All these articles telling you how totally safe it is to ingest artificial chemical xyz remind me of how companies were telling you it was fine, even healthy, to smoke cigarettes. The degree of arrogance with which these scientists state their truths is confounding.
Meanwhile chronic illnesses and cancer rates are skyrocketing.
I'll pass on the industrial byproducts being used in my food, thanks.
>I'll pass on the industrial byproducts being used in my food, thanks.
Is this even possible? Can you define industrial byproduct?
Like even if you go to a typical Western grocery store and buy a single apple and then eat it. It was covered in a thin layer of wax to prolong its shelf life. Likewise if you buy a potato it might have trace amounts of industrial produced material in it from industrial farming.
“The team acknowledged that this increased incidence of certain cancer types is, in part, due to early detection through cancer screening programs. They couldn’t precisely measure what proportion of this growing prevalence could solely be attributed to screening and early detection. “
If the US is flat but global is rising pretty easy to explain by (poorer) diets and detection. These scientists don’t know why but that’d be my null hypothesis to beat.
The problem is that we eat so much sugar that its really hard to not overshoot the recommended max. sugar intake of ~30-50 gramms per day. Thats 2-3 glasses of juice or one bar of chocolate.
If your diet is good and you are around or below this „threshold“ then yeah no reason for artificial sweeteners, but many people (including me) enjoy sugary products and would like to drink a glass of coke for example with dinner which would limit my sugar intake for that day greatly.
To people like me, it doesn't matter how unfounded it is. I'm sure there are people in this world who can benefit from sugar replacements, but in my mind there is absolutely no reason at all to start feeding myself artificial sweeteners when there is enough sweeteners in nature.
On a related note, I'm kinda happy to note that steviol is much in use here in southern europe, where I'm currently residing. They don't even make a big deal out of it, regular sodas, vitamin powders, you read the ingredients and there it is.
Steviol is a sweetener based on a natural plant Stevia. I've so far seen it in both Hungary and Croatia.
I come from Sweden and it used to be that Stevia products were in a bin on their own, marketed specifically as stevia products. But down here they don't even mention it on the marketing side of the label. It's buried in the ingredients.
You can easily buy that in the US, we have boxes of the stuff at home. Nowadays you can also buy Monk Fruit-based sweeteners, which are also "natural". Unfortunately, both taste a bit worse than Aspartame (which is already not so great). I guess this is just a matter of habit, though.
I have never tasted any liquid with artificial sweeteners that was "right" to me. They all have a weird aftertaste that reveals to me that they contain a sweetener, even stevia products.
I just would prefer the sweetener to be as natural as possible, if I had to use it.
> I have never tasted any liquid with artificial sweeteners that was "right" to me
Since you seem to be against anything artificial for god knows why, is this possibly a bias? You know it's artificial and that knowledge results in you thinking it tastes off to you?
This is an example of the "appeal to nature" logical fallacy. You may be able to make a case that Stevia is healthier than Aspartame, but it should be based on evidence to that effect rather than because you like the idea that it has ingredients derived from organic material.
The problem is that you assume consistency, but in reality, we keep modifying plants / fruits / etc by selecting them and planting them. IIRC fruits are now too sweet for zoo animals.
It is the statistical processes that determine how much something is "natural". Our bodies evolved alongside fruit that was on the smaller and less sweet side, and logically that's what we are the most compatible with. Over centuries and millennia we selected fruits to favor size and sweetness, and over 5 years we e.g. genetically modify a strawberry to have peach flavor. The last one is like a step function compared to the slow moving processes of the agricultural selection and so less "natural" and almost certainly less compatible with our bodies.
We might still get lucky and get beneficial side effects of aspartame or peach-flavored strawberries that makes us faster, stronger, smarter, but with these things the luck usually works in the other direction.
And this is an example of "where is the evidence" logical fallacy. In complex systems, such as the human body, the only evidence of safety is time -- a very long time. The Stevia plant (though not the same as extract) has been used for centuries. Aspartame was (accidentally) created in the lab in 1965.
If you are going to mess with complex systems, such as feed yourself aspartame, vape, give pregnant women a synthetic sedative and medication for morning sickness etc., you do it for a high potential gain that offsets potentially huge downsides. Benefits of aspartame are close to nil; if anything it probably makes things worse because people think they can consume more ultra processed foods sweetened with it because such foods have "fewer calories".
> In complex systems, such as the human body, the only evidence of safety is time -- a very long time. The Stevia plant (though not the same as extract) has been used for centuries. Aspartame was (accidentally) created in the lab in 1965.
Time is not evidence of safety, that is an odd claim (see smoking tobacco), thankfully we have the scientific method to investigate hypotheses like "x is bad for you".
Only if a long time passes without evidence of harm, we consider that the "evidence" of safety -- there is no other. It is very difficult to claim that something new introduced in a complex system is safe, so you weigh what you get right away from it vs. what you might end up paying down the road if it ends up being unsafe. Aspartame does not, in my view, clear that bar.
Seriously? I should trust some scientists getting paid to push a product to multi billion dollar companies, over something simple you can grow yourself?
Ricin [1] appears naturally in the castor oil plant. I wouldn't eat it just because it's "from nature". Who knows if Steviol is completely benign or not?
Is there any benefit in using sugar replacements? When you eat something sweet your body prepares itself for the sugar intake which, in the case sweetener usage, t never comes. What are the long terms effects of this imbalance? Let's assume your organism addapts to this situation and at some point you consume something that contains actual sugar, how will it respond to that?
> But small amounts of insulin are also released before any sugar enters the bloodstream. This response is known as cephalic phase insulin release. It is triggered by the sight, smell, and taste of food, as well as chewing and swallowing (5Trusted Source).
> BOTTOM LINE:
Eating carbohydrates causes a rise in blood sugar levels. Insulin is released to bring blood sugar levels back to normal. Some claim that artificial sweeteners may interfere with this process.
That taste ends up as preparation for something is completely new to me, is this an assumption, or has been shown? Afaik taste is the evolutionary (but now outdated) helper to choose non-poison and energy providing food?
> Is there any benefit in using sugar replacements?
Serious question? The taste joy without getting that much calories in? (Yes I know, we skew our taste and could also have joy without too much sugar, and also other ingredients, e.g. salt, but different topic).
Carb rinsing is a well documented thing (swirling a sports drink in your mouth then spitting it out). I’m not sure whether artificial sweeteners trigger the same physiological effects.
There’s a major benefit you’re missing, no calories.
If you drink seven cans of Coke a day you’re likely going to end up gaining weight and could end up obese with all the additional health issues that brings.
If you drink seven cans of Diet Coke per day you’re not going to end up obese (through that method anyway).
What seems to be missing in this HN debate is that sugar itself (yes the natural substance) is not good for us either! Aspartame may be “bad” (debatable) but sugar is bad but in different ways.
You failed to answer my question. Again is there a benefit to tricking your body that you are eating a meal which provides a high amount of energy?
Sugar isn't bad, it is a biological solution to the energy storage problem just like fat, and our bodies know how to deal with the sugar present in nature (in fruits). The sugar in an apple is absorbed slowly, without a dramatic increase in blood glucose unlike the one in a Coke can.
I don't think activating taste receptors while not having calories is harmful and haven't seen any studies to suggest otherwise. Have you?
As for health benefits apparently it has antioxidant properties, but I don't know to what extent that's true. I use it because I like the taste and doesn't seem to be harmful in any way, but it also hasn't been studied as extensively.
Like the other commenter said, you’re falling prey to the “appeal to nature” fallacy.
There are plenty of natural things that are bad for you and plenty of synthetic things that are good for you.
And there absolutely are reasons to feed yourself artificial sweeteners.
Sugar-free soda is awesome for people trying to lose weight. The carbonated drink keeps you satiated and you don’t ingest any of the calories in regular soda.
Let me check if i understand this correctly. News about aspartame causing cancer are published. Gain media attention, put certain corporations stock at risk. Dust settles. Said corporations bribe, erm pr, news outlets to change public opinion.
How is it not obvious yet that we are being manipulated on a daily basis on everything we do ranging from what we eat, how we work, how we dress, how we think?
I am not talking about conspiracy theories, I am talking about plain obvious media corruption.
What. The EU’s food institution has published similar articles too saying aspartame is relatively safe and the cancer risk only becomes rlevant at siginifcant intake of it (liters of coke zero per day)
Any asshole can publish a book and a lot of them have.
Aspartame has been studied avidly, if not obsessively, for decades. It has never shown a serious carcinogenic risk. That's what we're talking about here.
Editorial piece brought to you by Coca-Cola & Co. I don’t trust anything that is written on mainstream media about health. It has proven to be very unreliable and ill guided. My generale rule is if it didn’t exist 200 years ago I’m not gonna eat it
You weight harmless and bad for you the same despite vanishingly small evidence of it being bad for you and lots of evidence showing that it breaks down immediately in your gut into components that you consume constantly from other sources?
Research on the long-term effects of Aspartame and multi-generation studies are just starting. I don't think there's enough evidence to rule out problems. Most study summaries say more research is needed. And the more studies they do, the more complicated the area becomes.
"Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression in the amygdala"
"“What this study is showing is we need to look back at the environmental factors, because what we see today is not only what’s happening today, but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer,” said co-author Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Biomedical Sciences."
"Led by doctoral candidate Sara Jones, the study involved providing mice with drinking water containing aspartame at approximately 15% of the FDA-approved maximum daily human intake. The dosage, equivalent to six to eight 8-ounce cans of diet soda a day for humans, continued for 12 weeks in a study spanning four years.
Pronounced anxiety-like behavior was observed in the mice through a variety of maze tests across multiple generations descending from the aspartame-exposed males.
“It was such a robust anxiety-like trait that I don’t think any of us were anticipating we would see,” Jones said. “It was completely unexpected. Usually you see subtle changes.”
When given diazepam, a drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, mice in all generations ceased to show anxiety-like behavior.
Researchers are planning an additional publication from this study focused on how aspartame affected memory. Future research will identify the molecular mechanisms that influence the transmission of aspartame’s effect across generations."
A mouse weighs about 0.2% of a human (napkin math). Does it make sense to feed a mouse 8 human cans of drinks worth of aspartame every day for 12 weeks? this is a genuine question, I'm not exactly an expert on mouse studies. Does the ability to induce anxiety in mice by seemingly overdosing them warrant concern?
This is based on 14.0%, 7.0%, and 3.5% of the FDA recommended values
And converted to "mouse equivalent dose"!
in the research paper there is a math:
"The FDA recommended maximum DIV for aspartame for humans is 50 mg/kg (33). Based on allometric conversion utilizing pharmacokinetic and body surface area parameters (43), the mouse equivalent of the human DIV is 615 mg/kg/d. Therefore, the male mice received a daily aspartame dose equivalent to 14.0%, 7.0%, and 3.5% of the FDA recommended human DIV, and the females received a dose equivalent to 15.5%, 7.7%, and 3.9% of the human DIV. The estimated average daily aspartame intake in humans is 4.1 mg/kg (44), corresponding to a mouse equivalent dose of 50.68 mg/kg (43), which was the dose delivered to mice consuming 0.015% aspartame."
The "mouse equivalent dose" calculated by this paper:
That's not the conclusion of the link you posted. The conclusion is more like:
> After aspartame is consumed, it immediately breaks down into three naturally occurring chemicals. Even large amounts of aspartame cause smaller fluctuations in those chemicals than normal food. The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion.
Cancer or not, perhaps it is also healthier for our brains to not constantly be tricked that they found a nice high calorie food item? It feels that it would become like food-tiktok, dopamine "addiction" etc. Sure, perhaps overweight people can benefit from sugar free alternatives temporarily as a remedy to lose weight.
Personally as someone who eats very clean and unprocessed, I like to take the sugar calorie consequence of sweet things I might eat like fruits and the occasional pastry or soda
I think an interesting question on this topic is “which is worse for you, sugar or aspartame?”
So would it be healthier to drink three cans or Coke per day or three cans of Diet Coke?
As far as I can see (from all the research), ingesting sugar seems worse than ingesting artificial sweeteners with regards to long term health outcomes.
For me artificial sweeteners do not taste sweet.
At least in what I have tried so far in light
soda or tea sweeteners.
Given the popularity of artificial sweeteners
I must be an edge case.
I dont remember when, but at least here in Norway
Mountain Dew partially replaced sugar with an
artificial sweetener. It tasted off for me but
it took me a while to figure out what they had
done.
Aspartame is arguably the safest artificial sweetener. It's made of two naturally occurring amino acids and it's rapidly destroyed by the acidity of the digestive system.
Plenty of natural things will kill you, fast or slow. Also, if you combine natural things together in an industrial process, the result isn't natural anymore.
I cut sweeteners not so much because of the risk, but because they don't seem to help with weight loss. I've started drinking my espresso unsweetened with a bit of milk. It's disgusting. At least it's short.
But, it helped me mature my pallet and avoid the next "sweet high". Chocolate tastes too sweet for me now and I tend to gravitate to healthier options. Part of that might be projection and wishful thinking, but I think it's a sweetness I was craving too much.
It is hard to tell what is unfounded or not. One thing that the PFAS debacle shows is that (chemical) companies can keep major environmental and human health risks under the covers for decades, and even when uncovered - are not punished and things are forgotten quickly.
77 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttps://www.sciencealert.com/everything-we-eat-both-causes-a...
All these articles telling you how totally safe it is to ingest artificial chemical xyz remind me of how companies were telling you it was fine, even healthy, to smoke cigarettes. The degree of arrogance with which these scientists state their truths is confounding.
Meanwhile chronic illnesses and cancer rates are skyrocketing.
I'll pass on the industrial byproducts being used in my food, thanks.
Is this even possible? Can you define industrial byproduct?
Like even if you go to a typical Western grocery store and buy a single apple and then eat it. It was covered in a thin layer of wax to prolong its shelf life. Likewise if you buy a potato it might have trace amounts of industrial produced material in it from industrial farming.
https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/researchers-r... Dramatic rise in cancer in people under 50
If the US is flat but global is rising pretty easy to explain by (poorer) diets and detection. These scientists don’t know why but that’d be my null hypothesis to beat.
If your diet is good and you are around or below this „threshold“ then yeah no reason for artificial sweeteners, but many people (including me) enjoy sugary products and would like to drink a glass of coke for example with dinner which would limit my sugar intake for that day greatly.
On a related note, I'm kinda happy to note that steviol is much in use here in southern europe, where I'm currently residing. They don't even make a big deal out of it, regular sodas, vitamin powders, you read the ingredients and there it is.
Steviol is a sweetener based on a natural plant Stevia. I've so far seen it in both Hungary and Croatia.
I come from Sweden and it used to be that Stevia products were in a bin on their own, marketed specifically as stevia products. But down here they don't even mention it on the marketing side of the label. It's buried in the ingredients.
I just would prefer the sweetener to be as natural as possible, if I had to use it.
Since you seem to be against anything artificial for god knows why, is this possibly a bias? You know it's artificial and that knowledge results in you thinking it tastes off to you?
We might still get lucky and get beneficial side effects of aspartame or peach-flavored strawberries that makes us faster, stronger, smarter, but with these things the luck usually works in the other direction.
If you are going to mess with complex systems, such as feed yourself aspartame, vape, give pregnant women a synthetic sedative and medication for morning sickness etc., you do it for a high potential gain that offsets potentially huge downsides. Benefits of aspartame are close to nil; if anything it probably makes things worse because people think they can consume more ultra processed foods sweetened with it because such foods have "fewer calories".
Time is not evidence of safety, that is an odd claim (see smoking tobacco), thankfully we have the scientific method to investigate hypotheses like "x is bad for you".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin
Are you a bot sent out from the aspartam industry?
> BOTTOM LINE: Eating carbohydrates causes a rise in blood sugar levels. Insulin is released to bring blood sugar levels back to normal. Some claim that artificial sweeteners may interfere with this process.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/artificial-sweeteners-b...
> Is there any benefit in using sugar replacements?
Serious question? The taste joy without getting that much calories in? (Yes I know, we skew our taste and could also have joy without too much sugar, and also other ingredients, e.g. salt, but different topic).
If you drink seven cans of Coke a day you’re likely going to end up gaining weight and could end up obese with all the additional health issues that brings.
If you drink seven cans of Diet Coke per day you’re not going to end up obese (through that method anyway).
What seems to be missing in this HN debate is that sugar itself (yes the natural substance) is not good for us either! Aspartame may be “bad” (debatable) but sugar is bad but in different ways.
Sugar isn't bad, it is a biological solution to the energy storage problem just like fat, and our bodies know how to deal with the sugar present in nature (in fruits). The sugar in an apple is absorbed slowly, without a dramatic increase in blood glucose unlike the one in a Coke can.
Monkfruit which I use supposedly has health benefits, in addition to being calorie light.
As for health benefits apparently it has antioxidant properties, but I don't know to what extent that's true. I use it because I like the taste and doesn't seem to be harmful in any way, but it also hasn't been studied as extensively.
Erm, yeah ...
There are plenty of natural things that are bad for you and plenty of synthetic things that are good for you.
And there absolutely are reasons to feed yourself artificial sweeteners.
Sugar-free soda is awesome for people trying to lose weight. The carbonated drink keeps you satiated and you don’t ingest any of the calories in regular soda.
For you probably there aren't, but for others there is a very valid reason: to some (me included), Stevia's (and other products') taste sucks.
It being artificial is irrelevant. Doesn't mean it's healthier or better/worse in any way.
"Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176555
How is it not obvious yet that we are being manipulated on a daily basis on everything we do ranging from what we eat, how we work, how we dress, how we think?
I am not talking about conspiracy theories, I am talking about plain obvious media corruption.
Aspartame has been studied avidly, if not obsessively, for decades. It has never shown a serious carcinogenic risk. That's what we're talking about here.
"Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression in the amygdala"
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213120119
"“What this study is showing is we need to look back at the environmental factors, because what we see today is not only what’s happening today, but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer,” said co-author Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Biomedical Sciences."
"Led by doctoral candidate Sara Jones, the study involved providing mice with drinking water containing aspartame at approximately 15% of the FDA-approved maximum daily human intake. The dosage, equivalent to six to eight 8-ounce cans of diet soda a day for humans, continued for 12 weeks in a study spanning four years.
Pronounced anxiety-like behavior was observed in the mice through a variety of maze tests across multiple generations descending from the aspartame-exposed males.
“It was such a robust anxiety-like trait that I don’t think any of us were anticipating we would see,” Jones said. “It was completely unexpected. Usually you see subtle changes.”
When given diazepam, a drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, mice in all generations ceased to show anxiety-like behavior.
Researchers are planning an additional publication from this study focused on how aspartame affected memory. Future research will identify the molecular mechanisms that influence the transmission of aspartame’s effect across generations."
https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2022/12/08/fsu-res...
in the research paper there is a math:
"The FDA recommended maximum DIV for aspartame for humans is 50 mg/kg (33). Based on allometric conversion utilizing pharmacokinetic and body surface area parameters (43), the mouse equivalent of the human DIV is 615 mg/kg/d. Therefore, the male mice received a daily aspartame dose equivalent to 14.0%, 7.0%, and 3.5% of the FDA recommended human DIV, and the females received a dose equivalent to 15.5%, 7.7%, and 3.9% of the human DIV. The estimated average daily aspartame intake in humans is 4.1 mg/kg (44), corresponding to a mouse equivalent dose of 50.68 mg/kg (43), which was the dose delivered to mice consuming 0.015% aspartame."
The "mouse equivalent dose" calculated by this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804402/
- Larger animals have lower metabolic rates
- Physiological process of larger animals is slower
- Larger animals required smaller drug dose on weight basis
Until then, I'll enjoy my occasional diet coke.
> After aspartame is consumed, it immediately breaks down into three naturally occurring chemicals. Even large amounts of aspartame cause smaller fluctuations in those chemicals than normal food. The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion.
Personally as someone who eats very clean and unprocessed, I like to take the sugar calorie consequence of sweet things I might eat like fruits and the occasional pastry or soda
No need to speculate or ask rhetorical questions. This is a scientific question with presumably lots of research already.
So would it be healthier to drink three cans or Coke per day or three cans of Diet Coke?
As far as I can see (from all the research), ingesting sugar seems worse than ingesting artificial sweeteners with regards to long term health outcomes.
For me artificial sweeteners do not taste sweet. At least in what I have tried so far in light soda or tea sweeteners. Given the popularity of artificial sweeteners I must be an edge case.
I dont remember when, but at least here in Norway Mountain Dew partially replaced sugar with an artificial sweetener. It tasted off for me but it took me a while to figure out what they had done.
Plenty of natural things will kill you, fast or slow. Also, if you combine natural things together in an industrial process, the result isn't natural anymore.
But, it helped me mature my pallet and avoid the next "sweet high". Chocolate tastes too sweet for me now and I tend to gravitate to healthier options. Part of that might be projection and wishful thinking, but I think it's a sweetness I was craving too much.