Aspertame is the most-tested food additive ever. There has never been proven any causal link to cancer, not in the decades anyone has tried, and there still hasn’t— not even in this year-old article.
I feel like this is a difficult subject, since there’s two sides that are willing to pour money into research that’s biased one way or the other (Big sugar vs the artificial sweeteners).
The article is perhaps advocating for an overly cautious position. Traditionally, I’ve been pro-artificial sweeteners, and considered aspartame quite safe, but specifically, this part in the article:
the IARC is more selective in its use of unpublished, confidential commercial data, and it takes greater care to exclude people with conflicts of interest from contributing to its evaluations.
A few years ago, Millstone and a co-author looked closely at how the European Food Safety Authority had weighed the 154 studies on aspartame safety when it looked to assess the product in 2013. About half of the studies favored aspartame’s safety and about half indicated it might do harm.
The agency had judged all of the harm-suggesting studies — but only a quarter of the safety-affirming studies — to be “unreliable,” wrote the authors. And the agency had applied looser quality standards to the studies suggesting safety than it had to the studies suggesting harm. Agency reviewers pushed back against Millstone’s assessment. And in any case, aspartame has remained on the European market.
Was a little concerning.
The conflict of interest even more so:
The FDA has rules about who can serve on its advisory committees that are aimed at preventing conflicts of interest. However, a recent investigation by ProPublica found that consultants employed by McKinsey worked for the FDA on drug safety monitoring projects while simultaneously working for pharmaceutical companies directly affected by those projects.
As much as you may try to use a straw man to shift the discussion to governing or regulatory agencies, there is still no actual evidence linking aspartame to harmful effects in humans when used as a food additive.
Different agencies and studies can irresponsibly throw around words like “maybe” and “possibly” and “might”, but until there’s any real evidence linking aspartame’s use as a sweetener to an illness in a human, then it’s nothing but fear-mongering.
I don’t believe I’m straw manning, and I think your characterization of that is a little unwarranted.
There is no study that conclusively points to it being harmful, that is true. But when there’s a lot of money on the line and conflicts of interest start getting involved, I don’t think it’s entirely out of the question to be at least slightly wary of the ‘official’ recommendation from a verifiably financially biased institution. Regular folk aren’t going to research all 154 studies on a single sweetener, making them inherently reliant on institutions (who can do meta studies) for advice. It’s the quintessential laymen’s quandary.
The EU seems to be, at least nowadays, a more trustworthy source regarding food safety, and are certainly more willing to reverse previously incorrect assumptions, such as when they reversed the ban on Cyclamate sweetener when it was found to be safe (yet it remains banned in the US). They, so far, also deem aspartame safe, and it’s difficult to see how exactly it could be dangerous.
Is it safer than sugar, where there are known dangers? I think so, I’d pick a diet soda over a sugar-based one any day. But I think it’s healthy to at least attempt to ensure the answer recommended to us is as unbiased as possible.
By the way, the article itself doesn’t even suggest that aspertame is that dangerous:
“My big concern is that I don’t want people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to stop diet sodas, I’m gonna get sugared sodas,’ and then they start drinking those and gain weight, which we know is one of the major cancer risks,” said Bevers. “And that has solid data.” A better outcome of the recommendation would be if people who drink a ton of diet soda replaced some of it with water.
I think the takeaway from this article should be “Aspartame is probably pretty safe, but holy shit one of the main institutions we have in charge of determining that, along with a bunch of other substances, is basically corporate captured, so get your advice elsewhere.”
Aspartame has been tested by far more than just the FDA and WHO, and nobody has ever found any link to any illness in humans, not ever.
And if you have any, you’d be the first.
It’s a straw man to argue your “uncomfortableness” with regulatory agencies as a reason not to trust aspartame. In fact, quite the opposite, as it’s the WHO who is doing the fearmongering.
And comparing it to any other approval processes is just a false equivalence.
Found the aspartame spokesperson.
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And there are many daily consumed food items (processed food, alcohol, …) that are known to cause cancer but nobody tries to regulate those.
You need to pay more attention
Edit: downvoted for pointing out the commentor needs to pay more attention because those things, in fact, are regulated
Big sugar vs the artificial sweeteners?
They’re the same companies.
Coke vs Diet Coke.
Coke is downstream of Sugar and Artificial sweetener manufacturers. Coke doesn’t care what sweetener you prefer in their products as long as they make a profit.
Aspertame was owned by Nutrasweet, where as big sugar, is, well, sugar cane and sugar beet plantation owners and processors.
Both of them were competing with each other for adoption in products and when sold direct to consumer (I.e, equal). They both had a vested interest in slandering the other.
See this as an example.
Thank you for correcting me.
I apologise for being so flippant about it.
So, I can keep drinking my beloved zero mountain dew?
There are other things in that which are bad for you.
prove it
I would if I weren’t going to bed. Feel free to ignore me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s pretty interesting how many walls of text you’ll write to defend an unnecessary additive but not to prove you should just drink water
Another straw man.
A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.[1]One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having refuted or defeated an opponent’s proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., “stand up a straw man”) and the subsequent refutation of that false argument (“knock down a straw man”) instead of the opponent’s proposition.[2][3] Straw man arguments have been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly regarding highly charged emotional subjects.[4]
You should switch to Diet Baja Blast. It’s healthier because it’s tastier or something.
Green means healthy!
The “zero” beverages are usually sweetened with Sucrolose primarily. Not Aspertame. Though I’ve seen some with primarily Sucrolose and also Aspertame as a secondary ingredient.
The original selling point was partly that it wasn’t aspartame, but I think that’s changing to the mixture since some people react poorly to sucrolose.
The original selling point was partly that it wasn’t aspartame,
Was it? I thought it was just an angle to use a better tasting sweetener than Aspertame. Sucrolose tastes much closer to sugar than Aspertame does, probably because Sucrolose’s chemical structure is very close to sucrose.
Yeah some of the Diet brands were running as “aspartame free” when it was gaining popularity
Mountain dew has aspartame
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And that sounds a lot like a false equivalence based on pure speculation with zero evidence to back it up.
And there was always a lot of evidence of the damage caused by second-hand smoke that tobacco industries simply paid politicians to ignore. Hell, all you had to do was look at the walls and curtains of a smoker to see the tar and smoke stains. It was clear as day.
For decades studies from all sorts of institutions, both big and small and independently-funded have failed to find any evidence at all that aspartame is unsafe for human consumption as a food additive.
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Lmao
lmao you can’t be serious. Smoking affects everyone around you
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Body odor doesn’t increase the likelihood of cancer for the people around you.
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Let’s trade sources. Here are mine.
Edit: I also did the work for you and checked some of the references in those sources. Here’s the 1986 landmark surgeon general report.
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Good to know, I’ll stick to sodas full of sugar, no problem can come from that 👍
The article says that sugar based drinks are far worse for your health than diet versions.
Your average pseudoscience obsessed health hobbyist is never going to notice that particular detail though.
What kind of sugar? High fructose corn syrup or sugar?
HFCS is metabolized in the liver making it far more damaging to the body. And soda that uses real sugar typically has a lower sugar content. Soda with real sugar also imparts a feeling of fullness, typically resulting in people drinking less.
I am going to need a source that HFCS is worse than sucrose for your liver.
People hear “high fructose” in High Fructose Corn Syrup and assume it’s in comparison to other sugars, it is not. High Fructose corn syrup is a name to differentiate it from regular corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose.
Let’s look at the real differences between HFCS and sucrose or table sugar. Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. HFCS is usually 55% fructose in beverages and 42% in most other HCFS sweetened products. This means that typically the High Fructose corn syrup has less fructose than regular sugar.
You could focus on beverages, but 5% isn’t a huge difference, and if your going to talk about the dangers of sugary beverages it’s always important to remind people that fruit juice has A LOT of fructose (go figure).
Sugar itself is the problem, monitor intake. HCFS is only an issue because the price drove down the cost of sweetening foods to everyone’s detriment.
(Here’s a study on the liver effects.)[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6549781/]
It doesn’t specifically say that fructose has a worse effect on the liver than sucrose, but it does say that fructose is 2x sweeter than glucose, which makes it more addicting, which causes you to drink more because you crave it. So I went looking up sweetness scales and fructose is also sweeter than sucrose (which is still sweeter than glucose), sometimes by a significant margin.
So if both are bad on the liver, fructose could possibly be worse because of a higher level of addiction due to sweetness level, which causes you to consume more than you might with just sucrose.
But sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose. And HFCS is either 42/58 or 55/45. They are basically the same thing.
My brother in Christ, why is sucrose bad for your liver? Because it is metabolized into glucose and… Fructose
The metabolism of sucrose into glucose and fructose happens in the small intestines. Fructose enters the bloodstream and is metabolized by the liver.
Don’t most sodas have corn syrup and stuff instead of sugar?
In the US.
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You probably meant sucrose. Sucralose is a calorie-free sweetener.
And, as a quick aside, a side effect of the sweetener is to damage DNA.
Most of the smaller soda brands in the US use sugar, too. Just the big boys still using corn syrup at this point.
Does it have atomic mass? Then it probably can cause cancer.
This is a good rule, especially for things that change their own atomic mass.
Does it interact in any way whatsoever with the electromagnetic spectrum?
Yeah that’ll give you cancer alright
I have atomic mass … am I … Doctor Manhattan?
Here’s another year old article that came out in response to this.
TLDR: You should not worry, and the only people who might think about worrying are those drinking 12 cans of diet soda a day — so basically no one.
“Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most consumers,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at the WHO, during a press conference in Geneva. He said the problem is for “high consumers” of diet soda or other foods that contain aspartame. “We have, in a sense, raised a flag here,” Branca said, and he called for more research.
But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it disagrees with this new classification, pointing to evidence of safety. In a written statement, an FDA official told NPR that aspartame being labeled by the WHO “as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer.”
The WHO has long set the acceptable daily intake, or ADI, of aspartame at a maximum of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. So, a person who weighs 60 kilograms (about 130 pounds), could consume up to 2,400 milligrams per day, which is roughly equivalent to 12 cans of Diet Coke — much higher than most people consume.
I beg to differ I know for fact my dad drinks 12 cans or more a day. Hell I did at one time but with regular Dr Pepper. It not hard to go through a 12oz can of soda.
Bro drink some water.
Oh I do a ton. I was referring when I was younger.
I have a coworker who has a 1.5L bottle of coke zero beside him everyday.
How big is said coworker? And I remember working in call center when I was younger and always having a 20oz bottle of soda. Looking back I know how dumb that was, but shit I smoked cigarettes back then too so wasn’t all they bright.
Regular Coke, sure not hard. Diet, though?
The few people I’ve known that would drink that much daily drink diet only. It has been pretty obvious throughout my life that people who have no self-control are more likely to go for things like diet sodas and “lite” whatever. I hate sweeteners, I can’t stand diet anything both because it tastes bad to me and it makes me feel ill, but to me it still seems like it would be easier to drink 12 cans of diet soda than the same amount of “normal” soda. It’s a disgusting amount either way.
The Vox article comes to the same conclusion.
In Mexico and other countries there are cities where you cannot drink the water so you end up drinking soda your entire life. Coca-Cola buys the good water and pollutes the rest so that they are the only safe drinking option.
I came in here ready to defend delicious aspartame from people who aren’t science literate and was surprised to see many really good arguments and comments already posted. Lemmy, you’re pretty cool as a community right now.
Realistically what it means is that millions of people will react with “meh, still gonna use it.” I mean, have you met humans? We knew lead was toxic since at least the Roman era, but that didn’t stop us from using it in everything - including food and drink.
The difference is that you can completely avoid lead poisoning if you eliminate exposure to lead, but you can’t completely avoid cancer even if you eliminate exposure to carcinogens.
And eliminating exposure to aspartame would have only a minimal effect, at best, on your overall risk of cancer.
And they’ll do that while standing in bright sunlight without sunscreen, drinking beer, eating red meat, processed food, candy with real sugar and driving in fossil fuel cars which are in the same or higher category of cancer risks.
Don’t forget cell phones, which are in the same risk category as aspartame.
candy tastes good, beer gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and i ain’t paying 10x more money for a car just so i get to spend 10 hours a week at some charging station so my tablet with wheels can go whirrrr.
Are you somehow defending leaded gasoline?
there is no lead in gasoline anymore
Unfortunately, there is actually. Aviation fuels, even “low-lead” variants still use lead. Virtually all small propeller aircraft use leaded gas.
well, i never said i fly. and with lithium being the “best” battery technology, electric planes would be a little heavy.
So according to WHO, aspartame is more cancerous than glyphosate
A few months ago, Ann Reardon released a good video covering this
That was genuinely an excellent video, thanks for sharing. :)
Science Vs did an episode on this years ago.
Science Vs: Artificial Sweeteners - not so sweet?
Episode webpage: https://gimletmedia.com/science-vs/
That’s cool. I just suggested the Ann Reardon video because she’s addressing the findings from the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that’s also mentioned in this article.
Mexican coke > regular Coke
Mexican coke Lite > Diet coke
Sorry y’all that’s just coke math.
colombian coke >
No sugar, no aspartame, just pure taste
EDIT: This is, in fact, false information! Please refer to @FlowVoid@lemmy.world’s comment for the facts.
Mexican coke has been found to have no sugar in it, it also uses High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Any flavor enhancement over regular coke appears to be placebo, possibly an effect of the glass bottle.
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The study he references suggests that Coca-cola is essentially lying, because no one other than that study bothered to test if there was Sugar or HFCS in the soda labeled with Cane Sugar.
Considering Coca-Cola is a company known for being willing to murder union organizers, I don’t think it’s a stretch that they’d lie about that for profits.
The study he references also did not bother to test for sugar, only fructose.
When they later repeated their analysis, they found that Mexican Coca Cola actually does contain sugar, unlike American Coca Cola.
The paper cited in that video had serious flaws in their methodology.
A repeat analysis by the same group found that Mexican Coca Cola actually does contain table sugar (sucrose) as well as fructose, whereas American Coca Cola contains no table sugar and more fructose than the Mexican version.
Cheers for that information! I’ve corrected my post to reflect this.
I never trusted the stuff. We use to say this matter-of-factly when I was a kid, about thirty years ago. I’m glad to see that my unfounded confidence and speculation turned out to be right!
Ehhh, not so much. Honestly the rating for carcinogenic substances is very shaky and can be very misleading. Like many things, poison depends on the dose and the same with carcinogens. Bacon is a group 1 carcinogen, and cigarettes are a group 1 carcinogen. Despite the same rating, cigarettes are BY FAR much more carcinogenic.
For group 2b “possible carcinogens”, it usually coincides with the frequency of the product. For this rating they review what a cancer victim typically eats/consumes/interacts with. Aspartame and many other ingredients, are labeled as possibly carcinogenic, as many victims have eaten them, but there is no strong correlation.
The problem is however, many of these ingredients are so common that almost everybody eats them. It’s like saying “everybody who drinks water dies, it’s poisonous!”.
“possibly”
Not exactly. In this context “possibly causes cancer” translates to something like ‘we have no credible evidence that it does, but we can’t prove that it doesn’t.’
In the early days of YouTube, after I saw a video where they boiled a can of Coke and found 13 spoons of sugar. I stopped drinking that stuff. Aspartame or not, I’d rather drink water.
yeah def dont drink calories for no reason especially this stuff
Damn. I’ve got the Mountain Dew drinkers riled up.
“Possibly causes cancer” is sufficient for me to never the touch the stuff. Please stop drinking these things. They’re literally addictive.
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Your dad has been wrong for almost 40 years.
Depends on if he made the statement in California or not.
In California sand has a warning label.
To be fair, eating, drinking, or inhaling sand is not great for you.
Oh crap, now what am I going to have for lunches.
There’s still no evidence that it does. Unless, perhaps, you’re injecting gigantic amounts of it into rats or something. But drinking it in a soda? Nobody’s ever proved any evidence that it’s anything but safe.
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Anything can be dangerous if you consume too much of it.
just breathing air in a city is dangerous
It isn’t dangerous at all when used as a food additive. And if you have evidence to the contrary, you’d be the first ever to find it.
One thing I have observed with sodas containing aspartame, is the short shelf life, I think normally they give sodas 1 year but after 6 months the soda starts having an off taste that only gets stronger.
I have tried drinking a can of zero that was 2 years past the expiration date, and it tasted like cat piss.
Ps: I guess the aspartame molecules are not very stable in a soda mix?
