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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
“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.”
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.
> 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.
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.
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/
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!
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.
"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).
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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+.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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).
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.
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! :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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".
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...)
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).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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."
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.
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.
[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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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
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?
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.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 1679 ms ] threadIdentify 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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8227014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9776645/
Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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?
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.
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!
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.
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).
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
Better late than never, I guess.
>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).
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
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.
>“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?
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...
[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.
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.
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.
[1] https://locavoredelivery.com/blog/some-facts-about-bacon-wit...
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/classic/research/...
> 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...
Prop 65. It's everywhere in California and it's completely useless.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2118565-are-potatoes-no...
(I have 2 kids, but both are in their early 20s.)
It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...
Depending on the topic, I'm in camp abstinence.
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.
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://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2708042/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18627677/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28198207/
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.
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.
Which seems to qualify as food, as well. Cheese, whey, milk, buttermilk, onion powder, MSG, etc. Nothing too scary on the list.
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.
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)
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)
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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
and that'll be found to be bad in 20 years time, then they repeat again
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.
For instance, this is a known symptom of being Gen X.
Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer
The list is empty...
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
Edit: Figuratively not literally, haha!
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
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.
https://stc.g100ul.com
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.
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
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.
I'm pretty sure the scientists who dealt with these chemicals even warned against using it, but some higher ups still let it pass
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1770067/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19352508/
Unless California has aspartame on its list, prop65 says nothing about this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The BBC has a reasonably good article on this subject today
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66057216
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.
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
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?
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.