Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/29/aspartame-artificial-sweetener-possible-cancer-risk-carcinogenic

by sandebert • 3 years ago

465 536 3 years ago

sgbeal• 3 years ago

The weird thing about this is that i stopped drinking Diet Coke, specifically because of aspartame, after reading this same thing in 1996 or perhaps early 97. WHO's decision to wait nearly 30 years before backing that just makes them look impotent.

lkuty• 3 years ago

We got to stay actively informed to be eating good stuff way sooner than the official position of the government about various foods. There are so much bad stuff in the typical supermarket. One way is reading the "right" books.

gnulinux• 3 years ago

How can a layman determine the right book? Anti-vax kooks also think they're reading the right sources.

arbitrage• 3 years ago

Personally I'm taking the WHO announcement as an implicit signal that they are no longer so tightly controlled/held captive by corporate interests as they have been for the past ... three, four decades?

Better late than never, I guess.

systemvoltage2• 3 years ago

Why? I don’t understand. You can imagine a scenario where executives at WHO have shorted the CocaCola stock or bought Aspartame alternatives stock? Many such scenarios possible.

lotsofpulp3• 3 years ago

FYI, according to the linked article, the WHO is not claiming what you think it is claiming.

It is preparing to label the sweetener as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, Reuters reported on Thursday. That would mean there is some evidence linking aspartame to cancer, but that it is limited. The IARC has two more serious categories, “probably carcinogenic to humans” and “carcinogenic to humans”.
It previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its probably cancer-causing class, and listed using mobile phones as possibly cancer-causing.
The IARC safety review was conducted to assess whether or not aspartame is a potential hazard, based on all the published evidence, a person familiar with the matter told the Guardian. However, it does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume.

Some pretty weak claims. Especially weak considering the risk of aspartame (which are not confirmed, and not at amounts regularly consumer) relative to the risk sugar it replaces (which are guaranteed at amounts regularly consumed - see type 2 diabetes).

nerdponx• 3 years ago

As a kid in the 90s I remember seeing health warnings on things like artificially-sweetened chewing gum. I have a very specific memory of asking my dad about it at the local deli.

indymike2• 3 years ago

That was saccharin. I remember the label on my granddad's Tab cola.

It caused bladder cancer in lab animals at high doses, and it was later found that the metabolic pathway that caused the cancer did not exist in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin

ranger_danger• 3 years ago

Where's the proof that drinking Diet Coke causes literally any health issue that is a direct relation to the aspartame itself specifically? Because I don't think that has ever existed because it's not actually harmful in this way... meanwhile your post reads like FUD.

kagakuninja3• 3 years ago

You can start here: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

Diet sodas with aspartame contain a warning for this reason. Now of course, most of us do not have this condition.

But how do we know if it is safe? I decided 20+ years ago that artificial sweeteners were a crutch with no nutritional value and unknown risks, so I stopped consuming them.

brewdad2• 3 years ago

Where's your proof that gravity exists and that we fully understand all of its effects?

Science doesn't work that way. Meanwhile aspartame has been linked to many health problems.

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

Government bodies took a lot more responsibility before the 90's after 90's they rather fund the private sector than be blamed for being authoritarian and monopolistic.

throwaway17772• 3 years ago

Ok I’ll be that guy. The study says there’s no risk unless you drink equivalent of 70 cokes per day. So I think I’m ok. Barely.

jjulius• 3 years ago

You're not wrong, but the full quote from the article is:

“Back in 1981 they established an acceptable daily intake of aspartame, of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. To consume over that limit would require a very large daily consumption of Diet Coke or similar drinks. On 14 July, Jecfa may change that risk assessment, or they may not.”

Emphasis mine. I'd be curious to see if this understanding has shifted in the past 42 years.

benatkin• 3 years ago

That doesn't mean it's good for you. I agree with the labeling of it as a neurotoxin, whether or not the rubber meets the pavement at a psychological level. There are better ways of calming for the vast majority of people than satisfying a sweet tooth so often. For one thing it can reduce the overall satisfaction of eating sweet things, through the law of diminishing returns.

kagakuninja3• 3 years ago

I've been hearing that type of argument since the 70s, after they banned saccharine.

Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?

We often test chemicals on rats, but the problem is that they only live a few years. No one wants to wait 20+ years to see the results of an expensive study on longer lived mammals anyway.

The solution is we feed the rats excessive amounts of the chemical and see if it causes problems. This isn't a great way to do it, but what other option would you suggest?

throwaway17772• 3 years ago

I would simply suggest we stop making any strong claims until we do know.

hombre_fatal8• 3 years ago

Let's suppose a chemical causes slow damage to the body, maybe greatly increasing your risk of cancer or alzheimers if you drink a can of diet soda per day. How could we possibly know if it is safe?

The same way we know cigarettes are unsafe. You look at human cohort data and run variable adjustment models on it and control for confounders. How do cigarette smokers or diet soda drinkers do over time, especially in older cohorts? Are there any other products out there with aspartame that we can look at as well until we've isolated a risk model for aspartame by itself?

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

Chemically, it doesn't make sense that there would be any harm in the first place. With properly functioning kidneys, the resultant chemicals get filtered out extremely quickly through the urine. It helps that most diet colas are also diuretic. The resulting methanol and/or formaldehyde don't stick around to cause harm. This is empirically backed up by the lack of adverse effects over massive populations and over decades.

LarsAlereon• 3 years ago

To clarify, this doesn't mean aspartame in food is harmful, it means that in certain circumstances it's possible for the chemical to cause cancer. For example, workers exposed to extremely high levels during manufacturing, or breakdown products formed during improper storage.

penneallagricia3• 3 years ago

What about the mass of people who in order to drink liters of soda every day ingest large amounts of aspartame? Is it about "circumstances" or concentration?

j45• 3 years ago

Is litres of soda the bar for Aspartame to be bad for someone?

What about a few cans a week?

saiya-jin2• 3 years ago

It literally doesn't matter if its causing cancer or not, that's outright a very bad decision to do so, you will 100% fuck up your health long term. It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so?

Nobody apart from maybe sales folks ever claimed these things are safe to drink in such amounts regularly. Just like nobody ever claimed that consuming say 100g of pure salt every day would be OK, yet you can buy endless amounts of 1kg bags if you want.

Do folks really need some government agency to come to them personally to tell them how to live their lives, babysit every single decision they make, steer them away from their addictions on sugar etc? That's not how game of life works.

cheekibreeki25• 3 years ago

Or soldiers stationed anywhere hot.

pleb_nz4• 3 years ago

Can you find aspartame naturally in the environment in non processed and manufactured foods? E.g steak, fruit, milk whatever? If yes, then I'm a little more lenient on your answer. If not, personally I would rather not see artificial man made ingredients in foods I consume. I did a quick Kagi search and it looks like it's completely synthetic?

femboy• 3 years ago

I wish there was a switch in the mass production of products to contain neither sugar or sweeteners.

But it feels like that is never going to happen.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

You can do it yourself. I used to drink a lot of sweetened soda. I switched to diet, then stopped. Regular sugar-sweetened drinks taste sickeningly sweet to me now, and diet drinks taste like chemicals.

Once you break the habit, your sense of taste recovers and you realize how nasty these drinks are. Most people get started on them as kids when you don't have a nuanced sense of taste and really crave sweet stuff.

brewdad2• 3 years ago

Same. I used to drink multiple Cokes a day. I switched to Diet Coke sometime in my late 20s. In my 30s I cut back to one Diet Coke a day and about 4 years ago in my mid 40s I switched over to carbonated water when I crave something fizzy but still limit myself to one a day most days. Coffee and plain water have replaced the soda I used to drink.

This was all done over time as I realized I needed to change my diet to keep weight off and I wasn't really enjoying my daily soda(s) anyway. With an actual intent, one could drop soda within a few months easily and never miss it.

stronglikedan• 3 years ago

Why would there be? Sugar is good. Products with sugar are good. Self control is also good. People can like products with sugar and exercise self control, so there will always be a demand for mass produced products with sugar, and that's a good thing.

sp332• 3 years ago

Self control doesn't reduce the amount of sugar that's already added to the soda I would like to drink. It just means I don't get to drink it. I have to go find low-sugar sodas. I would like to have more options.

dham2• 3 years ago

We have to stop putting sugar in dumb things first, like ketchup and bacon. We have to get a grip.

time0ut• 3 years ago

No chance there would be a switch. Consumer tastes and eduction aren't going to change.

Short of that, I wish there was clearer and more consistent labeling. I avoid sugar and sweeteners. Its annoying to be in the mood for a flavored drink, see something that claims to be zero sugar/all natural/etc, grab it in a hurry, then discover on the first sip its got erythritol in it. I read the label, but sometimes I miss it. My preferred options are unsweetened iced tea, coffee, or flavored water. Those are reliable, but can get boring.

Food is generally easier. I just avoid anything that has (or should have) a lot of carbs as a rule when looking for convenient pre-packaged food. No point in sweetening a can of sardines...

kagakuninja3• 3 years ago

I just started brewing my own tea and coffee, unsweetened. Snack foods are a bit harder, but we are better off eating whole fruits and vegetables anyway.

SirMaster2• 3 years ago

There are plenty of products that have an unsweetened version, at least in my experience.

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf2• 3 years ago

Reminder that bacon is already a known carcinogen for those worrying about artificial sweeteners but happily eating processed meats.

LegitShady4• 3 years ago

It’s actually sodium nitrite that’s carcinogenic (after being exposed to high heat), and I can find bacon without sodium nitrite here pretty much at every grocery store.

remote_phone• 3 years ago

If you read carefully, it still contains sodium nitrite except as powdered celery. So the source of the sodium nitrate is “natural” but the dose is still the same.

malnourish4• 3 years ago

Adding to what remote_phone said, and repeating another comment of mine, that nitrite free bacon still has the same amount of nitrites (in some cases, more).

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

galangalalgol• 3 years ago

If it is completely uncured sure, but usually niteite/nitrate free bacon has an asterisk saying something like "beyond what is naturally found in the added celery juice". If you heat those nitrites in the bacon it doesn't the same thing as the synthetic stuff would. Luckily trichinosis is largely a thing of the past, so why heat it? Uncooked bacon tastes awesome. Also, in stews I believe it does reach the dangerous temps?

tptacek18• 3 years ago

Sodium nitrate converts to sodium nitrite over the course of a cure; that's why Prague Powder #2 is used for long-term cures.

nomel2• 3 years ago

This is not correct, in spirit of "is it carcinogenic": https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing-and-health-prof...

This is why Vitamin C was a required additive, with "nitrate" cured meats. Unfortunately, it is not with the "nitrate from celery" forms, which should lead to more cancer.

susysink• 3 years ago

But without sodium nitrite you instead run the risk of increased bacterial growth, and in the worse case: botulinum toxin which is like instant death compared to dying of cancer at 70+.

Fezzik• 3 years ago

My understanding is that bacon itself is not the culprit of the possible (note — possible) carcinogen. The sodium nitrate that is often used as a preservative is. Nitrate-free bacon is easy to find though.

malnourish4• 3 years ago

Nitrate-free (or, "no nitrates added") bacon still contains nitrates. About the same amount as standard bacon, and in some cases, more.

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

loeg2• 3 years ago

Nitrate-free bacon isn't bacon. The stuff that is marketed as nitrate-free isn't -- it's a dubiously moral marketing gimmick that is essentially untrue.

Lonewolfa• 3 years ago

Source please

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf2• 3 years ago

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...

adrr• 3 years ago

Or drinking hot tea. Working graveyard shift. Drinking alcohol.

93po2• 3 years ago

Breathing air in any city.

tptacek18• 3 years ago

Why stop with nitrates and nitrites? Acrylamide is a known human carcinogen, and occurs in a huge variety of cooking processes (including baking, frying, and grilling). If you eat potatoes, you're almost certainly putting yourself at more risk than aspartame is: we've got epidemiology and mechanism of action to back up the potato risk.

likpok• 3 years ago

I believe California even helpfully warns you about any location that has acrylamide.

barcode_feeder2• 3 years ago

What's the danger with potatoes? Can you point me towards a study or something?

grvdrm• 3 years ago

Serious question: do you have kids and if so, what do you feed them if you avoid acrylamide? I’m constantly looking for alternatives for my kids and it feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole such that they do, sometimes anyways, eat the processed things because I can’t eradicate the junk from everything.

penneallagricia3• 3 years ago

With bacon you know what you get, so you can dose it and take your risks. Aspartame has been sold to us as the healthy alternative to sugar. People literally use aspartame as an excuse to chug liters of soda every day.

Aachen2• 3 years ago

Isn't it a healthy alternative to sugar? If you have a one in five chance to live ten years longer because you don't develop cardiovascular issues from obesity, but one in a million develops cancer, I mean...

It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.

Spivak4• 3 years ago

The caffeine will get you before the aspartame if you actually chug liters a day so you can't really do that in practice.

Source: My dad has a heart attack from drinking liters of diet soda every day.

opan• 3 years ago

I hope you're saying to stop eating bacon as well and not just that nothing matters.

Aachen2• 3 years ago

Neither nor. They're saying to see things in perspective.

neonsunset2• 3 years ago

When I accidentally ingest food or drinks containing aspartame, it takes me out for at least 24h with a hellish migraine.

h2odragon• 3 years ago

being a statistical outlier means you don't count. Good luck explaining that to your doctors.

neonsunset2• 3 years ago

Statistical outlier? Aspartame is known to be linked to migraine triggering:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2708042/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18627677/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28198207/

kyriakos• 3 years ago

I suffer from migraines. Usually related to exposure to sun and sleep patterns, I found out that drinking diet coke during a day that I already experienced one of my other triggers, gives me a migraine almost immediately. Any other day it has no effect.

GRBLDeveloped• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2B

I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.

LegitShady4• 3 years ago

Caffeic acid may be a carcinogen but I do not think any decent studies have found a connection between drinking coffee and cancer, and in fact some have found the opposite.

codr7• 3 years ago

A bigger problem is likely caffeine inhibiting uptake of vitamin D and disrupting sleep.

shrubble3• 3 years ago

Donald Rumsfeld was famously influential in getting aspartame's approval ; however more of the story behind this can be found here: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8846759/Nill,_As...

In 1984 the year after aspartame's approval for soft drinks, the company that held the exclusive patent on it, sold $600 million worth (1984 dollars) of it.

Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...

cameldrv• 3 years ago

Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...

True for human food as well. Maybe it’s not rancid, but food science can make terrible ingredients taste great. Take Doritos. It’s just cornmeal (animal feed) plus a ton of artificial flavoring that is incredibly well dialed in to make them delicious and even addictive.

SketchySeaBeast• 3 years ago

I think it's disingenuous to say that cornmeal is just animal feed. Polenta has been a thing for a long time.

rightbyte• 3 years ago

Cornmeal is just corn flour but with courser grinding? But glutamate and stuff, sure. Doritos have the same "fake" feel as Pringles according to my taste.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Or HP sauce.

Honestly I see it as a feature if we can move product that’s otherwise garbage, as long as it’s not dangerous. Reminds me of “omg do you know what’s in hotdogs?!” Hotdogs are a success story.

nonethewiser4• 3 years ago

Doritos really are an amazing case. They are tortilla chips. It took me so long to realize this because that delicious dust is so transformational. It it’s literally a tortilla chip underneath that salt, msg, and spices. For the longest time I assumed it was some other novel type of chip.

poisonarena• 3 years ago

I eat tortilla chips of all kinds outside of the dorito sphere, dont need anything besides a little salt, let alone engineered powders

joezydeco• 3 years ago

Dortitos is a tidal wave of glutamate. Not just the added MSG but the cheese extracts that add even more.

iLoveOncall3• 3 years ago

Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...

What's the difference between that and humans eating a pizza but not eating the raw ingredients of a pizza? If it's not inedible anymore I don't see the issue...

shrubble3• 3 years ago

Not quite following you... do you mean the difference between cooked and raw, or something else?

marvel_boy• 3 years ago

Curiously the share value of COKE has not plunged today. (+0.21% as we speak)

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

Why would it? If it's a carcinogen for Coke then it's a carcinogen for Pepsi or everyone else.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Coke owns most sodas, so if you're switching, you're likely to end up switching to another Coke product.

blibble• 3 years ago

they'll just swap it out for the next artificial sweetener

and that'll be found to be bad in 20 years time, then they repeat again

hombre_fatal8• 3 years ago

It's already been priced in: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/ever... ;)

brink2• 3 years ago

That stuff gives me migraines. I can't even chew most gum without a headache because it's full of it.

moogly• 3 years ago

Isn't it mostly Xylitol in chewing gum?

brink2• 3 years ago

On the list of gums that give me a headache, it's aspartame on the ingredients list. Believe me, I check. :)

ajhurliman• 3 years ago

Xylitol is actually pretty rare as the main sweetener in gum, it’s a lot more expensive. If gum mentions that it contains xylitol, check the ingredient list to see if there are other sweeteners listed first.

Xylitol is preferable because of its oral hygiene benefits, but most consumers are choosy enough to make sure their gum is exclusively xylitol.

There are some brands on Amazon that sell 100% xylitol gum if you go out of your way to find it though. Be careful with it around dogs though, xylitol is insanely toxic to them.

rootusrootus9• 3 years ago

The ones I'm familiar with mostly use sorbitol. Though it's not uncommon to find aspartame on the 'less than 2% of the following' part of the ingredients list.

TeaBrain• 3 years ago

I just checked the gum in my backpack. Both Trident and Mentos gum have xylitol, sorbitol, acesulfame K, mannitol and sucralose. Mentos gum also has aspartame and maltitol syrup in addition to the others.

myshpa• 3 years ago

Some gum bases are made from non-degradable plastic polymers ... another reason to stay away.

nightski• 3 years ago

Thats interesting. All the recent scientific evidence I have been seeing has been saying that Aspartame really isn't bad. This seems suspect. It's so hard to trust science today since it has become so intertwined with politics and corporate agendas.

carimura6• 3 years ago

agreed, it's really hard with lobbyists, captured agencies, flawed studies, social media noise, political narratives, etc etc etc. We try our best to just go back to first principles: as close to the food source as possible, as few added ingredients as possible, organic, etc.

tptacek18• 3 years ago

Ahh, the naturalist fallacy. But the natural substitutes for artificial sweeteners are markedly worse for you, and more primitive, less industrial cooking and food preparation techniques often can be as well.

hulitu• 3 years ago

AFAIK it can cause diarrhea.

vore2• 3 years ago

Aspartame is not a sugar alcohol like the other artificial sweeteners that do cause diarrhea due to incomplete digestion.

astrange4• 3 years ago

If you find everything is hard to trust, that likely just means you're not good at trusting things.

For instance, this is a known symptom of being Gen X.

tekla• 3 years ago

The "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields" associated with using mobile phones are "possibly cancer-causing"

Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer

marginalia_nu• 3 years ago

The word "possibly" does a lot of heavy lifting in having this make sense.

beders• 3 years ago

Yeah, with billions of cell phone users humankind is practically dead now....

umeshunni• 3 years ago

Did you know that sunlight causes cancer?

cameronh90• 3 years ago

They do: "Group 4: probably not carcinogenic"

The list is empty...

yomlica8• 3 years ago

And here I just thought it just tasted kind of off and gave me headaches.

dghughes• 3 years ago

Weird to have Coke in the Reuters headline when it's not just Coke that uses aspartame.

And this is interesting may be related?

Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid.
When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. ...The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate ... they ‘excite’ or stimulate the neural cells to death.
Methanol is highly toxic; it is gradually released in the small intestine when the methyl group of the aspartame encounters the enzyme chymotrypsin. It has been pointed out that some fruit juices and alcoholic beverages contain small amounts of methanol.

source: https://www.3dchem.com/aspartame.asp

OkayPhysicist4• 3 years ago

Diet Coke is undoubtedly America's biggest source of aspartame. Diet Coke has massive market share.

carimura6• 3 years ago

I had a computer science professor who drank so much diet coke that she had a wall of empty cans stacked up from floor to ceiling in her office. Even then, 20 years ago now, I was so grossed out with that level of artificial intake I wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. But that wouldn't have helped my grade.

quechimba• 3 years ago

Regular coke is probably my biggest source of aspartame now that they changed the recipe to contain 30% less sugar compensated by aspartame and acesulfame-k. I bought a Sprite a while ago and it tasted different so I checked and it doesn't even contain any sugar even though the bottle looks just like before and says "100% saborizantes naturales" (although the sweeteners are artificial). Here's the product page, https://www.coca-cola.com.pe/marcas/sprite

RhodesianHunter• 3 years ago

It's always surprising to me how quick we are to go from discovering a chemical to mass-producing it. We're only just figuring out all of the negative externalities of things like PFAS, and they're in absolutely everything (packaging, clothes, pizza box linings, food cans, cookware...)

flashback21992• 3 years ago

Leaded gasoline will really blow your mind, at least it did for me

Edit: Figuratively not literally, haha!

kzrdude• 3 years ago

It was known to be harmful back in 1920s when it was introduced

wcedmisten• 3 years ago

Interestingly, the inventor of leaded gasoline also invented freon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

mcast• 3 years ago

Vertasium has a great video on the invention of leaded gasoline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA

justinator6• 3 years ago

3M knew about the negative "externalities" of PFAS 50 years ago, they just decide YOU didn't nee to know.

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...

It's the same with oil companies having studies on climate change privately, while discounting climate scientists publicly.

Profits over People is the way of Capitalism!

no_butterscotch• 3 years ago

I'm always surprised by this when it's "50 years ago".

Certainly the scientists and analysts at 3M who collected and analyzed the data would have thereafter known of it's extremely harmful effects.

And I don't mean to open this up to "heh yea well they made bank!" I don't think they did relatively speaking.

My main question, is that certainly those scientists would have been advising their friends and families to stay away from X, Y, and Z products because they contain PFAS?

aio2• 3 years ago

Yes, "We've" figured out the dangers of PFAS just now, but when companies started producing them back over 50 years ago, company 3M knew it (to say the least) wasn't good.

I'm pretty sure the scientists who dealt with these chemicals even warned against using it, but some higher ups still let it pass

sacnoradhq6• 3 years ago

Worrying about aspartame is bikeshedding about minutia. The arbitrary grandfathering of thousands of chemicals under TSCA and lack of precautionary principle are far bigger risks to public health in America.

Multiple companies knew about the health dangers of certain "forever chemicals" including PFAS and intentionally did nothing because money. It's a repeat of the cigarette debacle.

cheekibreeki25• 3 years ago

Just returned from Ireland and every 'regular' soda was full of disgusting artificial sweeteners. In the usa these would be labeled diet. And of course sucralose was pretty common and we're now finding scary things about its harm to the human body. Sugar really isn't that bad..

mcdonje• 3 years ago

Just because we're finding out many sugar replacements are bad doesn't mean that sugar isn't bad in high doses as with sugary drinks.

beebeepka2• 3 years ago

Don't consume high doses of anything. Sugar is fantastic.

biomcgary• 3 years ago

As a biologist, I can tell you that sugar really is bad. All sorts of nasty effects (e.g., look at the RAGE gene and pathway). Of course, that doesn't mean artificial sweeteners are a good alternative. Limiting added sweeteners of any kind is a good idea, just hard to follow.

kushan2020• 3 years ago

You are making it sound like alcohol - where the warning is no amount of alcohol is safe.

Sugar is a naturally occurring substance and is totally safe for consumption. However, purified added sugar is bad for you because in nature you cannot find a fruit that contains that many sugars per gram.

OkayPhysicist4• 3 years ago

Sugar in the amount put in soda absolutely is terrible for you. The problem definitely is with people drinking too much soda, period, but replacing your average Americans's diet soda consumption with sugar soda consumption works out to an average increase of ~73 calories/person/day. Of course, most of that consumption is being done by the subset of the population currently primarily drinking diet soda, which multiples that number by 2-5 depending on what study you refer to. Which would definitely be an alarming increase in caloric consumption in a significant block of the population.

taeric3• 3 years ago

73 calories actually sounds misleadingly low? How is that calculated?

I think this is what you are correcting in the rest of the post? In that a single soda is typically double that. And many folks drink more than a single soda. Considerably more.

bamfly• 3 years ago

It's really weird that we've normalized consuming huge amounts of what's effectively an exceptionally-sweet dessert drink with most non-fancy restaurant or fast-food meals. Shit made a lot more sense when standard serving size was like 7oz and free soda refills weren't a common thing (so: the 1950s or whenever, for the former, and before some time in the '90s, for the latter). 20+oz glasses (and 32oz "medium-size" to-go cups—JFC) and free refills pushed by servers are just nuts. That's so very much sugar.

Imagine consuming a pile of 37 Pixy Stix (sugar equivalent of 24oz of Coca Cola) to accompany a hamburger. WTF. That's plainly nasty as hell, and anyone doing that in public would rightly feel ashamed. And that's not even a large serving of soda, by modern standards.

mandmandam• 3 years ago

Sugar is pretty bad. Glucose spikes cause a huge amount of stress in the body.

But yeah, Ireland's drinks are like that because of a 'sugar tax', and now it's quite hard to find fizzy drinks without gross sweeteners. Even brands that were quite high quality before are kinda rancid now.

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

Nah, sugar is way worse.

dimitar• 3 years ago

This is awful reporting.

Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria.

So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.

jeron• 3 years ago

effectively this is pick your poison: aspartame or sugar

131012• 3 years ago

Well no. May I suggest water?

tehnub• 3 years ago

I choose Stevia

PreachSoup• 3 years ago

Sucralose is another a widely used option. Cokecola uses aspartame, pepsicola uses sucralose. You can also easily buy it off the shelf

TheRealPomax2• 3 years ago

But what does California's proposition 65 say about it?

pinkmuffinere• 3 years ago

I know this is a joke, but if anyone’s curious: Prop65 says you have to tell people if your product contains chemicals from a list of carcinogenic substances. The list is kept up-to-date by California. Prop65 has no punishment for over-reporting though - you can slap on a warning “just for fun” if you want.

Unless California has aspartame on its list, prop65 says nothing about this.

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

Why is it awful reporting? The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer) is labeling it as being, quite literally, a “possible carcinogen.” That’s the actual name of the category. It’s either “Not classified,” “Possible Carcinogen,” “Probable Carcinogen,” or “Carcinogen.”

Don’t like it? Bring it up with the WHO.

cwillu• 3 years ago

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

    LONDON, June 29 (Reuters) - One of the world's most 
    common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a 
    possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health 
    body, according to two sources with knowledge of the 
    process, pitting it against the food industry and 
    regulators.

[…13 paragraphs later…]

    The IARC's decisions have also faced criticism for 
    sparking needless alarm over hard to avoid substances or 
    situations. It has four different levels of 
    classification - carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, 
    possibly carcinogenic and not classifiable. The levels 
    are based on the strength of the evidence, rather than 
    how dangerous a substance is.

Using a term with a technical definition that isn't remotely close to the plain english meaning of the composing words, in a headline—and not explaining the gag in the first paragraph—is terrible reporting

mrguyorama2• 3 years ago

Isn't this the same list that says Cellphones are a possible carcinogen despite mountains of evidence that they cause no cancer and also zero known mechanism of action?

sampo• 3 years ago

The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer)

IARC is only nominally under WHO. It is a weird French agency founded by some French activists and politicians in the 1960's.

They use a 5 class classification

    Group 1: The agent is carcinogenic to humans.
    Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans.
    Group 2B: The agent is possibly carcinogenic to humans.
    Group 3: The agent is not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.
    Group 4: The agent is probably not carcinogenic to humans.

But out of the 1042 chemicals and things they have classified, none are in Group 4. (Historically, there once was one single chemical in Group 4, but they have reclassified it.)

For IARC, everything is either at least possibly carcinogenic, or there is insufficient evidence (Group 3) to yet declare it carcinogenic.

Also:

"In 2019 IARC was accused of cooperation with "toxic tort law firms" who make profit of suing companies for compensation for alleged health issues based on IARC classification. IARC was accused from hiding conflicts of interest impacting a few invited experts, especially those related to large-scale cash flows from US law firms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Agency_for_Resea...

Many countries have perfectly capable chemicals agencies and food safety agencies, who are much more reliable than the IARC.

rowanG0773• 3 years ago

That list doesn't even contain "Not a carcinogen". So basically I don't take it seriously at all.

sodathrowaway• 3 years ago

Well, is it good or neutral for you? I've always felt like these diet drinks were just marketing to make you think everything was fine, feel free to drink as many as you want. I've worked with a few people that would go through 4-6 Coke Zeros every day. In no world can I imagine that that wouldn't have negative long term effects on a human -- all things in moderation, right?

Personally, I'll drink a Mexican Coke with cane sugar maybe once or twice a year, knowing it's not great for me and treating it as a dessert.

But I do agree, it's not good reporting. Pretty much no info on the actual scientific research, but hopefully WHO will give more in depth data.

mjburgess• 3 years ago

In no world can I imagine that that wouldn't have negative long term effects on a human -- all things in moderation, right?

Why on earth would you think that?

It's carbonated water with a tiny amount of food dye, sweeter and caffeine. The latter of which, iirc, has generally positive effects.

EA-31672• 3 years ago

I file it under the same category as, "The Daily Mail trying to divide every known substance into ones which cause cancer, and ones which cure it."

mrguyorama2• 3 years ago

This venn diagram is just a circle

HarfShnarfGobb• 3 years ago

So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.

Saying it's "partially responsible" in essence is ridiculous, though, when it's also a critical nutrient we eat in virtually every food. Aspartame is not. It's the sheer volume of sugar ingested that's the issue.

garbagecoder• 3 years ago

High fructose corn syrup is not a critical nutrient.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

AFAIK, most lists of "possible carcinogenic" are just lists of things people want to cause cancer but the evidence disagrees.

There's something to say about lists where people put substances we don't know a lot, to call attention for studying more. But I haven't actually seen one of those, it's always lists of substances people study a lot, and publication bias set them marginally into statistical relevancy.

autoexec• 3 years ago

I doubt very many people want any substance to cause cancer. People want the things they eat to be healthy and wholesome but they've learned that they can't trust the people making our food or our regulatory agencies to protect them. That's caused people to be cautious and distrustful even when there is little cause for it.

cm2012• 3 years ago

Aspartame is one of the must trustable things we eat. Very few foods have been studied as much as it has. Both quality and quantity of studies.

This is part of how the medical regulation leaders in every country are the most insanely cautious, neurotic people on earth. They all recommend not to eat steaks rare. Everything is a carcinogen. When they have such a low tolerance for danger, it just means everyone learns not to listen to their advice.

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

Purely anecdotal, but I used to drink insane amounts of aspartame in the form of Crystal Lite. I don't know what that's made of now, but decades ago it was made with aspartame, and I'd guzzle gallons upon gallons of that stuff because it could be mixed with tap water and was therefore cheaper than buying drinks in cans. Maybe in the long term it will cause my butt to fall off in my 60s, IDK, but if aspartame causes cancer, then it must be incredibly weak given the unglodly amounts I was consuming on a daily basis.

Today, I'd still avoid aspartame, but also sucralose, because it's unnecessary and may even cause insulin to be artificially raised in response to the sweetness. And I also just don't drink nearly as much as I used to now that I'm metabolically healthy.

asfgidonhio• 3 years ago

It's a common fallacy that increasing the dose necessarily increases the effects. There are a whole lot of chemicals where the relationship is more complex. There are drugs where negative effects only occur when the drug is discontinued, where the effect of the drug increases or decreases as it it taken continuously, where the effect rapidly saturates and does not increase with increasing dose, and so forth.

I know enough about pharmacology to know that I know nothing.

satysin• 3 years ago

Indeed it is awful.

The BBC has a reasonably good article on this subject today

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66057216

mrabcx• 3 years ago

Perhaps this will finally increase the popularity of Stevia.

RamblingCTO• 3 years ago

Just live healthy. I hate the addition of stevia and other sweeteners to everything. Please give me cane sugar. I'm a grown up, I can handle my intake, thanks. (Especially anything in the direction of soylent, green shakes etc. No need for stevia.)

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

Nah, it tastes worse.

nicole_express• 3 years ago

I hope this questionable categorization doesn't result in aspartame being removed from sodas; I much prefer it to other artificial sweeteners. Can definitely tell when Diet Coke is formulated to include them.

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

We don't discuss the dark times when Pepsico switched from aspartame to sucralose in the 2010s.

powera• 3 years ago

Everything might cause cancer.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

The current system (especially CA Prop 65) makes it impossible for these pronouncements to carry any meaning whatsoever.

beebeepka2• 3 years ago

The whole war on sugar is baffling to me. After I had my first glass of soda in a decade, my impression is that artificial sweeteners are garbage. Poisonous, too. But this has been known for decades, hasn't it. It's cheap, though.

As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes

jcutrell• 3 years ago

Honestly, what I want to know in a headline like this is "what changed?"

As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in many studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.

So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?

recursive• 3 years ago

Right here, in this very thread, are comments suggesting that there is no credible evidence that aspartame is a carcinogen.

gcanyon• 3 years ago

Healthcare Triage did a review of the research years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf82FfX-wuU

tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that did find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.

tahoeskibum• 3 years ago

Coffee is a known carcinogen (due to formation of acrylamides in roasting). Ripe fruits emit small amounts ethylene that is carcinogenic.

userbinator• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#United_States

"Acrylamide is considered a potential occupational carcinogen by U.S. government agencies and classified as a Group 2A carcinogen by the IARC."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene#Safety

"It is listed as an IARC class 3 carcinogen, since there is no current evidence that it causes cancer in humans."

Those are very different.

mhanberg• 3 years ago

Literally read halfway down the article before they say that "working overnight" is also in the "probably carcinogenic" category and that the organization is known for publishing confusing results that cause panic.

FFS

fortenforge• 3 years ago

Actually "working overnight" is "probably carcinogenic" which is a higher evidentiary standard than Aspartame which is "possibly carcinogenic".

Basically these WHO cancer guidelines are entirely useless in terms of public health and have probably done as much harm as Prop 65 has in California.

miika• 3 years ago

Mobile phones, WiFi etc a have been under the same classification by WHO since 2011. The industry didn’t take it too seriously, and probably this one doesn’t mean anything either.

https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....

glonq2• 3 years ago

A few of the conspiracy nutters that I know firmly beleive that "Big Aspartame" is responsible for suppressing information about its dire negative effects.

But when you consider:

- how many doctors and scientists are personally/professionally motivated to research this

- how many gov't organizations are concerned about this

- how many industry competitors would benefit from discovering this

- how many lawyers would get rich from exploiting this

...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.

kelipso3• 3 years ago

And yet it took 40+ years for its danger to be widely acknowledged. Forgive me but for thinking there is something suspicious going on... Frankly, the Big Aspartame should be the default explanation and any other explanation be under more scrutiny.

samtho3• 3 years ago

Big Aspartame does not exist in a vacuum, however. The sugar industry is arguably bigger, more powerful, and has even more budget to fund motivated research. I don’t trust Big Aspartame to prove to is that it is safe, but I put my full faith in Big Sugar to tell us if something is wrong with Aspartame.

samtho3• 3 years ago

To expand on point number 3, the sugar industry is one of the most notorious at utilizing motivated research to its own benefit. If aspartame had even slightest chance of causing illness or cancer, you could bet on the inevitable, unrelenting smear campaign that Big Sugar would be waging against it.

vosper2• 3 years ago

Who are the players in Big Sugar who works exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.

vosper2• 3 years ago

Who are the players in Big Sugar who would exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.

User23• 3 years ago

...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.

Have you ever heard of tobacco? Suppressing information about the harmful effects of a popular consumer product for decades is observably within the capabilities of at least some who might wish to do so.

abhaynayar• 3 years ago

It's kind of similar to finding a trivial security bug in a critical piece of software after a decade of it being introduced into code. You would think it would not be possible because the software is being used everywhere for extremely important stuff, and so many highly-skilled security researchers would have already looked out for it due to incentives. But there are many examples of this happening. I have heard of many instances where a critical security bug was already reported many years ago, but no one bothered to look at it and fix it until someone else rediscovered it.

thrawa8387336• 3 years ago

Meh, I'd sooner believe it treats depression. Try having a Diet Coke and report on the 24h after ;)

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

Every now and then I get car parts delivered from USA and without fail they come with a label telling me they cause cancer. I can't take this kind of labeling seriously when it comes from an American source.

jeegsy• 3 years ago

One would have hoped for a more definitive statement (either way) than 'possible'

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

It is definitive. It doesn't cause any measurable harm.

SirMaster2• 3 years ago

Existing... is a possible cancer risk.

jncfhnb• 3 years ago

Do other people feel like aspartame introduces a tangible viscosity into drinks? I feel like it’s like drinking slime

CydeWeys• 3 years ago

The opposite. Real sugar makes a drink much more viscous. Fake sugar leaves the mouth feel thin.

vvilliamperez• 3 years ago

I think what you experiencing is an overproduction of saliva to dissolve what your body thinks is sugar.

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

Nope. The amount you need in a drink is so small it wouldn't substantially affect the viscosity at all. Source: me, who mixes soda syrups and did piles of informal experiments on syrup ingredients.

tptacek18• 3 years ago

The challenge you have here is that aspartame isn't just one of most widely studied substances in the food chain, but that it's also one of the most widely and vigorously consumed. People drink a lot of diet soda; a lot of people drink it to the exclusion of all other liquids. So it's going to be tricky to get the epidemiology to match up with the claim here: if aspartame is meaningfully carcinogenic (meaning: more than by the trace amounts all sorts of other things in the food supply are, from small quantities of mold due to spoilage to acrylamide forming in almost anything we cook), we'd expect to see a pretty obvious effect in case rates.

The article mentions a French study showing a "slight" increase, over 100,000 pts, in an observational study that used self-reporting to control for other risk factors. I can't find it; has anyone else?

DanBC2• 3 years ago

IARC will release it when it's ready, and it'll be here: https://www.iarc.who.int/cards_page/iarc-publications/ (probably here: https://monographs.iarc.who.int/ )

Important to remember that IARC just talks about the quality of the evidence, and not the strength of the effect. If they know that something does cause cancer it'll go into group 1, even if it only causes an additional 1 case of cancer per 100,000 population.

The IARC categories (1, 2a, 2b, 3) aren't that confusing, but they do seem to cause a lot of confusion. Here's a short summary I wrote in another place: https://tildes.net/~food/1774/aspartame_may_be_declared_a_po...

tptacek18• 3 years ago

Per the article, they're planning on Group 2B.

rnk2• 3 years ago

So we need other dimensions. Thanks for that article you wrote, made it easy to understand 2b etc.

We need something like the danger of getting cancer from it. Tobacco doesn't make everyone get some kind of cancer, but it hugely increases the risk. What are other cancer dangers in terms of some measurable risk, compare that to this new risk.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

Yeah I drink a lot of Pepsi Max. I just love it especially in summer. I've drank it for decades.

Would this make me worry a lot? Not really. I have worse health risks like being overweight, pfas etc.

The "if it was that dangerous we'd see the effect" is a pretty decent argument IMO considering it's been heavily used for almost 40 years.

peteradio• 3 years ago

What effects from the last 40 years might be missing attribution?

grecy• 3 years ago

Cancer rates are rising rapidly. Soon 50% of people will have cancer. I’d say something is going on

AnomalousBean• 3 years ago

Well, aspartame has been shown more recently and by studies not funded by the food industry to impair glucose tolerance in obese people. And soda cans are lined with plastic, so there's your PFAS intake.

cookiengineer3• 3 years ago

I don't think it's a decent argument.

You are using the "I was at the train station and I was never mugged there, therefore mugging never happens at train stations" extrapolated argument.

People still think that smoking doesn't cause cancer, even when they are in the hospital because of not being able to breathe.

People still deny that climate change exists because of that one bought study in the 60s.

People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world, even though it is proven that this increases cancer rates 2x as much.

As the devil's advocate I'd argue that people will only change their behaviour if a person within their personal influence radius dies because of it.

If they just read about it, they don't care.

beached_whale• 3 years ago

It’s also got over 50 years in the food chain.

nostrademons2• 3 years ago

I remember reading back in the early 90s a number of studies that showed elevated risks of certain brain cancers from aspartame. The evidence was pretty strong - it wasn't conclusive (hence the "possibly" qualifier in this label), but it was enough that I was personally convinced. The link between aspartame and cancer is much stronger than the one between cyclamate (banned in 1970 but legal in the EU) and cancer. My parents never let me chug Sweet'n'Low packets the same way I chugged sugar packets because of it.

IIRC, the only reason aspartame was not banned was because saccharine had just been, and if you banned aspartame there would have been literally no artificial sweeteners on the market. That is no longer the case, with sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Coke Zero and other diet sodas), Stevia, sorbitol, and several other sweeteners now on the market.

copperx10• 3 years ago

Sucralose (Splenda) has been linked to cancer quite convincingly last week. It's the only artificial sweetener that I used, and now there are no options except sugar alcohols. Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.

tptacek18• 3 years ago

The claim you're making here is that there are studies that present strong evidence that aspartame causes brain cancer, but that they've been suppressed this long because otherwise there'd be no artificial sweeteners, a concern we're saying IARC would have had, and that as a result, in 2023, the only way we can move aspartame into Group 2B --- the possible carcinogens nobody takes seriously --- is an observational study in France showing a barely significant increase in cancer rates.

tamrix• 3 years ago

Sadly the marketing just works too well and now you're a conspiracy theorist for questioning the narrative.

mohaine• 3 years ago

Sweet'n'Low doesn't contain aspartame. It is Saccharin.

tracker17• 3 years ago

Sucralose saw a recent study on effects of DNA that are more compelling than Aspartame. Acesulfame-K messes with pancrease and insulin signalling, Stevia has other detractors iirc... etc. etc.

In the end, it's all a mixed bag, and who knows if it's actually better or worse than consuming more than 25-40mg of fructose or alcohol in a day. There are massive corporate interests in all directions with deep revolving doors in regulatory and research bodies. It's effectively impossible to know.

Is it a variety/strain of food that was considered "food" 250+ years ago? Probably safe. Is it a new strain that has a multiplier of hystamine or other negative hormonal responses, or in a consumption that is a multiple of 250+ years ago? Probably not safe. That's my take.

girishso• 3 years ago

Makes me wonder if some new (sweetener) molecule is around the corner?

copperx10• 3 years ago

Yes, but hasn't there been also a big increase in certain cancers such as colorectal in young people, and researchers don't have good guesses at what could be causing them? The studies that I read ruled out screenings because it is happening in people decades younger than the first screening recommendations.

kortex4• 3 years ago

Meat consumption is way up and fiber consumption is way down over the past 50 years. Those two factors alone are very big contributors.

kortex4• 3 years ago

The other big challenge is from a SAR (structure-activity relationship) point of view, it's completely benign looking from just about any way you look at it. It's two peptides, and a methanol (which yes, gets converted to formaldehyde, but so does fruit pectin). There's nothing zany about its structure, it's not particularly lipophilic, no receptor bindings of note, no spicy reactive groups, no alkylators, no intercalators, no redox sites. If it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't quack, doesn't waddle, doesn't fly, doesn't hang out in ponds, and hasn't shown ducklike activity over 50 years, what are the odds it's secretly a duck?

headwayoldest• 3 years ago

So you're telling me there's a chance?

Warnings like these quickly hit the Prop 65 problem - the notices are so ubiquitous you go blind to them.

colordrops2• 3 years ago

You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.

tptacek18• 3 years ago

I had fun reading this comment to my son (early-career biochem) pretending I was coming up with it as I went along. "Does it have any alkylators? NO."

hilbert42• 3 years ago

Right, I'm more worried about Sucralose with all those chlorines hanging about.

creamyhorror• 3 years ago

Might be this paper from Mar 2022, which got me to reduce my aspartame & acesulfame-K consumption when it came out last year: Artificial sweeteners and cancer risk: Results from the NutriNet-Santé population-based cohort study https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

n=102,865 adults were followed for a median 7.8 years, using 24-hour dietary records collected via web including some photographic validation. Key results:

In particular, higher cancer risks were observed for aspartame (HR = *1.15* [95% CI 1.03 to 1.28], P = 0.002) and acesulfame-K (HR = *1.13* [95% CI 1.01 to 1.26], P = 0.007).

+13~15% raised cancer risk in high consumers of aspartame and acesulfame-K (controlling for many factors, including sugar intake, BMI and weight gain, physical activity, etc.).

In particular, no difference was detected between the categories ‘higher artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake below the official recommended limit’ and ‘no artificial sweetener consumption and sugar intake exceeding the recommended limit’

So the raised cancer risk was statistically the same for both categories (though possibly slightly worse for artificial sweeteners). No real win for sugar there (but we also have to look at their performances in the area of CVD and diabetes).

(I will say that the 100g/day cutoff for high vs low sugar consumption is kind of high, even if it includes sugars in fruit and other whole foods. The key question imo is: how would low sugar + low sweetener consumption fare against the equivalent amount of sugar?)

Overall, definitely an interesting study, considering that they adjusted for a lot of factors including BMI/weight gain, and that it's the more health-conscious types who would consume artificial sweeteners. Even the lower-consumption category was associated with a statistically significant +14% raised cancer risk vs non-consumers (for the same level of sugar intake).

One point to note was that sucralose intake didn't seem associated with raised cancer risk, the caveat being that the sucralose sample size was about half those of aspartame and acesulfame-K. This could possibly reflect sucralose being a sweetener used by the most health-conscious participants, since it's less commonly used in mass-market products. Still, would be interesting if sucralose might not contribute to cancer risk. Overall, this paper is a non-loss for sucralose on the cancer front.

guerby• 3 years ago

If you look at page 15 of the S1 annex of the study

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003950.s002

Figure C: Cancer risk associated with the combined exposure to artificial sweetener and sugar intakes, NutriNet -Santé cohort, France, 2009-2021 (n=102,865)

For me the two interesting cases are:

"Sugar above nutritional guidelines" and "no artificial sweetener" => 1.09 (0.97 - 1.22) P=0.158

"Sugar below nutritional guidelines" and "high artificial sweetener" => 1.12 (1.00-1.25) P=0.046

nutritional guidelines are 10% max energy intake from sugar, about 50 gram of sugar per day for a 2000 kCal diet (62 gram for 2500 kCal for adult male).

A 330ml coke can has 35g of sugar, so we're talking one or two max per day to keep below the guideline.

If I read this correctly if one makes the switch from sugary beverage to artificial sweetened ones and it lowers your total sugar intake below the dieteray guidelines then your relative risk factor doesn't change (at about +10% vs low sugar and no articial sweetener).

theshrike79• 3 years ago

My anecdata is that at one point Aspartame and/or Asesulfame K did something to my gut flora.

Now both or either one (can't say which) give me gas. And not funny gas but "this is a war crime" -gas.

Sugary drinks don't do this. Also this is how I discovered that Scandinavian Pepsi started replacing sugar partially with Aspartame. Took me a while to read the label and find out. I switched from Pepsi to Coke (still full sugar) and the issues went away.

Even though a substance is studied extensively, there might still be adverse effects that people don't attribute to it. I'm not afraid it would give me cancer but bioweapon levels of gas is something I can't live with. Sadly it's getting harder and harder to find drinks that don't have Aspartame in it...

that_guy_iain• 3 years ago

There has been 1,300+ studies in to aspartame. Pretty much all of them trying to prove that aspartame is bad for you. The fact, they've consistently tried and failed to prove a risk after so much testing yet continue to say it may be harmful just leads me to think this is more of a story line being pushed. It is impossible to prove a negative, you can't prove it can't give you cancer. And any attempt to prove it can cause you cancer fails. Not just 100 attempts, not 500, not 1000 attempts over 1,300 attempts have failed.

If someone tried to prove an airplane design can fly 1,300 times and all it did was come off the ground for a centimeter for half a second, would you say "this airplane design can possibly fly"? I doubt any reasonable person would. But with aspartame there is an idea in people's heads that it's harmful and should be avoided therefore people continue to go with the theory that even though they've failed to prove it's harmful 1,300 times they may do so in the future.

chiefalchemist• 3 years ago

I have no food allergies. Except to aspartame, if you consider it a food.

I don't drink a lot of soda so I picked up on the reaction sooner rather than later. From then on I avoided it. Until one day it was in something and I wasn't aware of that. My chest hurt so much I thought I was having a heart attack. Maybe I was.

So while that isn't cancer, it's still not a good sign. Standard sugar will do.

randomcarbloke• 3 years ago

the WHO definition of "possible carcinogen" implies only minor evidence, despite enormous numberse of studies, the schedule of this class includes such things as "Aloe Vera", "carpentry and joinery", "low frequency magnetic fields", and lots of medicines.

It's barely newsworthy and yet here we are, frontpage.

pieter_mj• 3 years ago

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

2devnull2• 3 years ago

Cancer can take 50 years to develop. Aspartame is from the 80s, so maybe we’d only now be noticing the beginning of the wave of cancers, assuming our ability to notice is not limited, which I think the pandemic should make you wonder about. And how many other things started in the 80s. Cigarettes were relatively easy to notice, but even great minds like Fischer couldn’t see it. A 50 year lag makes a lot of things hard to notice.

tptacek18• 3 years ago

We're not noticing a wave of new cancers; for most cancers, broadly including those implicated by ingesting Diet Coke, we're seeing decreases; where we're seeing increases, they don't track country-by-country consumption patterns for aspartame.

cykros• 3 years ago

I suspect it's more that aspartame indirectly causes cancer, which is why it doesn't look, walk, or quack like a duck, but it DOES have a habit of feeding the ducks. What I mean by that is that candida LOVES aspartame, and candida, a fungus that lives in the human gut and feeds on sugars, alcohols, preservatives, and a few other things Americans in particular eat a ton of, HAS been seen to cause cancer. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24963692/

gumby• 3 years ago

A bit of background (from an unlikely source). The Tl;DR:

  \* Group 1: carcinogenic (this includes cigarettes, the HPV viruses that cause cervical cancer, and ionizing radiation)

  \* Group 2A: probably carcinogenic (this includes red meat, hot beverages, and working as a hairdresser)

  \* Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic (this is the group aspartame reportedly may end up in)

  \* Group 3: not classifiable

  \* Group 4: probably not carcinogenic (this list contains zero items; a chemical called caprolactam was previously on it, but was moved to group 3)

  These are not designations of cancer *risk*, but of *the chance that there is a detectable link of some kind*.

https://lifehacker.com/aspartames-possible-carcinogen-design...

leashless• 3 years ago

Is Stevia evil these days?

Tastes less toxic. Is it?

Tokkemon11• 3 years ago

It tastes worse.

hedora7• 3 years ago

I wish they’d just force all products with a non nutritional sweetener to have a big cigarette-style warning label on the front of the packaging.

I still haven’t gotten over the rise of “organic” artificial sweeteners. That must have involved some N-th level regulatory capture with the product labeling regulators.

cheekibreeki25• 3 years ago

The eu slaps these sweeteners in drinks not marked as artificially sweetened, it's maddening.

tacocataco2• 3 years ago

Fruit is sweet enough for me already. Some granola and Greek yogurt to cut that down a bit more.

klabb3• 3 years ago

The most obvious substitute for aspartame is sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. In liquid form, and the quantities that people drink soda, the health risks are immense. Cardiovascular decease kills a comparable amount of people as cancer overall, from all sources. For aspartame to end up a net negative, it’d have to be massively carcinogenic.

Certainly its better to replace Diet Coke with water, all else equal, but the effort in changing habits is much higher. There is a ton of preventable decease due to bad diet and lack of exercise, despite well known causes. So why is that?

Health discussions have this psychological bias where people think “be more like me” is effective (don’t do drugs, just go out and meet people, exercise more, just stop smoking). The fact that people think like this, despite the war on drugs disaster, is madness. Especially when the solution is so simple: throw the moralism away and focus solely on harm reduction – also known as “whatever works”. Just good old empiricism.

skellyclock• 3 years ago

One of my favourite all-time comments on HN was the guy that was constantly trying new experimental sweeteners just for fun and ended up with something that bound to his tastebuds for months. I can't find it.

Etrnl_President• 3 years ago

But the FDA approved it. It is safe. Silly WHO.

sacnoradhq6• 3 years ago

Another "eggs are bad" article. Wake me when there's something other than a nothingburger here.

cm_silva• 3 years ago

As an experiment, sprinkle some aspartame-based artificial sweetener over an ant and watch what happens.

xvilka• 3 years ago

It's better to not use sweetener at all, nor sugar. After some withdrawal period body stops to crave either. The only good amount of either is zero.

liampulles• 3 years ago

I got off the sugar addiction (which I am very happy about) but still need something to sweeten my tea and coffee addiction, which I use sweetener for

I am a Luddite when it comes to tastes, no two ways about it. I suspect many people are, and so some tradeoff has to be made.

qwerty456127• 3 years ago

Nice! I can't wait for cheap obsolete sweeteners like aspartame and acesulfam-k to begone from my beloved energy drinks to be replaced with relatively modern and supposedly prebiotic alternatives like steviol glycosides, xylitol etc. Unfortunately even the most expensive energy drink manufacturers still use aspartame and acesulfam-k.

hobomatic• 3 years ago

Being 'declared possible' seems meaningless. Isn't it already implicitly possible?

6510• 3 years ago

The US research history has to be one of the weirdest possible. Large financial incentive, actual fraud, repeated animal trials where everything goes wrong.

Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)

But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.

nuc1e0n• 3 years ago

Maybe. But is this like how Bananas are radioactive? i.e. almost not at all? How carcinogenic would the equivalent amount of sugar be?

tracker17• 3 years ago

It seems within the past month we've seen the WHO warn about non-sugar sweeteners general, aspartame in particular, and looks like sucralose in particular. I'm not generally one to support conspiracy theories, but given the number of countries placing limits on added sugar, sugar taxes and the like, what are the odds the sugar/hfcs industries are funding these studies.

Not to mention that with aspartame in particular, the evidence is sparse and low quality. The verbiage regarding Sucralose in actual human terms of consumption are much more alarming. I generally try to keep any sweet drink consumption with meals, or otherwise sweetened with stevia (which has seen it's own detractors). Given a century and a half of food industry lies, disinformation, misinformation and tethers with regulatory bodies, it's really hard to believe anything and just defer to if it was considered "food" a couple hundred years ago.

MetricExpansion• 3 years ago

This (Group 2B) is the same list that includes mobile phone radiation. I think I’ll take my chances.

redkinght99• 3 years ago

Oh man, this report about Gen Z taking "Diet Coke" breaks to 'escape work' came to mind: https://fortune.com/2023/04/25/gen-z-diet-coke-break-trend-t...

Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

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