I’d make a strong argument that one Diet Coke a day is still healthier even if it’s carcinogenic vs one regular coke everyday. Sugar is that bad for you.
Neither Coke nor Diet Coke are nutritious. Whether one or the other is a risk is specific to a person, and aspartame as well as other sweeteners aren’t fully understood in terms of risk.
I think these kind of simplistic statements serve to stoke fears around food than actually help people understand them. Added / excess sugar is associated to health risks but ultimately people need to understand their own health as individuals.
Here’s a Healthline article (by no means an authority but still fairly informative) to help expand.
Sugar is incredibly addictive, non-nutritious yet high in caloric content, unfilling, causes highs and crashes reminiscent of drugs, and overuse of sugar in modern food is a major promoter of obesity. As with all types of food, sugar is fine in moderation. I consume plenty of sugar. However, if you rely on it too much for your daily calories then you won’t get enough of any other macronutrients such as fat, protein, and fiber, and you’ll get almost no micronutrients like vitamins. Sugar is also converted to energy incredibly quickly by the body, which is a good thing in many cases (like when you need a quick burst of energy at breakfast time, provided you balance it out with things like protein), but also leads you to get hungry quickly after eating it and eat some more, causing you to get fat, and wasting your money. When your body gets used to large amounts of sugar it also starts to crave it like a drug user craves drugs.
Oh ya, it’s also in just about everything these days, especially in America. It’s not even the tasty kind that comes from sugarcane, they just use corn syrup. Thank you, corn lobby!
Sugar itself is not particularly harmful. Most foods we eat naturally contains sugar.
What’s really harmful are sugary drinks, such as regular soda, fruit juices, and sweet coffee based drinks.
The problem comes from how quickly the sugar is absorbed into the blood stream. Regular foods containing sugar such as fruits release the sugar slowly as they are broken down and digested. Sugary drinks however are pure dissolved sugar which is absorbed incredibly rapidly.
It causes a rapid blood glucose spike which is followed by an insulin spike. Having that as a regular occurance is devastating to your body, and can lead to some terrible conditions like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and diabetes.
I see someone else who’s part of the keto crew. Sugar (and carbs) are goddamn awful for people and it is infuriating to see how so many people still focus on the amount of fat in foods, which to a large degree is meaningless. Sugar is the killer.
I think that’s the general conclusion. Diet coke is better than regular coke and may satisfy a sweet tooth. If you can handle stevia that could be even better than aspartame - its slightly more potent and afaik not absorbed into the body at all. But like drinking water is probably even better in most cases, it just doesn’t satisfy cravings for people that have them.
“Look, it may give you cancer, but honestly at this point what won’t. And at least the cancer has a chance to take you out before the catastrophic collapse”
With the amount of aspartame I drink, I’d like the process to hurry up already, please.
You’re going to need to eat it by a spoonful to even have a chance of it causing cancer.
Nine to fourteen cans of cola a day is the limit. Eek, I’ve probably done that when I was a young programmer! Hope it doesn’t catch up to me. :(
The WHO said aspartame is safe to consume within a daily limit of 40 milligrams per kilogram of a person’s body weight.
An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks.
Holy shit you weren’t kidding. And here I was worried that my 2-3 cans a month might be catching up to me!
I’ve only ever seen aspartame in the ingredient list of diet sodas, and I often check ingredient lists.
Read this article and decide if you think the risk is actually that serious. The WHO is almost certainly blowing this way out of proportion and overstating the risks.
You think Coca-Cola would let someone say they’ve been giving everyone cancer? He’ll no.
Don’t worry you’re only drinking the recommended amount of carcinogens.
Everything is a carcinogen pretty much though.
Eat meat? Better boil or steam everything because any bit of char on meat is a carcinogen. Especially avoid all red meat and sandwiches in general.
Don’t heat potatoes or a lot of other vegetables too high either. They can produce acrylamide, another carcinogen that’s also found in tobacco smoke.
Never drink alcohol either because it’s a carcinogen.
Don’t fry anything. Causes cancer.
Peanuts and peanut butter are laced with aflatoxins that are carcinogenic.
Literally everyone gets cancer several times in life. Most of the time your body kills it off. It’s only when that fails that we catch it. The longer we live and the more we minimize other factors, the bigger cancer will become as a cause of death.
Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.
Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.
Depends on what kind of processing it’s being put through. I wouldn’t drink unpasteurized milk, that’s for sure.
Eh if you know the source well, raw milk is delicious. I sure as fuck wouldn’t trust some corporation with it though. I know local farmers though and get raw milk from trusted sources. Way better than even the high end grocery store stuff.
Which is good. We’ve had a general sense of aspartames’ carcinogenicity for some time, but we really do need to dial in the doses of understanding. I have Mexican friends who do not drink liquid other than soda and alcohol (let’s ignore the last word for the sake of this conversation) and it’s the same for many of their friends as well.
Anything can kill you. Water. Oxygen. Green beans. The dose makes the poison.
So it’s about time we came to a concensus and quantified the risk.
