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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it a healthy alternative to sugar? If you have a one in five chance to live ten years longer because you don't develop cardiovascular issues from obesity, but one in a million develops cancer, I mean...

It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.

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The WHO recently conditionally recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control. Their stance is that we should be reducing sweetened food/beverage intake in general, rather than trying to find healthier ways to sweeten what we eat.

https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...

While that is their stance, it is conditioned on what they seem to consider to be good evidence that using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control does not work (at the level of public health, that is; for individuals, YMMV.)

If we shift the context just a little bit, everyone would ridicule this kind of abstinence-only approach.

"Everyone" might be a stretch.

Depending on the topic, I'm in camp abstinence.

Aspartame causes weight gain, so abstinence-only isn’t a great analogy.

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.

I am personally trying to achieve that.

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.

Nothing is safer than sugar if you're just talking about a few grams for your coffee.

Can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar. Diet cokes has 0.2 grams of aspartame.

You listed two isolated facts. You forgot to make a point.

This was downvoted but Is correct, relative amounts mean nothing.

Using artificial sweeteners for coffee is completely unnecessary, unless you're drinking a lot.

The amount of calories in two teaspoons of sugar is minuscule.

Two teaspoons is already one sixth of the WHO recommended daily sugar intake, and that was just the coffee. And WHO claims there are additional health benefits expected if you can do half of what they recommend.

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