Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The article mentions a French study showing a "slight" increase, over 100,000 pts, in an observational study that used self-reporting to control for other risk factors. I can't find it; has anyone else?
Important to remember that IARC just talks about the quality of the evidence, and not the strength of the effect. If they know that something does cause cancer it'll go into group 1, even if it only causes an additional 1 case of cancer per 100,000 population.
The IARC categories (1, 2a, 2b, 3) aren't that confusing, but they do seem to cause a lot of confusion. Here's a short summary I wrote in another place: https://tildes.net/~food/1774/aspartame_may_be_declared_a_po...
IARCs comms strategy isn't great, and science journalism isn't great either.
We need something like the danger of getting cancer from it. Tobacco doesn't make everyone get some kind of cancer, but it hugely increases the risk. What are other cancer dangers in terms of some measurable risk, compare that to this new risk.
Would this make me worry a lot? Not really. I have worse health risks like being overweight, pfas etc.
The "if it was that dangerous we'd see the effect" is a pretty decent argument IMO considering it's been heavily used for almost 40 years.
The progress on other fronts really is staggering. Forget pre-industrial times: global child mortality is half of what it was in the 1980s. The same is true for vehicle deaths in the US.
We do have way more cancers, a big reason we know about is our food choices. We don't even know the impact of hard things to measure yet, like the impact of all these things on our gut biology. It's not a new discovery that eating a lot of sugary foods leads to greatly increased diabetes, and now we are learning more about how artificial sugars have their own impact. So basically, it's increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are not good for you too, maybe in different ways than "natural sugars".
That is no way to live.
In general, you should think about risk management, not exclusion. Have your bacon as a bi-monthly treat, and splurge for some high quality bacon at the butcher.
I remember seeing a video of a talk where the host asked who was managing their health by going partially or fully vegetarian. Lots of raised hands. Then he asked who was sitting or standing still for extended amounts of time. Even more raised hands, including almost all of the previous group. And that’s a higher cancer risk than meat eating :)
* Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data). This is no where near 50% of people "having cancer".
* The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 442.4 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 cases). (.442%)
* The cancer death rate (cancer mortality) is 158.3 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 deaths) (.158%).
Regardless, these numbers are very scary.
Live long enough and you will get cancer.
It would be interesting if death rates had a cut-off. Don't tell me that 50% die of heart disease, rather exclude everyone over 70, then tell me percentages.
For most of my life the largest causes of death are accidents and suicide, but equally the age-group either the highest rate are over 75s.
Sure there ways to improve both quantity, and quality, of life. Smoking pretty obviously reduces both - its a good habit to quit, or not start. Chugging DDT is bad for you. But linking foods to longevity, where there is unconvincing evidence, isn't helpful to me.
Especially when that food has significant quality-of-life benefits.
Ultimately we all die of something. A death "saved" here, is a death "gained" there.
Moreover, if you specialize on GI cancers, it looks like you see the opposite of what you'd expect if aspartame was a potent carcinogen: the rates are lower in places where Diet Coke is more prevalent.
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but I really think this is a result some people on message boards just want to see.
https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...
while cancer mortality rate was decreasing since 1980
https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...
Also, here in Germany, I can get my aspartame in glass bottles, fortunately.
I mainly drink my sodas from PET bottles by the way because cans cost twice as much per litre over here.
You are using the "I was at the train station and I was never mugged there, therefore mugging never happens at train stations" extrapolated argument.
People still think that smoking doesn't cause cancer, even when they are in the hospital because of not being able to breathe.
People still deny that climate change exists because of that one bought study in the 60s.
People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world, even though it is proven that this increases cancer rates 2x as much.
As the devil's advocate I'd argue that people will only change their behaviour if a person within their personal influence radius dies because of it.
If they just read about it, they don't care.
What biological cleaning process are you referring to? How does it prevent bacterial growth in the water distribution system?
</joke>
https://www.starwars.com/news/so-what-the-heck-are-midi-chlo...
You may have caught that, but it was Tomcan who made the "joke" comment. I just read it as they responded to your question, but added the terrible humour to imply that they didn't take it seriously.
The remaining ~4% (the Schlacke) usually are used as fertilizers for farming or are burned in biogas energy plants. The latter happens when the quality is not good enough or the sewege plant doesn't have a stage 4 filtration system.
The German wikipedia entry is actually also pretty good [4]
[1] https://umwelt.provinz.bz.it/wasser/wie-funktioniert-eine-kl...
[2] https://av-selbitztal.de/klaeranlage-naila/funktionsweise
[3] https://industryeurope.com/sectors/energy-utilities/how-germ...
Not adding any chlorine is an interesting choice in any case, you can start out with perfectly pure water and still end up with contamination along the way to your tap. A tiny amount of chlorine prevents that, and it evaporates quickly after the water leaves the tap.
It's more like "1 million people were at the train station and were never mugged there".
IIRC, the only reason aspartame was not banned was because saccharine had just been, and if you banned aspartame there would have been literally no artificial sweeteners on the market. That is no longer the case, with sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Coke Zero and other diet sodas), Stevia, sorbitol, and several other sweeteners now on the market.
The fact is that anything that increases the amount of you or the rate of you over time over the bare minimum needed for survival is an increased cancer risk... there are other causes like exposure to radiation that actually damage cells and so on as well.
Ultimately the question isn't if there's a link to cancer, it's how much something is increasing your risk of cancer relative to the alternatives. I suspect artificial sweeteners are in general for most less risk than consuming vast amounts of sugar, gaining lots of weight, becoming inactive, and increasing their cancer risk that way but who knows. Obviously if you ommit everything but consume the bare minimum sugar you need for survival you'll have a lower risk... good luck with that in modern society and diets
Your point is only valid if it actually lowers sugar and other carbs intake. Which isn't the case for most people.
Next to that. With diet drinks people drink more since they feel like they can get a way with, some do with sugar variants as well, but seems like more people binge drink diet versions which could lead to higher exposure relatively.
The has been processing sugar for millennia, these chemicals are pretty new.
More people need to stop consuming garbage that wouldn't have been considered food 250+ years ago.
This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy [1]. A naturally occurring substance is not automatically less carcinogen, or harmful, than a manufactured one. Coffee is associated with elevated risk for bladder cancer. Cycad trees are known to be highly carcinogenic. Mycotoxins (mold) are toxic and carcinogenic. Aflatoxin from peanuts is found to be carcinogenic.
I'm not saying that stevia is not safe, but safety has nothing to do with being natural or not.
Doesn't make it a good idea.
It would be a fallacy to suggest that one group or the other were unconditionally safer, but I find no dilemma in generalizing that the human body is more capable of processing plant-based substances. Just like I would generalize that consuming plant-based substances is healthier than consuming paint. Sure you can nit pick outliers, safe paint or oleander or whatever, but the heuristic is still of value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
It makes me wonder if some of the things like, e.g. the supposed success of the Mediterranean diet, are due to bits of food culture like this that we've lost or never fully understood.
For stevia to be arguably safer due coevolution with humans, the following would need to be true:
1. There is a selective pressure for stevia to not increase the risk of cancer in humans.
2. There is a selective pressure on humans to not have an increased risk of cancer from consuming stevia.
In other words, it is firstly to argue that a stevia plant which had a tendency to increase cancer risk in humans would be significantly less likely to reproduce. This effect would be hard enough even if the hypothetical carcinogen were to be otherwise selectively neutral, but it could have a selectively positive pressure if it were an essential hormone or defence against insects, pathogens, competitors, etc.
Secondly, it is to argue that if stevia were potentially carcinogenic, then humans that were susceptible to its effects were significantly less likely to reproduce. This fails on two levels. First, consider that even in the cut-and-dried cause of cancer that is smoking, lung cancer is still extremely rare among young smokers. Lung cancer patients are virtually always well past their reproductive age, meaning that even if a genetic mutation to be immune to tobacco were to appear (or indeed it may well already exist) then said mutation still has no selective advantage with regards to the consumption of tobacco. Second, even if a hypothetically-carcinogenic stevia[0] could exert selective pressure on humans to become unaffected by it, then that effect would only have taken place on the populations which consumed significant amounts of stevia over generations and not humanity as a whole.
[0] Which I insist, I don't believe is the case.
Humans are pretty observant, and have decent odds of noticing over time when particular things correlate with health problems. A plant known to cause health problems is less likely to become and remain a dietary staple. A plant that isn't a dietary staple misses out on a wealth of opportunity for propagation.
I think you're also hyperfocusing on the issue of evolution. The point isn't that stevia is a plant which merely exists, but rather its longevity in human culture[0].
What you're saying makes sense for random plants picked up in the woods; less so for plants that have been consumed by humans since antiquity. By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.
And lots of cultivated plants have downsides.
> By the same logic, there would be no a priori difference in risk profile between vegetables and random research chemicals.
No, that's a strawman. Nobody is suggesting that "random research chemicals" should be considered safe. And extracting random chemicals out of plants would also be dangerous!
An optimal organism doesn't imply an optimal environment.
fitness(org, food) = -2 org^2 + org * food + 7
Evolution doesn't optimize the environment for the organism. Evolution performs stochastic gradient descent, improving the organism for the environment, which can easily get stuck at global optima. More importantly, it improves the organism for the environment/food/etc. The idea that the food is optimal for the organism gets the improvement mechanism backward.
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...
Liquid stevia is my go-to sweetener for most purposes, or if I'm baking I'll use a stevia-monk-inulin mix that measures 1:1 for sugar.
More recently, I've been using freeze dried miracle berries as a sweetener for low-sugar fruits. They essentially convert sour taste signals to sweet, which works great for strawberries, raspberries, cranberries, kiwi, passion fruit, and citrus. Also has a bit of an effect on blackberries and dragon fruit, and starfruit is on my list to try.
Related LPT: most of the fruits I eat are frozen with a few minutes of thawing at room temperature. Easier to store, easier to prep, and turns out to be pretty similar to Italian ice.
I can’t stand the taste, I’d rather go without than have a product with stevia.
Clothes, refrigeration, and Pasteurization are all extremely recent on an evolutionary timescale. They're all artificial and extremely beneficial to human well-being.
Also, the idea that something is good because we've evolved with it gets the mechanism of evolution backward. Even if it were true that evolution's stochastic gradient descent had found the global maximum 15k years ago (instead of perhaps approximating a local maximum), that would imply no changes to the human would improve human reproductive success. It would not imply that no changes to the environment (such as available foods) would improve human reproductive success.
Do you have a citation for that? Google search is telling me the exact opposite, that it seems to reduce cancer growth.
Similarly though, antioxidants are often sold as a health food but can promote cancer because they benefit the cancer more than the rest of you, and some of them directly shut off chemo drugs. There's plenty of evidence of that one.
Perhaps this is outdated but this page says otherwise: “range of studies have found no evidence that sucralose causes cancer in humans”
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d....
I think this is the source of the more recent concerns around sucralose.
Besides, honey doesn't really do what the artificial sweeteners does. "Just use honey" is horrible advice for diabetics, for example. It isn't going to help folks that are looking to avoid carbs. And so on.
Realistically, if you aren't supposed to be eating added sugar, honey isn't going to do the job either. It is just a different form of sugar.
Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave. Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
I mean, good luck avoiding them and liking chewing gum. Or good luck if you are diabetic and want a soda from time to time.
Folks on keto diets avoid a lot of carbs, and diabetics tend to watch them. Artificial sweeteners help folks do this. Honey has similar woes to actual sugar, and if you are using the artificial stuff to avoid the effects of real sugar, honey is no solution.
Choosing between the two - artificial or "natural" - is really just a question of risk. You aren't in the position of considering that a soda might kill you. Or trying to explain your diabetic grandmother with memory problems that she simply can't have soda at all: I'm not sure giving an artificially sweetened drink really is going to be what puts them in an early grave.
People aren't literally eating zero carbs, they are minimizing their carb intake for various reasons (like being diabetic). With almost any variety in your diet, you are getting enough carbs to function. People "avoid carbs" because with our modern world of abundance, it is too easy to over consume carbs. If you are diabetic, honey is more likely to put you in an early grave than artificial sweeteners.
>Why eat anything processed or artificial when better alternatives exist?
Just because something is "artificial" doesn't mean bad. And rarely is one thing universally "better". it depends on the situation. Again, a diabetic looking for a soda-like drink is looking for different things than a vegan looking for dessert recipes.
>Artificial sweeteners will only put you in an early grave.
Source?
I’d be willing to bet in more than 50% of cases it does.
> Source?
Didn’t WHO or some similar organisation just start officially recommending against them? I haven’t actually read any of the research on this, I’ve just taken my advice from people who have. My personal source is an argument from nature along the lines of “if we didn’t need artificial sweeteners for 300,000 years, we probably won’t need them now”.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12421854/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21621801/
It's literally true and fundamental to what you're claiming.
Care to provide contradicting studies?
That sugar is bad for you? Here is a presentation with lots of studies.
In the end, it's all a mixed bag, and who knows if it's actually better or worse than consuming more than 25-40mg of fructose or alcohol in a day. There are massive corporate interests in all directions with deep revolving doors in regulatory and research bodies. It's effectively impossible to know.
Is it a variety/strain of food that was considered "food" 250+ years ago? Probably safe. Is it a new strain that has a multiplier of hystamine or other negative hormonal responses, or in a consumption that is a multiple of 250+ years ago? Probably not safe. That's my take.
Warnings like these quickly hit the Prop 65 problem - the notices are so ubiquitous you go blind to them.
And now, a short conversation between two people to illustrate the rhetoric in play:
Person 1: “Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!”
Person 2: “Except the top three players in that industry are quite profitably killing people.”
Person 1: “But how can the industry recover if we act too drastically?”
Person 2: I will quote what you said just above: <<Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!>> You were just saying that the market is adaptable! It seems like you are conflating the idea of protecting bad actors with the idea of setting the conditions for a healthy market. A healthy market does not kill its consumers.
When you put the exact same warning on food as lead-containing special solder, cadmium paints, and other very obvious "don't eat this" industrial materials, it loses all efficacy.
Claim: we would benefit by building a culture where basic probability ranges are expected and used.
Idea: Serious publications could:
A. Set basic guidelines for talking about probability estimates; something akin to what you see in government or business intelligence publications. For example, maps terms to ranges:
“highly likely”: > 90%
“likely”: 70% - 90%
“somewhat likely”: 50% - 70%
…
B. Update their editorial standards to not allow pure vagary around probabilities and impacts.
Could authors write more quantitatively? At the levels of the top 100 publications, I’d guess that 80% could, with the help of research and editing staff.
Would some readers be scared off? I’d guess than 80% of a college educated audience could handle it. The rest might complain, but could level up with a little peer pressure.
Would articles become more rigorous? Over time, I’d hope most would. Shift the expectations and make the vocabulary less forgiving to vaguery and fudgery, and I think the incentives point in the right direction.
> You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.
I agree with the comment as written, though it strikes me that virtually no mainstream publications use writing that clarifies or quantifies these kinds of indirect relationships.
I see a lot of intellectual laziness or dumbing down. Two categorical errors happen often:
(A) writing “everything is connected”. This can be true in some sense while also being useless. The more interesting framing is to ask “to what degree” and under what modeling assumptions.
(B) Writing about various linkages without clarifying probability and impact dilution.
The connecting idea in my head was something like this: when most publications talk about cancer they tend to lack even a basic statistical language.
Backstory: Having hundreds of interactions with ChatGPT, which is trained on much mainstream writing, made this interaction pattern obvious and tiresome.
Another way of saying my complaint: It feels like otherwise intelligent people hit a barrier where they start speaking vaguely. They pretend like this is the best we can do. It ideally isn’t; we have extensive scientific and statistical studies. There is no reason why we as a culture have to accept such statistical phobia as quality writing.
With that said, I consider your idea has merit and should be implemented.
But in terms of where we want to go, we can do better. Great writers care about precision, and wisely chosen numbers and ranges are able to provide that. It may be appropriate to situate them in footnotes or endnotes, depending on the context. But the numbers matter.
Very common = greater than 1 in 10
Common = 1 in 100 to 1 in 10
Uncommon [formerly 'less commonly' in BNF publications] = 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100
Rare = 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000
Very rare = less than 1 in 10 000
Frequency not known = frequency is not defined by product literature or the side-effect has been reported from post-marketing surveillance data
[0] https://bnf.nice.org.uk/medicines-guidance/adverse-reactions...
Patient has standard American diet and is overweight but not obese -> that leads to sleep apnea -> chronically tired -> they develop a diet Coke habit -> slight increase in cancer risk. What's causing the cancer here, the diet, the adiposity, the sleep apnea, the lack of quality sleep, the soda itself, the effect of soda on teeth leading to gingival inflammation, or the aspartame in the soda?
n=102,865 adults were followed for a median 7.8 years, using 24-hour dietary records collected via web including some photographic validation. Key results:
> In particular, higher cancer risks were observed for aspartame (HR = *1.15* [95% CI 1.03 to 1.28], P = 0.002) and acesulfame-K (HR = *1.13* [95% CI 1.01 to 1.26], P = 0.007).
+13~15% raised cancer risk in high consumers of aspartame and acesulfame-K (controlling for many factors, including sugar intake, BMI and weight gain, physical activity, etc.).
> In particular, no difference was detected between the categories ‘higher artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake below the official recommended limit’ and ‘no artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake exceeding the recommended limit’
So the raised cancer risk was statistically the same for both categories (though possibly slightly worse for artificial sweeteners). No real win for sugar there (but we also have to look at their performances in the area of CVD and diabetes).
(I will say that the 100g/day cutoff for high vs low sugar consumption is kind of high, even if it includes sugars in fruit and other whole foods. The key question imo is: how would low sugar + low sweetener consumption fare against the equivalent amount of sugar?)
Overall, definitely an interesting study, considering that they adjusted for a lot of factors including BMI/weight gain, and that it's the more health-conscious types who would consume artificial sweeteners. Even the lower-consumption category was associated with a statistically significant +14% raised cancer risk vs non-consumers (for the same level of sugar intake).
One point to note was that sucralose intake didn't seem associated with raised cancer risk, the caveat being that the sucralose sample size was about half those of aspartame and acesulfame-K. This could possibly reflect sucralose being a sweetener used by the most health-conscious participants, since it's less commonly used in mass-market products. Still, would be interesting if sucralose might not contribute to cancer risk. Overall, this paper is a non-loss for sucralose on the cancer front.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003950.s002
Figure C: Cancer risk associated with the combined exposure to artificial sweetener and sugar intakes, NutriNet -Santé cohort, France, 2009-2021 (n=102,865)
For me the two interesting cases are:
"Sugar above nutritional guidelines" and "no artificial sweetener" => 1.09 (0.97 - 1.22) P=0.158
"Sugar below nutritional guidelines" and "high artificial sweetener" => 1.12 (1.00-1.25) P=0.046
nutritional guidelines are 10% max energy intake from sugar, about 50 gram of sugar per day for a 2000 kCal diet (62 gram for 2500 kCal for adult male).
A 330ml coke can has 35g of sugar, so we're talking one or two max per day to keep below the guideline.
If I read this correctly if one makes the switch from sugary beverage to artificial sweetened ones and it lowers your total sugar intake below the dieteray guidelines then your relative risk factor doesn't change (at about +10% vs low sugar and no articial sweetener).
Now both or either one (can't say which) give me gas. And not funny gas but "this is a war crime" -gas.
Sugary drinks don't do this. Also this is how I discovered that Scandinavian Pepsi started replacing sugar partially with Aspartame. Took me a while to read the label and find out. I switched from Pepsi to Coke (still full sugar) and the issues went away.
Even though a substance is studied extensively, there might still be adverse effects that people don't attribute to it. I'm not afraid it would give me cancer but bioweapon levels of gas is something I can't live with. Sadly it's getting harder and harder to find drinks that don't have Aspartame in it...
If someone tried to prove an airplane design can fly 1,300 times and all it did was come off the ground for a centimeter for half a second, would you say "this airplane design can possibly fly"? I doubt any reasonable person would. But with aspartame there is an idea in people's heads that it's harmful and should be avoided therefore people continue to go with the theory that even though they've failed to prove it's harmful 1,300 times they may do so in the future.
I don't drink a lot of soda so I picked up on the reaction sooner rather than later. From then on I avoided it. Until one day it was in something and I wasn't aware of that. My chest hurt so much I thought I was having a heart attack. Maybe I was.
So while that isn't cancer, it's still not a good sign. Standard sugar will do.
It's barely newsworthy and yet here we are, frontpage.
In 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:
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"One Man Invented Two of the Deadliest Substances of the 20th Century" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-man-two-deadly...
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.
For instance, this is a known symptom of being Gen X.
Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best.
You might still get it wrong. Such is life.
There is of course a lot of kooky beliefs out there about food. But it seems like there is a very intentional social media campaign to associate ANY claim that the stuff in our food is not in our best interest with the kooks that believe the only safe thing to eat is raw goat balls or whatever.
For books anyway, I found The Hundred-Year Lie to be incredibly in depth, but there's a lot of chemistry so it's verrry dense.
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.
Science doesn't work that way. Meanwhile aspartame has been linked to many health problems.
FFS
Basically these WHO cancer guidelines are entirely useless in terms of public health and have probably done as much harm as Prop 65 has in California.
tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that did find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.
Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer
The list is empty...
As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in many studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.
So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?
Certainly its better to replace Diet Coke with water, all else equal, but the effort in changing habits is much higher. There is a ton of preventable decease due to bad diet and lack of exercise, despite well known causes. So why is that?
Health discussions have this psychological bias where people think “be more like me” is effective (don’t do drugs, just go out and meet people, exercise more, just stop smoking). The fact that people think like this, despite the war on drugs disaster, is madness. Especially when the solution is so simple: throw the moralism away and focus solely on harm reduction – also known as “whatever works”. Just good old empiricism.
>“Back in 1981 they established an acceptable daily intake of aspartame, of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. To consume over that limit would require a very large daily consumption of Diet Coke or similar drinks. On 14 July, Jecfa may change that risk assessment, or they may not.”
Emphasis mine. I'd be curious to see if this understanding has shifted in the past 42 years.
Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?
We often test chemicals on rats, but the problem is that they only live a few years. No one wants to wait 20+ years to see the results of an expensive study on longer lived mammals anyway.
The solution is we feed the rats excessive amounts of the chemical and see if it causes problems. This isn't a great way to do it, but what other option would you suggest?
The same way we know cigarettes are unsafe. You look at human cohort data and run variable adjustment models on it and control for confounders. How do cigarette smokers or diet soda drinkers do over time, especially in older cohorts? Are there any other products out there with aspartame that we can look at as well until we've isolated a risk model for aspartame by itself?
https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....
But when you consider:
- how many doctors and scientists are personally/professionally motivated to research this
- how many gov't organizations are concerned about this
- how many industry competitors would benefit from discovering this
- how many lawyers would get rich from exploiting this
...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.
Just to give you a recent/techy example, I'm sure Meta and Google lawyers and lobbyists worked together to deal with the ridiculous Canada news law. Same with Epic and others pushing alternative payments in the App Store.
Not everything is a "secret cabal hideout" jeez
The sugar industry’s escapades are well known. Most notably, the SRF’s (Sugar Research Foundation) war on dietary fats[0][1].
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
Edit to add something more concrete, we already have the "sugar tax" in the UK, to avoid it soft drinks went mostly sugar free or reduced sugar substantially, and replaced it with sweeteners.
And now: https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/artificial-sweeteners-to-face-go...
Simultaneously: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deposit-return-scheme-for...
They are also the ones that pushed ethanol on us and told us it wouldn't hurt our engines (even though it absolutely did. Most engines now are designed with ethanol in mind, but ethanol gas destroyed a lot of otherwise perfectly fine engines before people realized it was a huge lie. By then it was too late anyway)
With the presidential primaries coming up we'll get another big reminder about how disproportionately influential the Iowa corn farmers are.
Have you ever heard of tobacco? Suppressing information about the harmful effects of a popular consumer product for decades is observably within the capabilities of at least some who might wish to do so.
I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.
And this is interesting may be related?
>Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid.
>When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. ...The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate ... they ‘excite’ or stimulate the neural cells to death.
>Methanol is highly toxic; it is gradually released in the small intestine when the methyl group of the aspartame encounters the enzyme chymotrypsin. It has been pointed out that some fruit juices and alcoholic beverages contain small amounts of methanol.
"Acrylamide is considered a potential occupational carcinogen by U.S. government agencies and classified as a Group 2A carcinogen by the IARC."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene#Safety
"It is listed as an IARC class 3 carcinogen, since there is no current evidence that it causes cancer in humans."
Those are very different.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
The current system (especially CA Prop 65) makes it impossible for these pronouncements to carry any meaning whatsoever.
Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)
But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.
and that'll be found to be bad in 20 years time, then they repeat again
\* Group 1: carcinogenic (this includes cigarettes, the HPV viruses that cause cervical cancer, and ionizing radiation)
\* Group 2A: probably carcinogenic (this includes red meat, hot beverages, and working as a hairdresser)
\* Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic (this is the group aspartame reportedly may end up in)
\* Group 3: not classifiable
\* Group 4: probably not carcinogenic (this list contains zero items; a chemical called caprolactam was previously on it, but was moved to group 3)
These are not designations of cancer *risk*, but of *the chance that there is a detectable link of some kind*.
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...
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.
I am a Luddite when it comes to tastes, no two ways about it. I suspect many people are, and so some tradeoff has to be made.
Xylitol is preferable because of its oral hygiene benefits, but most consumers are choosy enough to make sure their gum is exclusively xylitol.
There are some brands on Amazon that sell 100% xylitol gum if you go out of your way to find it though. Be careful with it around dogs though, xylitol is insanely toxic to them.
I still haven’t gotten over the rise of “organic” artificial sweeteners. That must have involved some N-th level regulatory capture with the product labeling regulators.
Not to mention that with aspartame in particular, the evidence is sparse and low quality. The verbiage regarding Sucralose in actual human terms of consumption are much more alarming. I generally try to keep any sweet drink consumption with meals, or otherwise sweetened with stevia (which has seen it's own detractors). Given a century and a half of food industry lies, disinformation, misinformation and tethers with regulatory bodies, it's really hard to believe anything and just defer to if it was considered "food" a couple hundred years ago.
Tastes less toxic. Is it?
Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria.
So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
Unless California has aspartame on its list, prop65 says nothing about this.
Don’t like it? Bring it up with the WHO.
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.
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.
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.
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://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2708042/
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