Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)

by pHequals7 • 3 months ago

132 252 3 months ago

pfdietz3• 3 months ago

Sucralose-6-acetate, however, an impurity found in sucralose and produced in vivo from sucralose, is genotoxic.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37246822/

I would avoid sucralose. I have a suspicion it may be responsible for the observed increase in colon cancer in younger age groups.

gadflyinyoureye• 3 months ago

Did we just start adding this chemical in the ast five years? I can think of any other widespread roll out of a new technology in the same period.

pfdietz3• 3 months ago

The increase is cancers in younger age groups was noticed earlier than that, and the cancers can't be expected to occur instantly upon exposure to a carcinogen.

strictnein• 3 months ago

I'm still expecting the cause to be HPV and increase in anal sex. Some studies seem to point that way (and other studies that say it might not), but it hasn't been proven yet. However it would make sense, considering that it leads to cervical cancer, throat cancer, etc.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/

Not an expert on this by any means, just went down this rabbit hole when deciding if I should be asking about my son getting the HPV vaccine when it was first made available to males, and before it was broadly recommended for men.

mapt2• 3 months ago

A rise in meat (esp red & cured meats) consumption and a drop in vegetable consumption would also do it, particularly if it were disproportionately occurring in certain cohorts.

12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.

rcxdude• 3 months ago

Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.

doublerabbit• 3 months ago

Sugar please. I can't stand the taste of aspartame. They've started using Dextrin to replace sugars in confectionary (Mars Galaxy minstrels) and they taste awful.

I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.

hagbard_c3• 3 months ago

Sounds like aspartame is a boon for your health if its addition means you eat fewer Mars bars and drink less sweetened bubbly water. Hooray for aspartame!

Cthulhu_2• 3 months ago

And as always, too much of anything isn't good for you either. A sugary soda on occasion won't do much harm, but some have several a day or it's the only thing they will drink.

ChrisRR5• 3 months ago

I much prefer sucralose to aspartame

bitwize2• 3 months ago

Sucralose is a genotoxin: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/

mint5• 3 months ago

But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.

Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.

Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.

midiguy• 3 months ago

It's not that everything has to be sweet, but rather that, for example, Coke really isn't Coke without sweetness and people just happen to enjoy Coke. And if you're going to enjoy a Coke, Coke Zero or Diet Coke is better for your health.

Of course there are other things like coffee that really are not defined by sweetness and can be perfectly enjoyed unsweetened.

tptacek14• 3 months ago

The Japanese diet, which people in the west sort of accept as default-healthy, is also heavily sweetened; that is, it uses "sweet" as a flavor component probably even more than Americans do. Japanese home cooking adds sugar to savory dishes the way Americans add black pepper.

I think it's obvious that Japanese people generally consume less sugar than Americans do, so it's not my argument that sugar is fine or that the western diet isn't problematic.

Rather: the idea that there's some moral/health advantage to avoiding sweetness is unfounded, kind of culturally blinkered, won't hold up under scrutiny.

misthop• 3 months ago

It might not be bad for you, but it tastes like crap

hawk_3• 3 months ago

An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.

AlexandrB2• 3 months ago

There's no harm to doing that if you can do it. But advice like "just eat healthy, natural food" is not really something most people can stick to long term. I know I can't!

When I find myself in a stressful situation the craving for sweets is very strong and artificial sweetners at least mean I have options that won't dump a bunch of calories/refined sugar into my body.

Forgeties792• 3 months ago

There’s also the cost element on top of the realities of sugar addiction

BirAdam2• 3 months ago

Also, what is a natural food? Wheat, maize, oranges, bananas, broccoli... those are human made.

pizzafeelsright• 3 months ago

I believe in you.

kibwen2• 3 months ago

As the article mentions, this is a false dichotomy.

If you're an ordinary person driven to be healthy, drink water. Water is great. If you're already drinking water, you should absolutely not replace it with whatever bottled crap that Coke or Pepsi is peddling, be it "smart water" or otherwise.

But for people with sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population in the developed world, replacing sugary drinks with zero-calorie artificially-sweetened drinks can be a net health benefit. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are bad for your health, and consumption of sugar water is a significant driver of these. Yes, you could be even healthier by drinking water instead; see above. But sugar is an addictive chemical (sugar withdrawl is, in fact, a thing), and not everyone is going to quit cold turkey.

(And for the record, I fully agree that people should be more cognizant of their gut biome and how their diet affects it, including being skeptical of aspartame and other random synthetic ingredients.)

cornholio• 3 months ago

On the other hand, allowing people to feed their sweet addictions only re-enforces and desensitizates them further. So while you are probably safe drinking ungodly amounts of aspartame water, you won't find equivalent substitutes for sugar in other foods and you might suffer rebound consumption there, perhaps to a much higher total caloric intake versus just drinking sugary water in moderation.

Another thing to watch out for is caffeine input which is often associated with sweetened drinks. Caffeine is a diuretic and you will see yourself drinking can after can of diet coke while not quite quenching your thirst or properly hydrating yourself. This is documented to lead to intense muscle pain and unexplained migraines for people who do physical work and abuse these types of drinks, and can't be good for your kidneys long term, even under the assumption that sweeteners are 100% safe.

Overall, just drink plenty of water and use everything else in moderation seems like a solid advice.

kakacik3• 3 months ago

Or... you know, there could be some little actual effort in shedding such addiction (sugar ain't that hard), build a bit of character and walk off better off in many regards. Winning against addiction won't kill you, break you or similar damage but makes you (much) stronger and healthier as a bonus. Why do people shy away from such things?

But no, lets do everything possible just to keep the comfortable crappy couch lifestyle, no sweat, no effort, miserable health, miserable life. Then there are articles how US population (which suffers the most these shit HFCS addictions and resulting obesity problems) is depressed... for many reasons of course, but this sort of helpless victim mindset is one of them.

malfist3• 3 months ago

sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population

It's almost like our bodies are designed to crave calories

perching_aix2• 3 months ago

Does aspartame cause intestinal inflammation, or do artificial sweeteners sans aspartame cause intestinal inflammation? Or which specific ones do?

Cause reading the blogpost, it explicitly calls out that most other artificial sweeteners do not get broken down "at all", suggesting their in-body lifecycles are quite different. I'd expect this not to apply to aspartame as a result, and thus it not being a missed angle at all:

Incidentally, this same logic does not apply to other artificial sweeteners which mostly aren’t broken down at all.

llm_nerd• 3 months ago

An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome.

Everything affects the gut microbiome. Every single type of food you eat alters it. Taking a walk alters it. Taking a flight alters it.

The whole "but it changes the microbiome" thing needs to be qualified by whether that change is meaningfully relevant in some direction, and evidence thus far, for most sweeteners, is unconvincing. 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016 is the only mildly legitimate research on this (a seemingly well executed RCT), but even it shows a rapidly fading effect, and no effect for aspartame given it's the subject of this submission.

But researchers who want a bit of attention (and a remarkable amount of research is plied not for useful results, but knowing that certain topics are easy mass media coverage) know it's gold to write a paper saying a sweetener changed the microbiome, because it plays into a fear people have (people are always susceptible to the "too good to be true" aha moment). Or worse still the garbage observational studies that conflate that people with metabolic issues are more likely to use sweeteners, so flip cause and effect and claim that sweeteners cause metabolic issues.

What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.

If people ate calorie-restricted, balanced diets, and limited simple carbs and sugars, most food problems fade away (presuming they aren't eating overtly poisonous things, which many of our ancestors did). But that isn't reality. In reality sugar is one of the greatest health crises of our times, and finding some mechanism of reducing that problem is beneficial. Better still people should tame the sweet tooth, but we live in reality.

And FWIW, you can do the reductionist thing that wellness grifters do with most any food. Loads of "balanced whole diets" are full of crazy, scary constituents, many of which are known carcinogens. Spices and herbs are full of deleterious ingredients. And so on.

tptacek14• 3 months ago

How would that work? It's hydrolized into its constituents, which are present in higher quantities in apples and chicken and other foods, in the upper GI. Do you have a cite for this?

hawk_3• 3 months ago

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39475342/ - mouse colitis model

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41137210/ - inflammation pathways

BiteCode_dev2• 3 months ago

n = 1 but I clearly feel the effect when I start drinking aspartam drinks a few times a week. So much so that I just stopped drinking them.

I didn't use to. But I stopped rafined sugar for a year and compensated with coca zero. After that, guts never been quite the same and it took some copious amount of probiotics with regular doctor checks to feel better.

Even then, it's still no back up to baseline, and now drinking aspartam more than once is upsetting.

tptacek14• 3 months ago

People say this about MSG too, but when you blind-test them the effect vanishes, which is unsurprising because the constituents in MSG are, like aspartame, widely prevalent in traditional foodstuffs.

ChrisRR5• 3 months ago

Most people don't suffer from IBD though. IBS is very common, IBD isn't

BirAdam2• 3 months ago

I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.

ottah2• 3 months ago

I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.

hawk_3• 3 months ago

Look up CDED (Crohn's disease exclusion diet) which is the first line of treatment for pediatric Crohn's and now it's increasingly being used for adults. So don't dismiss the diet link despite the facts and research.

BeetleB• 3 months ago

They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers.

Not all of them do.

GolfPopper• 3 months ago

It's a reliable migraine trigger for meyself, and my nephew. That makes it bad for us.

msephton• 3 months ago

Similarly, it makes me dizzy/sick a little like travel sickness

cluckindan2• 3 months ago

That’s probably because 10% of ingested aspartame breaks down into methanol.

Or, you might just be sensitive to phenylalanine.

adzm• 3 months ago

Same here. People keep telling me it's not, but it is, even when I happen to ingest it while unaware I've done so.

PyWoody• 3 months ago

I can tell when a mixed drink uses a soda with Aspartame in it. My mouth instantly feels like it's covered in a thin film of plastic and the migraine is usually just around the corner.

Everyone in my family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, have the same reaction, too.

teunispeters2• 3 months ago

I keep getting people telling me this doesn't happen. GAH. Instant migraine trigger for me too, along with sucralose and several other artificial sweeteners.

bronlund• 3 months ago

It is bad. Don't belive the hype.

Just the simple fact that it has a sweet taste, but contains no sugar, disturbs the body's natural production of insulin.

diabeetusman• 3 months ago

Assuming, of course, that one's body _does_ naturally produce insulin. I'm glad it and other artificial sweeteners exist and are as prevalent as they are.

lormayna3• 3 months ago

In Italy we have an "indipendent research lab" that become really famous for a study that demonstrates that aspartame may cause cancer. The same institute published few years later a study about 5G emissions that may cause cancer.

eduction2• 3 months ago

“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding factor.”

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/efsa-assesses-new-asparta...

lormayna3• 3 months ago

Not a medical professional, but inflammation is something different from cancer that they mentioned in their website. And we need to understand also the trial scenario: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.

Forgeties792• 3 months ago

I know this lab! Ramazi Institute or something right?

We covered it in this podcast I used to produce (not explicitly the subject, they came up re: artificial sweetener studies and we explored them a bit). They’re very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.

lormayna3• 3 months ago

There is a waste area in the Italian society that is very prone to the conspiracy theory. Some famous journalists and some TV shows are very good in spreading this news. In the past, a party (M5S, now pivoting to a left wing, populistic, pro Putin movement) took 34% at the election, just taking advantage of those crazy ideas.

jiaosdjf7• 3 months ago

I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.

pHequals7• 3 months ago

lol pseudoscience as a service ha!

mmastrac5• 3 months ago

I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth.

Is this a genetic thing?

cwnyth2• 3 months ago

I've wondered this myself. The aftertaste on some of them is vile. The disappointing thing is that so many products use them when they reduce sugar, but sometimes I just want a reduced sugar product without any additional sweeteners. That seems hard to find these days.

robotomo• 3 months ago

I've been curious about the just-less-sugar idea myself. Like how would a Coca-Cola "dry" taste? Maybe the fact that nobody is offering this just means it doesn't taste good.

moooo992• 3 months ago

Maybe, while I can relate to this feeling when it comes to some sweeteners commonly used in baked goods, I genuinely habe a hard tile distinguishing between sugar and sweetener containing beverages at this lokng.

RHSeeger4• 3 months ago

For root beer, I can't tell the difference. For colas, the difference is staggering to me.

RHSeeger4• 3 months ago

It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.

Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.

And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.

mmastrac5• 3 months ago

I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.

ErroneousBosh6• 3 months ago

It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.

That's great, but it still means I can't have soft drinks any more.

mocamoca• 3 months ago

Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.

To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?

vasac• 3 months ago

Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

codazoda• 3 months ago

It might be.

I felt this same way all my life, until 6-months ago, when I found a flavored sugar free mix I actually liked.

I returned from vacation in Mexico, where I was drinking Coke with sugar. When I returned home, regular Coke, made with Corn Syrup in the U.S., tasted off. I decided to take the opportunity to stop drinking it.

I tried dozens of low calorie drink mixes and found one I could tolerate. I did some research and all things pointed to that being healthier than my Coke habit.

My tastes have changed again since starting this, but I don’t drink Coke anymore.

One thing that might have helped was drinking aspartame in my coffee, where its aftertaste is harder to detect.

I should mention the only good side effect I’ve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I haven’t lost any weight by the change. It’s also much easier to make a diet work when I’m not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.

AlexandrB2• 3 months ago

It's an acquired taste. I felt the same way, but when I started trying to get fitter a lot of protein supplements (protein drinks, protein bars, etc) contained artificial sweeteners. After eating these for a bit I got used to the flavour profile and even started to like some aspects of it.

The best comparison is beer. The first time I had it, I thought it was kind of gross. After trying it a few more times you get used to the bitter and fermented notes and the taste becomes more pleasant.

zamadatix• 3 months ago

The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.

m4ck_2• 3 months ago

I felt the same way, they used to taste awful to me, now I only notice a slight difference between Dr Pepper zero and regular. Maybe I just got older and my taste buds degraded?

ChrisRR5• 3 months ago

Dr pepper zero doesn't use as much aspartame as dr pepper diet. It uses more of a mix of different sweeteners

cestith7• 3 months ago

A lot of the “zero” soft drinks are sweetened differently from the “diet” ones. There’s often a mix of different sweeteners so you don’t get too much of any one aftertaste.

The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/

felooboolooomba• 3 months ago

It tastes disgusting to me.

mrweasel• 3 months ago

What I find weird is the assumption that everyone would like soda with artificial sweeteners, but I guess other don't taste it the same way. There are restaurants where I just give up and just get water. Strange because I assumed much of their profit came from drinks.

I know a few people like myself, that won't drink artificially sweetened soda, but we are the minority. Mostly people are confused when you tell them you don't like the taste, and that you drink so few sodas that the sugar doesn't make any difference in terms of health anyway.

I am convinced that something weird is going on with Pepsi Max though, the about of that stuff being consumed is absolutely insane. At events it not even close, it's Pepsi Max that people primarily consume.

sfjailbird2• 3 months ago

It's an acquired taste.

ottah2• 3 months ago

I actually hate the taste of sugar in sodas after switching to diet for long enough. Taste is subjective and your preferences can change. That being said, saccharine is probably the better tasting of all of them, and the most maligned.

Clamchop• 3 months ago

It's an acquired taste. All alternative sweeteners taste differently from sugar. These days, I appreciate that such beverages don't leave a film in my mouth and have a little extra bite compared to sugar.

I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.

It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.

flemhans2• 3 months ago

For me it was a persistence thing. Keep drinking and you don't really notice it any more. If anything sugared drinks now feel overly sticky or caramel-like to me. I can no longer enjoy non-diet coke.

Soldier on!

foxyv• 3 months ago

It changes over time. When I was a kid they all tasted horrible. Then I got older and they all taste the same as sugar.

swiftcoder• 3 months ago

The history of aspartame and the FDA is contentious and sort of infuriating

Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.

fabioyy• 3 months ago

migraine trigger for me too

m4ck_2• 3 months ago

It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.

All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)

tptacek14• 3 months ago

Why not?

perching_aix2• 3 months ago

Bias?

WarmWash• 3 months ago

The larger the impact of the information you are sharing, the more clicks and follows you will get.

People trying to become content creators quickly realize that pointing out a 30cm rock headed towards Earth gets no money, err, attention. So they drop the 30cm part, call it a massive chunk of rock that will rip through the atmosphere, and suddenly they are getting much more money, sorry, attention.

This is what makes social media so depraved, any idiot who makes a good word salad can profit from being an idiot.

Cthulhu_2• 3 months ago

I want to say a "well duh", but it seems it's not common sense that too much of anything is generally bad for someone.

(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)

Tyr42• 3 months ago

Health outcomes of lottery winners suggest it's not great.

ChrisRR5• 3 months ago

I think most things aren't great if you have them in quantity. Variety in your diet is a good thing

kakacik3• 3 months ago

You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).

Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?

ragequittah• 3 months ago

If people didn't make their decisions based on ads they wouldn't exist.

sfjailbird2• 3 months ago

dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day

In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be

tracker17• 3 months ago

Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.

That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.

tptacek14• 3 months ago

There is no meaningful insulin response to noncaloric sweeteners.

n8cpdx3• 3 months ago

Would this insulin response be detectable with a CGM?

The answer is no - sucralose, saccharin, aspartame; it doesn’t matter, diet soda and artificial sweetener does not affect blood sugar in any detectable way, at least for me. It was one of the first things I checked when I got my CGM.

“It will crash your blood sugar” and “it will spike your blood sugar despite not having carbohydrates” are myths.

jjice2• 3 months ago

Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.

That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.

n8cpdx3• 3 months ago

I lost a lot of weight using diet soda in the evenings as an alternative to snacking.

It turns out, drinking a lot of what is essentially just water, is actually pretty healthy.

Induane2• 3 months ago

Except that four cans of soda is not much more than a single 44oz soda fountain drink at QT and folk gobble down those often 3 times a day.

financetechbro• 3 months ago

The small Coke Zero cans make it tough to have just one. I typically will have 2 small cans with a meal which feels roughly equivalent to one regular sized can

petra2• 3 months ago

For those who want diet cola without aspartame, there's an alternative:

https://sodastream.com/products/diet-cola-4-pack

n8cpdx3• 3 months ago

If you’re concerned with aspartame, why wouldn’t you be concerned about sucralose and acesulfame potassium?

cael450• 3 months ago

Half of the world’s aspartame is made by Ajinomoto of Tokyo—the same company that first brought us MSG back in 1909.

There is nothing wrong with MSG either

cestith7• 3 months ago

Indeed. It turns out that “MSG headaches” are just high sodium level headaches, either through dehydration, unbalanced electrolytes, elevated blood pressure or whatever else higher than normal sodium levels cause headaches. The same headache could be caused by salt. MSG actually makes recipes require less of other flavor ingredients, including salt. It’s also often found in dishes that still contain relatively massive amounts of salt.

So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just don’t eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.

kccqzy• 3 months ago

This effect is very obvious on me. I consistently get headaches when my sodium intake is too high. I don’t even use MSG in my own cooking but occasionally I add too much salt.

cubefox2• 3 months ago

So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good.

Salt and MSG are sometimes said to strengthen existing flavors, but I'm pretty sure they mainly just contribute their own unique taste: salty and umami.

(There could of course theoretically be some interactions with other taste receptors, similar to how sweet things make things taste much less bitter, e.g. cocoa, but that is a relatively specific effect and not one that acts as a general flavor enhancer.)

bennettnate53• 3 months ago

I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespread danger to public health from these additives, but it doesn't mean there aren't still individuals whose health gets messed up (including legitimate headache or migraine symptoms) by these additives.

ranger_danger3• 3 months ago

I drank sodas with aspartame just fine for many decades. Then one day they suddenly started giving me migraines any time I had one, so I had to quit cold turkey. No other amount of caffeine, regular sodas, salty foods, MSG-laden meals etc. seem to trigger it though, and I have no idea why.

aitchnyu• 3 months ago

Doesnt all sodium chemicals like salt and baking soda increase taste perception?

ChrisRR5• 3 months ago

There's not "nothing" wrong with MSG. But msg is fine in moderation, just like salt, fat and sugar are all fine in moderation too

tptacek14• 3 months ago

If there's anything wrong with MSG that isn't simply due to sodium intake, I think it's unknown to science (at least in the sense that there's no theory about it with any wide uptake). MSG is also intensively studied and has a very similar mechanistic story to aspartame.

SketchySeaBeast2• 3 months ago

Sure, but it feels like a silly distinction. The famous example is water, which fits those same criteria. Would we that that there's not "nothing" wrong with water?

YeahThisIsMe2• 3 months ago

What's wrong with it?

FlamingMoe• 3 months ago

And water

jamal-kumar2• 3 months ago

Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]

[1] https://www.self.com/story/what-is-msg-and-is-it-bad-for-you

aesthesia• 3 months ago

The same This American Life episode raised serious doubts about Dr. Steel's claims, which is mentioned in the article you link:

When reporters tried to corroborate Dr. Steel’s claims, however, holes started appearing, according to the This American Life episode. Chief among them: There actually was a real Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, and his biographical details seemed to match those provided in the letter, like his professional title, the name of his research institute, and the date of his move to the US.
While both Dr. Steel and Dr. Ho Man Kwok had died by the time the digging began in earnest, their surviving family members were able to shed some light on the situation. Dr. Ho Man Kwok’s children and former colleagues were adamant that Dr. Ho Man Kwok had in fact written the letter. Meanwhile, Dr. Steel’s daughter said her father was a lifelong prankster who loved pulling one over on people. With this testimony in mind, the reporters came to the conclusion that Dr. Ho Man Kwok was most likely the true author and Dr. Steel had taken credit for years as an elaborate practical joke.

jiaosdjf7• 3 months ago

The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.

The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.

It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.

bena2• 3 months ago

But they were involved in price fixing lysine. And that was wrong.

FuriouslyAdrift• 3 months ago

Ajinomoto is also the worlds largest (95% market share) supplier of build up film necessary for integrated circuit packaging.

https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...

ThePowerOfFuet• 3 months ago

Wild. I had no idea.

1970-01-01• 3 months ago

Fact 5 is a false fact. Taking facts 1-4 into consideration with the (0th?) fact that it is considered the most studied ingredient is enough evidence. This is how scientists come to a consensus. Going beyond that is obscene to science.

nicole_express• 3 months ago

Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.

I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.

mapt2• 3 months ago

Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.

Lerc• 3 months ago

I don't drink things with Aspartame because it makes me feel queasy. I don't know of any mechanism that causes that effect. Occasionally I encounter something that I would not have expected to contain Aspartame that I notice the feeling before I have even considered the possibility that it might be present. I take that as a sign that it is not psychological.

herbst• 3 months ago

Same here. Very little amounts already give me a weird tummy feel. A normal amount (ex. Half a can) gets my tummy turned around for a few hours.

goolz• 3 months ago

Even so, it has a weird aftertaste that lingers on the palette. All sugar-free elixirs I have found to be subpar.

malfist3• 3 months ago

Some people are super tasters and they'll always have that problem. But most people stop noticing the aftertaste after a week or two of regular consumption. But I agree, when I started sugar free that aftertaste was nasty.

Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.

paulinho1• 3 months ago

I think it's just human nature. We assume anything good has to have a catch. Diet Coke feels like that to me

cestith7• 3 months ago

happygreybanana• 3 months ago

There's also an ever-escalating sweetness issue. When fresh fruit was plenty sweet enough and you get used to this level of sweetness, everything else seems to taste pretty bland. If this becomes the normal (I suspect it kind of has), everything gets sweetened; yogurts, crackers, bread, etc. The method those things get sweetened could be aspartame, but many will not be.

jiaosdjf7• 3 months ago

Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.

Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.

jiaosdjf7• 3 months ago

So basically there's no scientific consensus either way, there's no tradition of using it and there are extreme commercial incentives for harm so it's a no from me

shlant3• 3 months ago

So basically there's no scientific consensus either way

"The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion."

Did you even read the article?

jiaosdjf7• 3 months ago

"While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"

There is no such thing as "it's just a normal chemical". Sugar is "just a normal chemical" that doesn't mean refining it and injecting it into products with a commercial incentive to habit form hasn't helped create a health crisis

latch2• 3 months ago

Not sure how you get to that conclusion from the article when it ends with the conclusion from 5 health agencies that it's safe (and then more references from the scientific community that it's safe).

jiaosdjf7• 3 months ago

What in your view is the single strongest scientific conclusion supporting your statement that "it's safe"?

shlant3• 3 months ago

I have tried multiple times to find this article after reading it a year or so ago ! thanks for sharing again

zaphar• 3 months ago

I don't like aspartame because it's sickeningly sweet. I could care less if it's healthy or not.

mountain_peak4• 3 months ago

I'll impart my n=1 experience, since I've been using powdered Aspartame (in combination with Stevia) in drinks and baking for almost 20 years, and I've tried almost all available sugar substitutes over the years.

We already know from glycemic index charts that almost all sugar substitutes impact blood glucose to a certain degree, and there are only a few that have no impact. When sucralose became widely available, I bought some to try to bake with, but the carrier was maltodextrin - a starch, which prevented me from using it. Undeterred, I purchased pure sucralose drops in a neutral liquid. The sickly-sweet mouth feel after consuming sucralose is a bit tough to take [0], but that wasn't the worst of it. It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it ("Several studies have shown that sucralose is not physiologically innocuous").[1]

Then I read how sucralose is produced; literally thousands of pounds of sugar is used and converted to produce a few pounds of sucralose. It's being pushed hard by the industry, and I can only think of the 'vilification' of cheaper sweeteners such as Aspartame by industry, much in the same way that saccharin was vilified by flawed [2] studies in the 1970s - just as Aspartame was being developed as a commercial product.

Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, and sugar causes irreparable damage to millions of people around the world. I find it somewhat odd how people react to what appears to be a flawed and dubious Aspartame study, when there are much larger elephants in the room.

[0] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/after-sales-plummet-diet...

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7155288/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3185898/

tracker17• 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.

Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.

My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.

k4rli• 3 months ago

Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?

Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.

tracker17• 3 months ago

The sweetness in stevia is very different from sugar/hfcs... it has a flavor of its' own and is somewhat off-putting if you aren't used to it. Using a mix of sweeteners is often better overall flavor than any single sweetener (stevia, aspartame, ace-k, etc) on its' own.

I really wish Coke Life had better marketing and was more popular... It was a much smaller amount of real sugar combined with stevia for sweetness. It was lower calorie, but not zero, and probably a much better option than either full sugar or zero sugar.

sph• 3 months ago

It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it

Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.

Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.

As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.

tptacek14• 3 months ago

This is an article of faith on the Internet, but I haven't seen a credible cite to back up a material, meaningful insulin response to the mere taste of sweetness. Worth remembering: insulin response to aspartame has always been a major research focus, like a day-one concern; it was tested fasted, unfasted, in great quantities and small, with food and in beverages.

mountain_peak4• 3 months ago

From personal experience (sorry, n=1), I can eat pure Aspartame powder and have zero reaction - no increase in glucose, no "anticipatory" response - nothing.

When I have other sweeteners such as taking a swig of a stevia-laden diet iced tea, I have a reaction. I used to be able to drink the exact same iced tea when they used Aspartame with no effect. I don't think your body is "fooled" by sweet tastes - it only reacts when there is actually something to process.

The fact sucralose is being added into all kinds of products has removed many choices for me, which is unfortunate as the selection was quite small to begin with.

pull_my_finger• 3 months ago

What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc

mountain_peak4• 3 months ago

Those are excellent choices; pure monk fruit drops are great, but they cost a small fortune compared to others, and the affordable version is usually mixed with erythitol, which increase blood glucose, so that's a non-starter. Amazon and local health food stores sell a "tub" of stevia for a decent price, and that's my main go-to, but the bitter aftertaste is off-putting, hence Aspartame.

Prepared food is pretty much a no-go; there's only a single energy bar I purchase that uses stevia only, but I make my bars from whey protein isolate, cocoa powder, and peanut butter powder, plus roasted flax, almond flour, almond milk, and sweeteners. I did skip sweeteners completely for some time, thinking that I'd "get used to it", but I really didn't - we're programmed for something sweet!

freediddy2• 3 months ago

When I drink a single can of Diet Coke or anything with aspartame, I get crippling stomach aches and then sudden diarrhea, all within about 2 hrs and very predictable. It's definitely not harmless. This doesn't happen to me with stevia or sucralose, and I know sucralose isn't good for your either.

tracker17• 3 months ago

I have a similar negative response to legumes... but billions of people eat them without issue every day.

jjice2• 3 months ago

But a lot of people don't have that effect. So maybe it's not harmful for everyone.

amelius2• 3 months ago

Funny, I have this with Coke Zero (which I believe uses stevia), but not with aspartame.

The sale of this stuff should be prohibited, especially on long intercontinental flights.

bitwize2• 3 months ago

Coke Zero is sweetened with aspartame and phosphoric acid. It's just formulated differently to avoid the taste associated with Diet Coke, which some find unpleasant.

ck2• 3 months ago

phenylalanine is DLPA which many people use to deal with chronic fatigue and mild pain management

there's a reason why the President guzzles gallons of it per month

I'm not convinced large amounts of Methanol is harmless but DLPA is harmless, maybe even beneficial

amluto• 3 months ago

Not mentioned in the article: there is a really obvious biological effect of aspartame: it triggers your sweetness receptors. And you have them in your mouth (duh!) and elsewhere in your body including in your gut.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6288399/

One might imagine that aspartame triggers the receptors in the gut and that this has some effect. Maybe different sweeteners have different effects, too, since they are metabolized differently.

tptacek14• 3 months ago

There's not much question that there's some linkage between perception and chemical processes in the body, but there's also no real evidence that those pathways are causally linked to significant metabolic impact.

Your upper GI system quickly transforms aspartame into constituent substances that are widely present in ordinary food.

Different sweeteners certainly have different impacts, but this thread is about aspartame, the best studied and probably the safest of all of them.

guywithahat• 3 months ago

This was a really well written article, I enjoyed it. I had always assumed there were a bunch of hidden cons but it sounds safer than I had assumed

teunispeters2• 3 months ago

instant migraine ingredient. Mind so's sucralose and some others for me. shrug as long as they're not universal, will be ok.

ladyanita22• 3 months ago

How does saccharin held in this case?

khelavastr• 3 months ago

The right response is "we need to profile phenylalanine and glutamate metabolism better"...

erelong• 3 months ago

Well, from the comments we see:

-possible disruption of gut microbiome

-possible trigger of migraines

as well as from other places:

-those with phenylketonuria (PKU) must avoid it

-there are concerns that aspartic acid which is produced "can act as an excitotoxin, overstimulating nerve cells and potentially leading to neuronal injury and cell death" with chronic exposure or high doses

-potentially carcinogenic

-no nutritional value (thus no "need" to consume it)

Fruit, honey, or maple syrup in contrast are natural without some of these concerns in the same way

Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)

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