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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

It's not unreasonable to assume that the current rate of disease in our populations might be able to be lower since we weren't tracking the association of the introduction of products to safety in years past as well as we do today.

A better question is, suppose it was known that it did create a small but measurable in lifetime cancer risk, would you actually want to keep consuming it?

EDIT: Also aspartame is hardly universal - it's biggest use is in diet soda. Those of us who essentially never consume it (it's been...over 2 years for me) would almost never be exposed to it.

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I don't know, like everybody else, I eat things with substantial amounts of acrylamide, which is a carcinogen we actually know is problematic, unlike aspartame.

You're commenting on a story that suggests that even small exposures to aspartame might be dangerous. And you stopped drinking diet soda only recently. I think you might have a hard time finding an American (for instance) that hadn't consumed a substantial amount of aspartame.

Exactly. Anyone worried about aspartame but still consuming fried/grilled/brazed food (basically anything besides blanching) is kinda missing the point.

Is aspartame commonly used in products that aren't labeled as containing it, or that one might be surprised about? I never buy any food or drink labeled "sugar free" or "contains NutraSweet (or similar)". So I had assumed I wasn't consuming chemical sweeteners. Is it as common as you say because it is widely used in little-known places, or just because most people eat/drink sugar-free products?

Asking out of idle curiosity/surprise. I'm not afraid of aspartame, I just don't care for the taste much.

There's an interesting hypothesis that the pathway to cancer for aspartame (if it exists) might involve creating formaldehyde in the same way that's done when drinking ethanol, and so actually, drinking alcohol is _protective_ as it blocks the aspartame cancer effect -- in a similar way that ethanol is a treatment for methanol poisoning.

I don't really worry about aspartame cancer risk though, it doesn't seem like a big deal if it exists at all. I do buy the idea that diet sodas kill good gut bacteria and avoid them for that reason, but I don't remember a single thing about where I got that idea. It just "feels" right, and I don't mind the lack.

Formaldehyde is not a byproduct of ethanol metabolism. Acetaldehyde is the chemical 'equivalent' metabolic byproduct in the pathway that eliminates ethanol. In common alcohol/liquor for drinking there may be trace amounts of methanol (less true than historically, but still occurs), and that may be what you're thinking.

Depends how much I was drinking (that varies substantially across the population) but cancer risk usually doesn't track exactly with total exposure compared to ongoing exposure - i.e. when you quit smoking your lung cancer risk decreases the longer you stay quit, until after 5-7 years it tends to level out at about the normal population level.

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