- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- news@beehaw.org
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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!
You’d basically die from water poisoning before the aspertame would get you.
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well that settles it, I am going to treat myself without worrying anymore.
I drink about a can per day and I was so worried. lol
Maybe if you are very, very, very little.
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.
I know you didn’t even look at the article because it doesn’t rely on coca-cola’s word at all.
So, how much is that in liters ?
3.2 to 5 liters a day. Hope I did that calculation correctly.
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.
As long as you don’t try and serve it to me, all power to you.
It doesn’t matter how trusted the source is, raw milk could still be carrying pathogens. Having recovered from salmonella earlier this year (I didn’t eat anything for a month), I don’t recommend taking the chance.
I get it at the farmer’s market. It is delicious!
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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.
Of the basis WHO is using here, most if not all longterm studies (the kind you’d want for assessing things like cancer risk) are based on observational evidence. That is, a study where the participants typically aren’t asked to do anything they don’t already normally do. For this topic, that means generally speaking the participants are going to be people that already normally drink low calorie sweetened beverages.
It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.
I can’t really make sense of their recommendation. The data required to recommend for or against just isn’t there. The totality of short term data is all very showing a very strong association between sweetened drinks and weight loss. Wish they’d just explain this stuff properly so we didn’t have to rely on the dumbass media to interpret advice meant for medical professionals
Do you have data suggesting overweight people are more likely to drink sugar free sodas? You could just as easily intuit that health conscious folks drink less calories.
I didn’t, but I just found a few papers showing a relationship between awareness/use of nutrition claims/labels and obesity.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7622-3
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214001328?via%3Dihub
That second one sums up my logic pretty well:
The analysis revealed that people with excess weight display a high level of interest in nutrition claims, namely, short and immediately recognised messages. Conversely, obese individuals assign less importance to marketing attributes (price, brand, and flavour) compared with normal weight consumers.
Generally people that engage with products marketed as “diet” options are more likely to be people that want to improve their diet. In turn those people are more likely to be overweight. And people that are not overweight are more likely to select based on other product attributes.
Edit: The use of low-calorie sweeteners is associated with self-reported prior intent to lose weight in a representative sample of US adults - https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20169
In cross-sectional analyses, the expected relation between higher BMI and LCS [low calorie sweetener] use was observed, after adjusting for smoking and sociodemographic variables. The relation was significant for the entire population and separately for men and women (see Table 1). The relation between obesity (BMI ⩾30 kg m−2) and LCS consumption was significant for LCS beverages, tabletop LCS and LCS foods (see Figure 1a). Individuals consuming two or more types of LCSs were more likely to be obese than individuals consuming none (42.7% vs 28.4%) and were more likely to have class III obesity (7.3% vs 4.2%).
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But then couldn’t you just as easily say rather than ‘people use diet products because they’re overweight’, that ‘people are overweight because they use diet products’ ? I’ve certainly heard both propositions before. “Never seen a skinny person drinking Diet Coke”
I would disagree. We should attempt to validate all such claims. Personally, I’m pretty skinny. In fact, I’d like to gain some weight. I’m also reasonably health conscious. I don’t drink all that much soda. When I do though, it’s Coke Zero (or equivalent), not regular coke. I recognize that we have too much sugar in our diet in modern life anyway, so I cut it out where I can. However, health consciousness likely leads to people consuming fewer sodas in general (and more water), so the percentage of purchased product will likely skew towards people with a soda addiction/fixation who are searching for an alternative that doesn’t require them to change much in their lifestyle.
Life has too many variables to make assumptions like that. We should seek to varify claims instead of assuming our first thought must be true.
It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.
You say this based on what exactly? Because that’s a trivial thing to correct for in an observational study.
I’m talking about the WHO’s recommendations in their capacity as an advisory body on public health following their analysis of IARC research, not the research itself. Many of the studies do make substantial corrections for the participant candidates. I don’t think that’s necessarily translated through to the recommendations, which should be given in the context of existing public health outcomes.
The WHO agrees that two thirds of adults in countries like USA and Aus are overweight. They agree that obesity is an extreme risk factor for cancer. They agree that non-nutritive sweeteners confer at least a short term benefit to weight loss. They agree that the cancer risk associated with those products is comparatively insignificant. So they should be careful not to potentially mislead media and the the public about that specific causal relationship. It has directly resulted in the misleading headline of this post.
Aspartame is nasty anyway
I don’t understand why anyone would pick Diet Coke over Coke Zero which tastes infinitely better.
Isn’t that also loaded with aspartame?
Zero also has acesulfame potassium, so not sure if Diet has more aspartame or what exactly.
This has been a thing since forever. I remember there being a big doobadoo about the shit in Diet Coke back in the 90’s. They showed it gave mice cancer.
It used to be called NutraSweet.
The thing is that the study with the mice was seriously flawed. There’s been more research since then, which is why we’re getting this announcement now (even though the announcement itself is little more than “oh hey there might be something to this? We definitely need more research before we can know for sure.”)
Yeah, I thought this sounded pretty familiar. I thought it was like a known thing.
This thread is fucked with astroturfing. Welcome to Lemmy, everyone! It’s easier to do this shit here… It’s kind of a massive fucking problem.
Who’s astroturfing, exactly?
It is a term used by people that think that everything is a conspiracy theory. Most likely OC meant that comments here are payed shills of soft drinks companies trying to downplayed the significance of these news.
In reality, it’s full of reasonable people that don’t immediately jump on the boogieman bandwagon but simply critically look at the announcement and provide context for it so people don’t immediately stop consuming sugar-free consumables in favour of sugared ones as we know the latter to be deadly.
It’s weird to think someone would only disagree with you if they were trying to drum up fake support in support of a company.
Aspartame gives me mad headaches anyway.
Aspartame insulted my mother and kicked my dog
I heard that the WHO is pushing this agenda in order to replace aspartame in your diet coke with vaccines. Wake up beeple!
Does reading this comment count as me doing my own research?
Just a little, light cancer.
I drink a lot of Coke Zero and mainly went on it because sugar taxes were making regular Coca Cola far more expensive.
The notion that big soda corporations are giving us cancer is quite concerning.
Let’s be clear, sugary sodas are causing health problems right now.
Exactly this. I hate to say it but candy and sodas need to be taxed like cigarettes. The obesity crisis is very real. Over 70% of adults in the United States are overweight or obese.
Taxes don’t really make people quit. It just makes them more poor. The best it does is over time people stop trying things long enough to get addicted.
The almost certainly aren’t. Typically the quantities used in these tests are absurd if scaled up to a human. It also very well may not have the same effect in a human.
As long as you aren’t shoveling aspertame into your mouth, it’s almost certainly less than the equivalent amount they tested on these mice.
Quote from the article: “An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda such as Diet Coke daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks”
Aka, you’re fine.
Is there a reason a lot of people seem so bent on drinking fountain drinks constantly? Is it an anxiety thing?
addiction
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just an FYI, the rum is probably much more carcinogenic. WHO has had a statement on that for some time https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health
What’s the limit on packs of gum? Asking for a friend.
According to WHO, 40mg per kg of body weight is the safe limit.
Concentration of aspartame in chewing gum samples was between 1.9 and 30.5 μg/g with an average of 11.1 μg/g
So on average, 3.6kg of chewing gum contains 40mg of aspartame.
An average human weights around 60kg. So an average human would be within safe limit by chewing 216kg of gum a day. That’s about 475 pounds of gum a day.
Good riddance. Regardless of whether the allegation of being dangerous are true or not, anything that takes aspartame out of the food industry is good.
If aspertame replaces sugar or removing aspertame causes more sugar consumption, hell no. You might not care for the flavor, but sugar is much worse for people than aspertame. There are better sweeteners though. Stevia is pretty good, in my opinion, and you can grow and extract your own with fairly little effort.
How exactly are you comparing sugar consumption to aspartame consumption?
Sugar is very unhealthy and aspertame is maybe carcinogenic, but almost certainly only in quantities much higher than likely any human (potentially with a few very unhealthy individuals) is consuming. I don’t need to compare the quantities consumed really. Less sugar is better always.
From the article: “An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda such as Diet Coke daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks”
I asked how are you comparing them, not what the maximum dose is.
If you’re so opposed to sugar or sugary drinks, do you not see how it’s a problem to keep promoting these confusing liquid dessert forms which are literally owned by the same corporations that make the sugar drink?
I’m not sure what you mean by how am I comparing them. Do you mean how do I compare 1g of sugar to other sweeteners as a measure of harm, or do you mean it as a rhetorical “they aren’t comparable” comment? If the former, I don’t really need to. Artificial sweeteners do not have measurable harm on normal human consumption scales, where sugar does. If the later, they are comparable. Sugar has caused massive issues in out society and artificial sweeteners are a way to alleviate some of that harm without people dramatically changing.
I don’t promote sweet foods or drinks. I hardly drink or consume them. I rarely eat deserts, and when I do they’re on the much less sweet side. I also usually drink coffee and tea black, or with a tiny splash of milk (alternative). If I had my way, we wouldn’t have sweet foods/drinks everywhere. The current state is that we do though, and the best way to help things isn’t to convince people to not like sweet things, but to convince them they can consume sweet things but they should avoid sugar where possible.
but to convince them they can consume sweet things but they should avoid sugar where possible.
and that’s the problem
