Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.
Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.
Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.
I keep getting people telling me this doesn't happen. GAH. Instant migraine trigger for me too, along with sucralose and several other artificial sweeteners.
In Italy we have an "indipendent research lab" that become really famous for a study that demonstrates that aspartame may cause cancer.
The same institute published few years later a study about 5G emissions that may cause cancer.
I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.
I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth.
It's an acquired taste. All alternative sweeteners taste differently from sugar. These days, I appreciate that such beverages don't leave a film in my mouth and have a little extra bite compared to sugar.
I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.
It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.
For me it was a persistence thing. Keep drinking and you don't really notice it any more. If anything sugared drinks now feel overly sticky or caramel-like to me. I can no longer enjoy non-diet coke.
> The history of aspartame and the FDA is contentious and sort of infuriating
Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.
It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.
All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.
That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.
The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.
The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.
It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.
Fact 5 is a false fact. Taking facts 1-4 into consideration with the (0th?) fact that it is considered the most studied ingredient is enough evidence. This is how scientists come to a consensus. Going beyond that is obscene to science.
Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.
I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.
Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.
I don't drink things with Aspartame because it makes me feel queasy. I don't know of any mechanism that causes that effect. Occasionally I encounter something that I would not have expected to contain Aspartame that I notice the feeling before I have even considered the possibility that it might be present. I take that as a sign that it is not psychological.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
There's also an ever-escalating sweetness issue. When fresh fruit was plenty sweet enough and you get used to this level of sweetness, everything else seems to taste pretty bland. If this becomes the normal (I suspect it kind of has), everything gets sweetened; yogurts, crackers, bread, etc. The method those things get sweetened could be aspartame, but many will not be.
Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.
Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.
So basically there's no scientific consensus either way, there's no tradition of using it and there are extreme commercial incentives for harm so it's a no from me
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 82.5 ms ] threadhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37246822/
I would avoid sucralose. I have a suspicion it may be responsible for the observed increase in colon cancer in younger age groups.
Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.
Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
Not all of them do.
Just the simple fact that it has a sweet taste, but contains no sugar, disturbs the body's natural production of insulin.
Is this a genetic thing?
I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.
It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.
Soldier on!
Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.
All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.
https://sodastream.com/products/diet-cola-4-pack
There is nothing wrong with MSG either
The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.
It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.
https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...
I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.
Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.