't condition your kids on sweet stuff as some sort of reward. If you have to, use some great fruits like forest fruits and not cakes, ice cream etc. You are not being a good parent at all by doing this, just conditioning them mentally that sweet junk is something special, a prize deserved, which creates pretty bad mental patterns for rest of our lives.
It isn't so much managing daily nutrients but ensuring there is a decent variety of nutrients available at home. There is a lot of trial and error but long term it works out well. And like you said, variety is key!
I don't disagree with your assertion on steps, to be clear, just that you aren't answering the actual question. How can you trust Pollan (I'm not saying you can't, just...that's the core question the OP was asking).
While I agree with the spirit of this, I'll point out that tobacco was brought to Europe over 500 years ago, and only recently discovered to be one of the most unhealthy products available. Not to mention that it was widely used in the Americas for long before that.
In fact, 450 years after Columbian contact, the medical consensus was that tobacco was good for health.
Ugh, if we hadn't banned them from advertising they would absolutely be using this angle and it would absolutely be working.
Why not just look at the balance of evidence for various dietary patterns today?
https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/eat-drink-and-be-healt...
Here's a two hour interview with the author if you prefer the format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx2JUtngxkw
Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best.
You might still get it wrong. Such is life.
There is of course a lot of kooky beliefs out there about food. But it seems like there is a very intentional social media campaign to associate ANY claim that the stuff in our food is not in our best interest with the kooks that believe the only safe thing to eat is raw goat balls or whatever.
For books anyway, I found The Hundred-Year Lie to be incredibly in depth, but there's a lot of chemistry so it's verrry dense.
Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8227014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9776645/
Better late than never, I guess.
It caused bladder cancer in lab animals at high doses, and it was later found that the metabolic pathway that caused the cancer did not exist in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin
FFS
Basically these WHO cancer guidelines are entirely useless in terms of public health and have probably done as much harm as Prop 65 has in California.
tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that did find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.
Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer
The list is empty...
As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in many studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.
So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?
Certainly its better to replace Diet Coke with water, all else equal, but the effort in changing habits is much higher. There is a ton of preventable decease due to bad diet and lack of exercise, despite well known causes. So why is that?
Health discussions have this psychological bias where people think “be more like me” is effective (don’t do drugs, just go out and meet people, exercise more, just stop smoking). The fact that people think like this, despite the war on drugs disaster, is madness. Especially when the solution is so simple: throw the moralism away and focus solely on harm reduction – also known as “whatever works”. Just good old empiricism.
>“Back in 1981 they established an acceptable daily intake of aspartame, of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. To consume over that limit would require a very large daily consumption of Diet Coke or similar drinks. On 14 July, Jecfa may change that risk assessment, or they may not.”
Emphasis mine. I'd be curious to see if this understanding has shifted in the past 42 years.
Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?
We often test chemicals on rats, but the problem is that they only live a few years. No one wants to wait 20+ years to see the results of an expensive study on longer lived mammals anyway.
The solution is we feed the rats excessive amounts of the chemical and see if it causes problems. This isn't a great way to do it, but what other option would you suggest?
The same way we know cigarettes are unsafe. You look at human cohort data and run variable adjustment models on it and control for confounders. How do cigarette smokers or diet soda drinkers do over time, especially in older cohorts? Are there any other products out there with aspartame that we can look at as well until we've isolated a risk model for aspartame by itself?
https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....
But when you consider:
- how many doctors and scientists are personally/professionally motivated to research this
- how many gov't organizations are concerned about this
- how many industry competitors would benefit from discovering this
- how many lawyers would get rich from exploiting this
...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.
They are also the ones that pushed ethanol on us and told us it wouldn't hurt our engines (even though it absolutely did. Most engines now are designed with ethanol in mind, but ethanol gas destroyed a lot of otherwise perfectly fine engines before people realized it was a huge lie. By then it was too late anyway)
With the presidential primaries coming up we'll get another big reminder about how disproportionately influential the Iowa corn farmers are.
The sugar industry’s escapades are well known. Most notably, the SRF’s (Sugar Research Foundation) war on dietary fats[0][1].
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5099084/
Edit to add something more concrete, we already have the "sugar tax" in the UK, to avoid it soft drinks went mostly sugar free or reduced sugar substantially, and replaced it with sweeteners.
And now: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/artificial-sweeteners-to-face-go...
Simultaneously: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deposit-return-scheme-for...
Just to give you a recent/techy example, I'm sure Meta and Google lawyers and lobbyists worked together to deal with the ridiculous Canada news law. Same with Epic and others pushing alternative payments in the App Store.
Not everything is a "secret cabal hideout" jeez
Have you ever heard of tobacco? Suppressing information about the harmful effects of a popular consumer product for decades is observably within the capabilities of at least some who might wish to do so.
I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.
And this is interesting may be related?
>Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid.
>When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. ...The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate ... they ‘excite’ or stimulate the neural cells to death.
>Methanol is highly toxic; it is gradually released in the small intestine when the methyl group of the aspartame encounters the enzyme chymotrypsin. It has been pointed out that some fruit juices and alcoholic beverages contain small amounts of methanol.
source: https://www.3dchem.com/aspartame.asp
https://uranus.chrysocome.net/coke.htm
"Acrylamide is considered a potential occupational carcinogen by U.S. government agencies and classified as a Group 2A carcinogen by the IARC."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene#Safety
"It is listed as an IARC class 3 carcinogen, since there is no current evidence that it causes cancer in humans."
Those are very different.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
The current system (especially CA Prop 65) makes it impossible for these pronouncements to carry any meaning whatsoever.
Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)
But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.
and that'll be found to be bad in 20 years time, then they repeat again
But it feels like that is never going to happen.
Once you break the habit, your sense of taste recovers and you realize how nasty these drinks are. Most people get started on them as kids when you don't have a nuanced sense of taste and really crave sweet stuff.
This was all done over time as I realized I needed to change my diet to keep weight off and I wasn't really enjoying my daily soda(s) anyway. With an actual intent, one could drop soda within a few months easily and never miss it.
Short of that, I wish there was clearer and more consistent labeling. I avoid sugar and sweeteners. Its annoying to be in the mood for a flavored drink, see something that claims to be zero sugar/all natural/etc, grab it in a hurry, then discover on the first sip its got erythritol in it. I read the label, but sometimes I miss it. My preferred options are unsweetened iced tea, coffee, or flavored water. Those are reliable, but can get boring.
Food is generally easier. I just avoid anything that has (or should have) a lot of carbs as a rule when looking for convenient pre-packaged food. No point in sweetening a can of sardines...
Imagine consuming a pile of 37 Pixy Stix (sugar equivalent of 24oz of Coca Cola) to accompany a hamburger. WTF. That's plainly nasty as hell, and anyone doing that in public would rightly feel ashamed. And that's not even a large serving of soda, by modern standards.
I think this is what you are correcting in the rest of the post? In that a single soda is typically double that. And many folks drink more than a single soda. Considerably more.
As I mentioned before, that's a side effect of averaging across all Americans, a fraction of who don't drink soda, and a (much larger, in both senses of the word) who drink sugared soda. The population that those calories would realistically be distributed over, the diet soda drinkers, is somewhere between 20% and 40% of the population, hence the "multiply by 2-5".
Granted, you work with what you have. :D
Sugar is a naturally occurring substance and is totally safe for consumption. However, purified added sugar is bad for you because in nature you cannot find a fruit that contains that many sugars per gram.
But yeah, Ireland's drinks are like that because of a 'sugar tax', and now it's quite hard to find fizzy drinks without gross sweeteners. Even brands that were quite high quality before are kinda rancid now.
I am a Luddite when it comes to tastes, no two ways about it. I suspect many people are, and so some tradeoff has to be made.
Xylitol is preferable because of its oral hygiene benefits, but most consumers are choosy enough to make sure their gum is exclusively xylitol.
There are some brands on Amazon that sell 100% xylitol gum if you go out of your way to find it though. Be careful with it around dogs though, xylitol is insanely toxic to them.
I still haven’t gotten over the rise of “organic” artificial sweeteners. That must have involved some N-th level regulatory capture with the product labeling regulators.
Not to mention that with aspartame in particular, the evidence is sparse and low quality. The verbiage regarding Sucralose in actual human terms of consumption are much more alarming. I generally try to keep any sweet drink consumption with meals, or otherwise sweetened with stevia (which has seen it's own detractors). Given a century and a half of food industry lies, disinformation, misinformation and tethers with regulatory bodies, it's really hard to believe anything and just defer to if it was considered "food" a couple hundred years ago.
Tastes less toxic. Is it?
Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria.
So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
There's something to say about lists where people put substances we don't know a lot, to call attention for studying more. But I haven't actually seen one of those, it's always lists of substances people study a lot, and publication bias set them marginally into statistical relevancy.
This is part of how the medical regulation leaders in every country are the most insanely cautious, neurotic people on earth. They all recommend not to eat steaks rare. Everything is a carcinogen. When they have such a low tolerance for danger, it just means everyone learns not to listen to their advice.
Personally, I'll drink a Mexican Coke with cane sugar maybe once or twice a year, knowing it's not great for me and treating it as a dessert.
But I do agree, it's not good reporting. Pretty much no info on the actual scientific research, but hopefully WHO will give more in depth data.
Why on earth would you think that?
It's carbonated water with a tiny amount of food dye, sweeter and caffeine. The latter of which, iirc, has generally positive effects.
It’s very vague though
2. ???
3. In no world can I imagine ¬X
[1] shows that artificial sweeteners lead to higher insulin resistance. It is so because they provoke insulin level increase due to their sweet taste.
Caffeine is a tricky one.
If you can drink 6 cups of espresso a day, you have 50% less chance developing dementia. But, how can you drink 6 cups of coffee per day if you do not have good health? It can be that the "small positive effects of caffeine" are due to caffeine consumers have a little better health overall and these with worse health have to consume less caffeine.
For an anecdote, I once went completely off caffeine for a month and haven't noticed a thing after first three days, when I was unusually sleepy. Even training results followed the same progression.
Unless California has aspartame on its list, prop65 says nothing about this.
The BBC has a reasonably good article on this subject today
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66057216
Saying it's "partially responsible" in essence is ridiculous, though, when it's also a critical nutrient we eat in virtually every food. Aspartame is not. It's the sheer volume of sugar ingested that's the issue.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1770067/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19352508/
Don’t like it? Bring it up with the WHO.
IARC is only nominally under WHO. It is a weird French agency founded by some French activists and politicians in the 1960's.
They use a 5 class classification
But out of the 1042 chemicals and things they have classified, none are in Group 4. (Historically, there once was one single chemical in Group 4, but they have reclassified it.)For IARC, everything is either at least possibly carcinogenic, or there is insufficient evidence (Group 3) to yet declare it carcinogenic.
Also:
"In 2019 IARC was accused of cooperation with "toxic tort law firms" who make profit of suing companies for compensation for alleged health issues based on IARC classification. IARC was accused from hiding conflicts of interest impacting a few invited experts, especially those related to large-scale cash flows from US law firms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Agency_for_Resea...
Many countries have perfectly capable chemicals agencies and food safety agencies, who are much more reliable than the IARC.
Today, I'd still avoid aspartame, but also sucralose, because it's unnecessary and may even cause insulin to be artificially raised in response to the sweetness. And I also just don't drink nearly as much as I used to now that I'm metabolically healthy.
I know enough about pharmacology to know that I know nothing.
Can you provide an example of a chemical which has effects on the human body that are completely unrelated to the size of the dose? Just because the effects of a carcinogen may be non-linear in relation to the dosage, that doesn't mean that a greater risk of cancer incidents with a greater dose is an unreasonable expectation. Some thing can be assumed unless an exception is identified.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2708042/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18627677/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28198207/
As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes