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Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

Plus literally “flavoring” their wine on purpose with lead acetate.

And that was the first and last time that no-calorie sweeteners had deleterious population-level effects

High calorie sweeteners have deleterious population-level effects.

Is there any evidence that modern low calorie sweeteners have deleterious population-level effects, and what are they compared to high calorie sweeteners?

Anecdotally I get gut dybiosis (microbiome imbalance) that notably only occurs when using artificial sweeteners and stops when I stop taking it, I’ve talked to many others who have noticed the same thing. Gut dysbiosis can cause chronic systemic inflammation which is rather bad for the body, not sure if it’s worse than the sugar it replaces, but it shouldn’t be assumed that the problem is solved by low calories. I think it’s important to limit both, preferably to near zero.

Sugar alcohols are especially bad for this. I fried my GI one year and it was largely down to developing a gum chewing habit at a time when sugar alcohols were in almost all gum brands. You can’t process them, but bad gut bacteria can.

It sucks so much, because xylitol appears to be very good for your teeth but bad for your heart:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/xylitol...

I wonder if any Romans evidence had any evidence of population-level delirium from lead consumption...

Lower intelligence would likely surface as hedonistic behavior which is probably hard to distinguish from decadence. Decadence and hedonism were constantly being complained about long before the eventual fall.

> Lower intelligence would likely surface as hedonistic behavior why do you think so

poor decision making

Violence in the US declined as children born around and after leaded gas was banned reached the average age of first offense. It’s quite a line.

You're going to have to explain your point to me, or perhaps you misunderstood my own.

My point is that while it may have been unclear to the Romans as to the cause of changes in behavior they did notice a change and did complain about it a lot. I accept the premise that lead poisoning leads to lower intelligence.

What we know now is that lead’s effects are more pronounced as developmental issues. A little lead exposure as a child can lead to a violent temper. So once children were not born into a low grade cloud of lead contamination, they were set up for fewer mood disturbances as teenagers and young adults. Feeling like violence is your best avenue for conflict resolution leads to crime. So the change wasn’t over night, it was over 20 years.

I expect that whatever effect was going on in Rome if there was one, which seems to be up for debate, counted on pregnant women exposed to lead via alcohol and acidic foods, neither of which young children would normally encounter. Meanwhile lead dust from exhaust got -everywhere-, and paint a lot of places.

I still think you are agreeing with the implied and later stated accepted premise that there is a correlation and it’s not always obvious, I’m still unsure as to what it is you are trying to add.

> Violence in the US declined as children born around and after leaded gas was banned reached the average age of first offense

My pet hypothesis for the generation born after in the mid postwar era having been a general scourge on America is that we had a population boom amidst lead.

Hard to square the fall with lead poisoning when the leadership after the 3rd century hardly even bothered to go to Rome at all.

It's too easy to point at the Claudians as the beginning of the fall. In a way, the "Real" Roman empire began to fail once Augustus took over.

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