Hacker News Reader

Comment by glonq | Hacker News Reader

A few of the conspiracy nutters that I know firmly beleive that "Big Aspartame" is responsible for suppressing information about its dire negative effects.

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.

View on HN

To expand on point number 3, the sugar industry is one of the most notorious at utilizing motivated research to its own benefit. If aspartame had even slightest chance of causing illness or cancer, you could bet on the inevitable, unrelenting smear campaign that Big Sugar would be waging against it.

Who are the players in Big Sugar who works exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.

Who are the players in Big Sugar who would exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.

You’re correct that soft drink providers have no horse in this race as they are mere consumers of sweetening agents, and the their product output depends on customer demand. It would hardly make much difference to them if 90% of consumers started to prefer Diet Coke over Coca-Cola, they would just make more Diet Coke.

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...

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5099084/

They need to sell something, if people believe sugar is bad, sweeteners are bad, even disposable plastic bottles are bad, what's left?

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...

Corn farmers are a huge part (because their product makes high fructose corn syrup) and they are highly effective lobbyists.

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.

US Sugar and Domino, if memory serves.

And yet it took 40+ years for its danger to be widely acknowledged. Forgive me but for thinking there is something suspicious going on... Frankly, the Big Aspartame should be the default explanation and any other explanation be under more scrutiny.

Big Aspartame does not exist in a vacuum, however. The sugar industry is arguably bigger, more powerful, and has even more budget to fund motivated research. I don’t trust Big Aspartame to prove to is that it is safe, but I put my full faith in Big Sugar to tell us if something is wrong with Aspartame.

I'm not sure that I even beleive in "Big Aspartame". The patents have expired, so there are dozens of companies who manufacture it globally. I doubt that they all meet at their global secret cabal hideout to align their plans to extinguish all research.

How much longer are the sugar patents still in effect that allow Big Sugar to exist?

That's not how things work, at all. Most of the things you consider conspiracy theories are done completely in the open and there's nothing conspiratorial nor theoretical about it. These huge companies have hundreds of lawyers and lobbyists, sometimes they work together to push or prevent legislation. They are doing their job, nothing illegal about it, companies are also allowed to do it.

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

It's kind of similar to finding a trivial security bug in a critical piece of software after a decade of it being introduced into code. You would think it would not be possible because the software is being used everywhere for extremely important stuff, and so many highly-skilled security researchers would have already looked out for it due to incentives. But there are many examples of this happening. I have heard of many instances where a critical security bug was already reported many years ago, but no one bothered to look at it and fix it until someone else rediscovered it.

> ...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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com