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.
You should switch to Diet Baja Blast. It’s healthier because it’s tastier or something.
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.
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the IARC is more selective in its use of unpublished, confidential commercial data, and it takes greater care to exclude people with conflicts of interest from contributing to its evaluations.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.”
And there are many daily consumed food items (processed food, alcohol, …) that are known to cause cancer but nobody tries to regulate those.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does it have atomic mass? Then it probably can cause cancer.
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.
I have a coworker who has a 1.5L bottle of coke zero beside him everyday.
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.
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.
