Alright is someone paying for this misinformation campaign? Every news site I am on is telling me about the fake dangers of a product whose alternative has known real dangers. In a few months some company is going to announce a new artificial sweetener I bet.
Invent a problem and sell you a solution.
I’d settle for a single less sweet option.
The choice always seems to be extremely high in sugar, or even sweeter but with artificial sweeteners.
I like to use a soda stream. I can add co2 to my own water and add whatever I want to use to flavor it. Sometimes I just use a few drops of lime juice, sometimes I use bourbon.
I also like it unflavored. Sometimes all I want is the bubbles.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but odds are it will be meaningless - the research is sketchy at best for now.
In my mind with the quality of research out there right now, it will boil down to 3 outcomes:
- If you used a lot of artificially sweetened products to avoid consuming lots of sugar, and you would go back to using the same amount of sugar otherwise, then keep using the sweetener. Sugar is far more likely to cause damage to you.
- If you think you could cut out the aspartame and cut down on sugar, then do that instead.
- If you eat a decent amount of red meat, you may as well continue consuming aspartame. Odds are the meat will cause cancer long before the aspartame does.
The trouble is the news can latch on to the IARC plan to classify it as a class 2B carcinogen (“possibly carcinogenic”). The problem is, the IARC classification is kinda trash for an end user, since it only classifies the quality of the research available. Meat is a class 1 (“known carcinogen”), but so is asbestos and sunlight and alcohol. No one would argue that those are equivalent. Similarly, coffee, pickles and petrol are also 2B classifications. It’s easy for the news to run with “aspartame has been identified as possibly carcinogenic” and be completely correct while also entirely misleading.
The thing with most carcinogens is they are cumulative. If people are going to continue to consume lots of red meat, cutting other carcinogens does help.
Obviously, the media would be better from a public health point of view to focus on the red meat. However, the media focuses on news and changes. Red meat has been a known carcinogen for a while. Not to mention bad for the environment and ethically problematic. It’s led to a raise in veganism and vegetarianism and many people have cut red meat in particular or are flexitarian.
The problem with sweeteners in partiyos that many people consume them in an effort to be healthier, cutting their sugar intake. Over time, we’ve found out that they are more problematic than we knew. Risks for diabetes as well as cancer.
I drink diet soda to not drink soda. I drink soda to not do drugs and alcohol. I’d much rather have heroin than diet coke, but I probably shouldn’t ever have that again. So I’ll have a diet coke, on ice please.
