“The IARC will reportedly classify aspartame as a possible carcinogen. But this isn’t a food safety agency, and the context matters.”
I quit artificial sweeteners last year. Just use real sugar in moderation. Seems to be working for me. Biggest change is switching to water to drink. Once you conquer that the rest is cake.
I think a good rule of thumb is “everything in moderation.” Excessive use of anything isn’t healthy.
Except plutonium, man that stuff will mess you up.
Allegedly crack also isnt that good for you
Yeah, I mean drinking too much soda in general isnt exactly gonna be good for you regardless of how its sweetened.
However, if you are drinking a lot of soda, better you drink diet versions and get exposed to this spurious “possible” cancer risk than get exposed to ridiculous amounts of sugar that will all but guarantee weight gain and the build up of insulin resistance
Generally I agree with your point, but there is evidence that diet drinks increase cravings leading to greater overall calorie consumption. So it may not really be that much better.
I’m really far behind on clinical literature on the subject (I’m in a different field), but I remember a recent discovery that there were “sweetness” sensors in the gut. I’m not sure if it was speculation or already shown, but the theory is that detection of sweet things in the gut stimulated release of insulin. Since blood glucose doesn’t increase with zero calorie drinks, it can drop blood glucose, increasing hunger.
It’s known that some zero calorie sweeteners we can’t digest, but our gut bacteria can, and it changes them in a negative way.
People have been freaking out about it since it was first introduced. Can’t count how many times someone has told me to put down my diet soda because it causes cancer/diabetes.
Same as microwave oven, cell phones and laptops. Human beings freak out about stuff that they don’t understand, it was then thunder that human freak out about, it is now technology that human freak out about.
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I wonder if there would be that much worry about it if it didn’t taste like shit.
Soda companies could literally just switch to stevia or monk fruit tomorrow and it wouldn’t be a problem. The only issue is their refusal to change.
Aspartame doesn’t taste great, but stevia is just awful
A lot of people complain about it, but I don’t have any problem with it. I enjoy stevia-based sodas like Zevia or even hard seltzers with it (Truly has a few) with no problem. I wonder if it’s one of those things where it tastes different to various people like cilantro.
I’m more of a monk fruit person myself too honestly.
I got some monk fruit at the discount grocery store where they have random discontinued things and it was a huge bag of little mini pixie stick sized, single serve packets of monk fruit powder and I ate the whole bag like they were pixie sticks and I was a six year old on Halloween.
It’s the most metallic, awful tasting thing. It feels like I’m allergic to it or something. Like it makes my mouth subtly burn.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32811239/
TL;DR Stevia is shit and bad too
I’m a card carrying hippie and I fucking hate stevia. It ruins all it touches.
I find stevia based sodas taste better anyway
Yeah buuuuuuuuut bottom line et al
If you don’t mind me being pedantic, “et al.” is short for “et alia” which means “and other people”. “Etc”, short for “et cetera”, means “and other things”. You only use “et al.” when talking about people not named in a list.
The More You Know 🌠
Bottom line won’t change when users of your product are addicted. Since coke etc. are full of sweetener, which I assume causes a similar level of addiction to regular sugar, those that drink it won’t mind if the price goes up 5 cents or whatever because cola put some slightly better sweetener in it. Cola would probably just make a new branded version or slap a “new an improved flavour” on the can and jack up the price by 10 cents anyway. Actually, people are pretty particular about the flavour, so that’s probably why they won’t do it. They must have gradually shitted up the recipe to get to the current version so people didn’t burn down coke HQ.
Which I don’t understand. It literally would be cheaper for them to use stevia or monk fruit and call it a day than to quibble over something so trivial.
On the scale of Pepsi or Coke, a seemingly trivial amount like 1/2 a cent a can adds up to significant money. It’s amazing how companies pinch pennies when dealing in volume like that. They sold 32 billion cases of beverages in 2022. No idea what the real figure is, but let’s say 5,000,000,000 of those are diet drinks with aspartame… that’s 120 billion cans, so if the other sweetener cost only 1 cent more per can that’s 1.2 billion dollars.
Since the verdict on aspartame isn’t clear, they’d also have to tweak the formula for flavor, and switching would be somewhat of a PR admission that there’s something wrong with aspartame, I imagine they’re very reluctant to change anything.
I mean, to be honest, with 1 in 2 women and 1 in 3 men in the US estimated to get cancer in their lifetime, I’m just not surprised anymore when someone tells me <insert whatever> is linked to cancer.
Still tastes like crap.
Wasn’t aspartame also linked to liver failure in the 90’s? 🤔
Afaik it has been linked to cancer for about that long too. Used to tell my mom that aspartame (in her diet cokes) causes cancer all the time in ~2000-2001, don’t know where I heard it back then but obviously someone knew because child me was not a biochemist with a lab enough to come to that conclusion by myself.
