11 ms·

The price of ‘sugar free’: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?

138 points by lxm 4y ago

ggm 4y ago
The confounding outcome here is profoundly negative. People are being misled into believing a short term benefit of (from the article) around 3 months of weightloss translates across the board into longterm replacement for sugar without risk. Better to stop wanting to taste sweet things all the time, than wind up type 2 diabetic or risk heart disease.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  Indeed. After being abroad for long periods of time, when I return to eat meals in US restaurants, they are soooo salty. We get habituated to strongly flavored foods. The real diet drug they need to concoct would be one that inhibits that habituation. Sugar or salt saturated foods would taste gross.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  The right way to avoid the effects of eating too much sugar is not to replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners, but to limit the daily intake of sugar. I have seen the recommendation that the daily sugar intake should be up to 50 grams, i.e. up to 25 g of fructose. This seems a plausible value, which is equivalent with 500 g per day of most cultivated fruits, e.g. apples, pears or blueberries, or 300 g per day of the sweetest fruits, e.g. grapes or fresh figs. The refined sugar is not bad per se, as it is the same substance found in all vegetables, but it is bad because it easily allows its wrong use when food is made which is too sweet and which facilitates the eating of too much sugar every day. Limiting the daily sugar intake is easy if you cook at home, but it is difficult if you eat industrially-produced food. Unfortunately for those who like them, the first measure to reduce the sugar intake is to stop drinking any industrially-produced beverages.
torstenvl 4y ago
These articles are always divisive and lacking in substance. The science is usually exceedingly poor: I've only seen one posted to HN that actually looked at alternative sweeteners individually rather than assuming, say, xylitol and stevia do identical things to your body. And with it comes a strong prescription to change dietary habits yet again. Honestly, because these are thought pieces, because they seek to influence behavior, and because of the long history of the sugar lobby doing pernicious things to influence the public (even to the point of starting wars), I don't think they should be on HN unless the link is to a peer reviewed, reproducible, high-quality study. BL: Without a large-N variable-isolated longitudinal study that distinguishes between different sweeteners, articles like the OP are indistinguishable from sugar-lobby FUD.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  Which wars? Do you mean colonial era, or recent ones?
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    Dutch West India Co. and colonial wars over Caribbean islands, mostly. There's also an argument to be made that, in addition to cotton, the sugar trade contributed to the intense economic incentive for American slavery, leading to the American Civil War; that argument is weaker, however, since sugar wasn't as important as cotton to the South at large and since (to my knowledge) there wasn't a large consolidated commercial enterprise like DWIC for sugar (or Chiquita for bananas and the banana wars).
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  (Disclaimer: what I'm about to say meets none of your requirements.) An explanation that I "like" for why all artificial sweeteners can be lumped in together is that the salient effect is the taste, not some unknown biochemical effect on gut bacteria or whatever. Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame had an interview where he vividly described the experience of going on a potato diet. The concept is that you eat nothing but potatoes (and multivitamins) for a month, and this "resets" your relationship with food and also resets your tastebuds in some sense. There are two effects here, so lets unpack them a bit. In terms of relationship with food, eating bland food makes you enjoy the process of eating less, which reduces the addictiveness. Fewer dopamine hits makes the whole process less enticing, so you don't snack as much (or whatever). I'm not sure about this one, so let's just ignore it for now. What I definitely can believe is that if you eat a lot of any strong taste, you'll get accustomed to it. Your body will seek homeostasis, downregulating the associated receptors. That's why chilli heads can eat a ton of super spicy foods, their taste receptors (or associated neurons) change over time to compensate for the level of capsaicin. My partner loves spicy food so I got used to it, but if I go travelling for work for a month and eat bland food, my tastebuds reset and her cooking becomes inedible... for a week or two and then I can eat it again. Similarly, I can drink tonic water neat, and beer tastes sweet to me. For most people those are intolerably bitter. This is not some inherent trait that I have, my tolerance of bitter flavours is because I drink tonic water regularly. When I stop for a while, I can't drink it undiluted either... for a week or two. Sweet is no different. If you overload your receptors with excessive amounts of any source of sweetness -- artificial or natural -- they'll adapt. You will taste things as less sweet, and add more sugar to compensate. You'll add more BBQ sauce, more honey, more syrup, etc... And therein lies the source of the weight gain. Penn describes going off the potato diet. His friend invited him to have a burger at their favourite burger place and Penn could not eat the burger because it tasted like overly sweet cake. That's what a burger is! The bun has sugar in it. The sauce has sugar in it. The meat patty is even grilled to caramelise the outside in a Maillard reaction! When I drink diet softdrinks regularly, burgers taste meaty to me. When I stop, I can't have burgers from most places because they taste sickly sweet. I've literally put down half-eaten burgers because they were just "too much". This could even be tested scientifically, and it wouldn't even be a difficult experiment. Run four groups: 1) Control. 2) Taking tasteless pills with 'x' amount of artificial sweetener in it. 3) Adding 'x' amount of sugary drinks, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants. 4) Adding 'x' amount of artificially sweetened diet drinks to the diet, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants Where 'x' is measured equivalent sweetness, not grams. Do this for a month or two and see if group 2 has any effect distinguishable from group 1. I bet there's no or minimal difference. Similarly, I bet both groups 3 and 4 gain weight relative to groups 1 and 2, but 3 ought to be the worst. I also bet that you could try different artificial sweeteners, and it wouldn't make much difference as long as the equivalent sweetness amounts were used.
nuc1e0n 4y ago
I don't drink diet coke to lose weight. I drink it to avoid diabetes. I know it affects the gut microbiome, but sometimes killing off gut bacteria is a good thing (stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria). I eat yogurt as well to compensate.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  I don't think it necessarily kills off gut bacteria, it affects the balance of what bacteria are present - bacteria that can digest the sweetener win big, others lose out.
  - nuc1e0n 4y ago
    Then I think it comes down to what balance is best for the available resources. I'd rather drink a can of diet coke with aspartame in it than tap water with chlorine in it or bottled water with microplastics in it. Have there been studies comparing the effects of that on the gut biome or what the relative purity in non water ppm is? A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them. Plus, I like the taste of diet coke more than just water. Cans are easier to recycle than plastic bottles as well.
    - bongoman37 4y ago
      Coke and other soft drinks and bottled water have a similar supply chain for water. Chlorine is a non-issue.
    - RajT88 4y ago
      > A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them. What a rotten situation to be in. Last time I was in India, there was a story on the local news about how the Coca Cola bottling plant managed to contaminate the product with motor oil somehow.
      - nuc1e0n 4y ago
amluto 4y ago
There’s no need to invoke the microbiome to come up with a general mechanism by which artificial sweeteners could have effects on those who eat them: you have taste receptors in your digestive tract! https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/62/10/3336/17466/How-Sweet-It-Is-Intestinal-Sweet-Taste-Receptors https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/62/10/3336/174...
- clnq 4y ago
  Thanks for the very interesting article. But man, is it filled with needlessly complex language. > The upper gastrointestinal tract is well-endowed with taste and fat receptors, with sweet taste being detected, as elsewhere, by a heterodimer of the taste 1 receptor (T1R) family, T1R2/T1R3. These receptors have been localized to intestinal brush and enteroendocrine cells, and are coupled with α-gustducin as the α-subunit of the G protein (Fig. 1). They recognize sugars, d-amino acids, sweet proteins, and artificial sweeteners. Of importance to a possible role in the incretin response, these receptors are colocalized with glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and L cells containing peptide YY (PYY) and K cells containing glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) (3). Incidentally, fatty acid responsive GPRs are also coupled to GLP-1 release, but are found predominantly in the colon (5). Can be restated in plain English: Cells in the GI tract between one's mouth and duodenum have similar sweet taste receptors - T1R. Some of these cells are endocrine and store GLP-1, PYY, and GIP (incretin) messenger hormones. For context, messenger hormones cause changes in cells receptive to them, including the nervous system. Indirectly, these hormones can affect metabolism and feeling of hunger or fullness (this is not in the paper but is known). The paper then discusses inconsistent (but meaningful) evidence for sweet taste receptors influencing the messenger hormone release and insulin-glycemia response. Notably, the author suggests sucralose sweeteners consumed before carbohydrates might spike postprandial (after-meal) blood sugar and insulin response. However, the extent of this effect could depend on an individual's genetics. The link between messenger hormone release and sweet taste receptors is established because this effect is diminished in vivo in mice lacking specific sweet taste receptors.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I'm not a biologist but that doesn't sound that complex for a science paper. Your average CS paper would have a similar level of complexity (if not worse)
Proven 4y ago
kmoser 4y ago
> A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege Sugar isn't the only thing that causes tooth decay. Isn't it also the acids in the drink? I'd guess if you currently drink soda flavored with sugar and you're looking to reduce tooth decay, switching to water would be far more effective than switching to an artificially flavored soda.
- tgv 4y ago
  Acid definitely does. Sugar is bad for your teeth because it feeds bacteria that consume sugar and produce acid. It's the acid that erodes the enamel. The plaque (where these bacteria live) is not influenced by acid, AFAIK. Perhaps there's a dental expert around to enlighten us?
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Acid wears away the enamel, which allows plaque to get near the actual tooth, which in turn is fuelled by sugar and burrows in to the core of the tooth -> Ow. No acid -> tooth decay has a harder time getting through enamel. Acid, but no sugar -> enamel wears off and tooth decay will eventually get in unless you clean your teeth regularly and/or eat a very low sugar diet (keto-levels).
    - Hnrobert42 4y ago
      My father, a dentist, told me about a patient of his with horrible teeth. The man was in his 30s and otherwise a beautiful specimen. He was a body builder with a super healthy diet. For breakfast, he only ate a grapefruit and always brushed his teeth afterwards. And that was the problem! The acid softened his enamel and the brushing removed it.
      - jakub_g 4y ago
spfzero 4y ago
Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body that will then respond similarly than they would when encountering sucrose/fructose. Probably not all, but probably some. The insulin response seems like a good candidate and studies have shown people gain weight on diet sodas kind of the same as they do on sugared-sodas, so it is not out of the question that artificial sweeteners are not benign.
- pkulak 4y ago
  > Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body Fool? Taste buds aren’t sentient. So maybe you mean “activate”? But even then, just because something has taste, that doesn’t imply anything else at all.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    That is exceedingly pedantic, and not necessarily correct. The point is that taste buds exist to detect the presence of sugars like sucrose or fructose (and some other substances like sweet proteins), for their high caloric content and easy access to energy. Artificial sweeteners happen to activate those same receptors, but they are neither high in calories nor an easy way to access stored energy, so they are essentially "fooling" those detectors. Just like we can say that an SQL Injection payload is fooling the server to perform some operation, without having to attribute actual intelligence to a simple program.
    - pkulak 4y ago
      It's not pedantic, it's me fighting back against all these non-scientific logic shortcuts. Taste buds don't exist "to do" anything; they just exist. We can't anthropomorphize everything all the time, and then use those attributed human qualities to make our points. "Taste buds want do taste sugar because they know how many calories sugar has, but they are fooled by this mean chemical, and it makes them feel bad, so blah blah blah." It gets so tiring.
- hedora 4y ago
data_maan 4y ago
The engineer's fallacy: thinking you can outsmart complex systems with simple "improvements". Even worse, not habting respect for complex systems! For some reason this type of thinking and "just fix" attitude seems to be particularly prevalent among the US, in particular Silicon Valley types. ("Too much sugar is bad, so replacing it with a sweetner solves the problem"). I'm sure to have stepped on a few toes, so let's hear who says "ouch".
theshrike79 4y ago
Sugar free additives (at least aspartame and asesulfame K, jury is out on sucralose, stevia and the others) make my intestines ... not work according to empirical studies. I drank exclusively sugar free drinks for a good 15 years and started to notice that my farts started smelling _really_ bad. Like "_I_ need to leave the room" bad. Thought it was gluten or wheat, it wasn't. Changed to sugary drinks for a few weeks -> boom, bowel/intestine issues gone. Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened. Now I'm a Coke drinker, not because I like it, but because it's the only one that's sweetened only with sugar.
- sdze 4y ago
  Did you gain any weight due to the switch?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Or even lose weight?
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Not really, I can't drink that much of sugary colas. I start feeling icky from the sweetness after 0,5l or so. The artificial ones I could literally drink like water, there are no satiation signals going to my brain so I could easily down 3 litres of Pepsi MAX a day.
- poisonarena 4y ago
  to counter your anecdote with another one, my grandpa drank 10 diet cokes/diet dr. peppers a day for maybe the last 15 years of his life and suffered no illness until a sudden heart attack in his late 70s
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Not everyone's gut flora is the same. People are _very_ different. I'm pretty sure your grandpa could also eat endless amounts of wheat products. If my grandpa tried that, he'd literally shit out his intestines because of the gluten (celiac's disease).
vouaobrasil 4y ago
This article is exactly why I prefer reading the abstracts from primary research articles. The title here is overly suggestive, it is way too wordy, and moreover attempts to suggest more than there might be: (use of the word "harm" in "harmless" rather than something more direct). A better title would be "artificial sweetener may affect blood sugar and XYZ", and it could have summarized the findings in 1500 words instead of 4600. I realize it's a bit unkosher to criticize the article itself here but c'mon....this is over the top.
- bigpeopleareold 4y ago
  You're right and the wording can lead for some to evoke existing implicit (or explicit!) biases one might have (like I do! But I didn't need research to tell me the stuff tastes nasty :D)
  - 93po 4y ago
    The entirety of journalism these days hinges on biased language to push narratives. There is no neutrality in journalism now, and I don't know enough about its history to say whether there ever was any.
- pgt 4y ago
  Could you kindly repost this comment as the abstract to the article’s referenced studies? Then you may have an upvote, sir.
langsoul-com 4y ago
Let's be real here, both sugar and sugar free alternatives are bad. Everyone knows that, but it just tastes so damned good.
- runeks 4y ago
  Let’s not be this simplistic. There’s nothing bad about either in reasonable doses.
Gatsky 4y ago
Some comments here seem ignorant of the key study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35987213/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35987213/ It’s very compelling - some sweeteners have adverse metabolic effects and it is mediated by the microbiome [1]. Aspartame and stevia seem better than sucralose and saccharin. In theory, thaumatin should also be fine. [1] As always this varies between individuals.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  I’m still ignorant of it because it’s sadly not on Sci-Hub :/ That was the first thing I looked at because it sounded like an actually interesting study (pretty much the opposite of the article).
mateuszbuda 4y ago
On a related topic, here is an article which presents interesting findings based on nutrition data scraped from Walmart food products: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart It turns out that sugar is the main nutrient in half of the products, even if you exclude cookies and candy.
sph 4y ago
Sucralose actually having an effect might explain why modern diet soda is so bloody good, to the point that every single time I get a Fanta Zero I double check after my first sip that I didn't get the sugary version instead. You could taste the aspartame in Diet Coke, but Coke Zero, Sprite Zero and Fanta Zero are, in my opinion, better tasting than the original thing. But perhaps as unhealthy, if not worse. I'm in UK, in case there are regional differences.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  I think there are regional differences. I noticed in Greece that Fanta has pulp or something cloudy in it. That’s not the case in the US. It also tastes more sour. But I agree about the Zeros tasting good.
- robert_dipaolo 4y ago
  Not for me unfortunately, I've yet to try a sugar free drink or sweet that doesn't taste bitter and chemically (if that's a word!). I don't get any sweet flavour at all, so can't drink any of them.
DuckFeathers 4y ago
Who is "we"? Nobody outside of PR and marketing for these companies actually thought that random chemicals were more harmful than sugar.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  Do you mean less?
beeforpork 4y ago
This discussion is important! Nutriscore is a proposed system to mark products as 'healthy' on a scale of 5 colour-coded values. It takes into account fat and salt and sugar (high amounts are 'unhealthy'), but not artificial sweeteners or other additives like preservatives or MSG. I hate this. It will push sugar out of products, but, of course, artificial sweeteners will be put in instead. I've already seen artificially sweetened sweet-n-sour hering without any normal sugary alternative, because companies will of course try to produce few variants for efficiency. This is awful. I find the whole idea of condensing 'healthy' into a single small integer rather absurd as no amount of sugar or fat or salt or MSG is simply 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' on a scale of 1..5.
bigpeopleareold 4y ago
I will never understand how people would think artificial sweeteners even taste like sugar. Particularly as it relates to soda, it always tastes distinctly ... chalky or at least an under-taste of bitterness. Can't people taste that? I associate that taste also with the feeling I get, like drinking tea on an empty stomach, a touch nauseated. When younger in the 80s-90s, my sister and mother would gulp down Diet sodas, but I would never touch it - they were nasty tasting. My wife experiences the same sort of feelings also. Here in Norway (I grew up in the US), Pepsi Max or Coca-Cola "uten sukker" (without sugar) is heavily marketed. Regular Pepsi and Coca-Cola or local/generic brands are much better (and much more moderate tasting than the American counterparts, with hyper-sweet corn syrup), but cost a few kroner more because of the sugar tax. The sugar-frees are equally terrible tasting, like as if there was no real progress in actually making "sugar-free" satisfying. I don't drink much soda anyway, and if it is, it will just be the store brand - it's a treat more than diet staple. Even too much sugared soda will catch up to me. Like alcohol, I have never deliberately moderated myself, but just have. It's not a point of pride, just something that happened. Because of this, I am not as tolerant to either alcohol or any type of sodas. I get buzzed too fast and I start feeling the soda after a little too much that I get a bit scared of both. Just like alcohol, I feel like people will rationalize sugar-free soda consumption based on some values that they have. The article mentioned that "diet" soda is a "guilt-free" treat - whether that's an value alignment to sell more or this is a genuine response from the consuming public, it is something I will not understand. I mean, in the end, TANSTAAFL ... despite my sweet tooth, knowing I can get carried away (and my body lets me know!), I'd rather just eat sugar than chemical concoctions.
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  You're implying that Diet Coke is not meant to have a distinct (aspartame) taste. Coke Zero is the one meant to be an imitation, and it is much closer.
  - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
    I vaguely remember in the past there was suggestions in advertising that Diet Coke was like regular Coke. By naming it the same thing, it does suggest an affinity, particularly on the dimension of taste. I am probably wrong, but this can be my own "consumer" expectation, giving the naming. Coke Zero or the local variant still doesn't taste like Coke, but bitter fizzy water, to me :)
protortyp 4y ago
Not directly related to the article, but I just wanted to share my experience with using artificial sweeteners to overcome a sugar addiction. Based on the recommendation from my fitness coach, I found that aspartame-based sweeteners were really helpful in reducing and eventually eliminating added sugars from my diet. I used a FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor to monitor my glucose levels and was surprised to find that the Monster drinks I drank whenever a craving kicked in didn't have any effect on my glucose levels. It took me about three weeks to get rid of the sugar habit, and now I only consume small amounts of sugar through an apple a day and protein powder in my morning porridge. I'm also back to water only. I figured I'd share in case it could help anyone else out there struggling with strong sugar cravings.
- quotha 4y ago
  Were the monster drinks the zero sugar versions or the original?
  - protortyp 4y ago
    Yes, I only drank the Monster Zero Ultra drink (the white can). It was the only one that didn't have that classic energy drink taste, but it reminded me more of a sprite.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  One thing that might help is sparkling water. I grew up with an an unhealthy daily soda habit and eventually kicked it but would still crave a Coke after and couple of weeks. What helped me kick that is drinking lots of plain sparkling water (Pierrer/La Croix). I think what I was really looking for was that carbonated “kick” after all.
  - nazgulsenpai 4y ago
    Even at establishments that don't serve bottled sparkling water, you can usually get carbonated "soda water" from the dispensers. This is also how I kicked my soda habit!
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
I am a diet soda addict and I am not a scientist, but personally I think articles like this tend to bury this point: > One problem with sweeteners in the diet of children, Sibson says, is that the more children consume them, the more they develop a sweet palate and therefore crave sweetness in all its forms, with or without sugar Drinking sweet things gives you a sweet tooth! If we assume sweeteners are perfectly safe, wouldn't we still expect people who e.g. drink sweetened drinks instead of plain water to be more likely to gain weight overall, because they have a preference for sweet things and lots of sweet things have calories? Personally I'm not worried about it: my high consumption of sweetened drinks has not stopped me losing weight by the conventional method of eating less. There is another ingredient in soda that's more problematic (caffeine can mess up your sleep, and if you sleep badly it's a lot easier to gain weight).
vanilla-almond 4y ago
This was a frustrating read. The article freely used the term "sweeteners" but without making the distinction between artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame) and natural-derived sweeteners (stevia, xylitol). Later in the article, the term "artificial sweeteners" imply that all sweeteners are problematic (including natural-derived sweeteners). There are more natural-derived sweeteners now available, although they may be heavily processed. Examples of natural-derived sweeteners: stevia, xylitol, inulin, erythritol, monk fruit extract. The following paragraph from the article is sloppy: > "A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege." The linked study (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6405.12749 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6...) does not mention stevia at all. The linked study refers to "sugar-sweetened beverages". But misleadingly the article author start with stevia (a natural-derived sweetener) then switches to the term "artificially sweetened" and links to the study. The reader is left the implication is that all sweeteners cause toothache.
- Retric 4y ago
  There is zero inherent difference between natural vs artificial chemicals. It’s only a question of what effect each chemical has have on the body as “natural” chemicals run the full range from mandatory to lethal in minute quantities.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    There are some relevant differences regarding byproducts, contaminants, etc. No production process is entirely clean.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The same is true of refining products from organic sources. You don’t directly get 1lb of table sugar from planting a sugar beet, you need to separate the sugar. At scale this involves adding bleaching agents etc which end up in the final product along with whatever contaminates show up. Run a chemical analysis on several brands of natural sugars and your going to find stuff like sulphur dioxide used as a preservative and trace amounts of industrial lubricants etc.
amelius 4y ago
I'm getting slight addiction/depression symptoms from Diet Coke, and I'm getting severe gut problems from drinking Coke Zero. The former is probably caused by the caffeine, and the latter is probably the sweetener. I guess I can't drink any cola anymore, certainly not on a regular basis.
- greenbush 4y ago
  Cola is highly acidic, which causes gut problems, especially when drinking it on an empty stomach. It caused GERD for me and I had to take omeprazole to fix the damage. And, of course, I mostly stopped drinking cola, especially on an empty stomach.
pandemicsoul 4y ago
I'm not going to bother reading this because it's obviously click-bait, but I just want to relate that when I was in high school in the 90s, I remember being in a class where a guest speaker gave a talk and tried to convince us all that artificial sweeteners would "rot our brains" and give us alzheimers. For years, I avoided them because of that – until it became clear that real sugar was destroying my health and putting me on the path for diabetes. Since then, I've not only tried to minimize sugar in my diet, but also tried to sparingly use artificial sweeteners (specifically Stevia, whenever i can) to offset when possible. Point being: Don't listen to this shrill health BS that purports to have new revelations about what's good for you or not, since this health advice comes in cycles. We saw the same thing with butter/margarine. First butter was good, then it was the devil and margarine was the only way to go. Then margarine was the devil and butter was the only way to go.
donclark 4y ago
When the HN community "breaks down" articles/topics like this, are those arguments, facts, data repurposed somewhere into an organized fashion so that they can be referenced? *Instead of regurgitating similar arguments over-and-over as similar articles are posted? Is this an opportunity for A.I.? Could the AI solution that is created could be repurposed for other communities/forums/Discord Channel/Slack/Mastodon/youtube/etc?
denton-scratch 4y ago
I have no idea whether the research this article is based on is sound. What seems interesting is that the non-caloric sweeteners they tested are completely different chemicals, and yet they all were correlated with weight gain or diabetes. It's as if just being a sweetener is enough. That makes some sense to me. If a jolt of sweetness primes the metabolism for a glucose rush that never comes, perhaps the subject starts (unconsciously) hunting for another food that will provide the rush - starch might fit the bill, I guess. Or alcohol. Someone noted that the article title is clickbaity. Of course it is - this is The Guardian, which is now effectively a tabloid. It's not really a newspaper of record any more.
- pitaj 4y ago
  In the past, they've found that the causation is actually the other way. People with diabetes etc terms to switch to sweeteners as a way of reducing their sugar intake.
greenbit 4y ago
Whenever I see the gleeful declaration "NO SUGAR ADDED!" on the front of a product I'm considering, usually an inspection of the ingredients list reveals plenty of artificial sweeteners added instead. Seems like the label designers are hoping that shoppers will conflate "no sugar added" with "unsweetened".
- shigawire 4y ago
  I'm not sure about most shopper. Most shopper probably want it sweetened with no caloric downside.
mabbo 4y ago
One of very few saved comments I have on HN is on this topic. > I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440236#9440566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440236#9440566
hansvm 4y ago
The increased diabetes risk is at least somewhat expected from all sweeteners, regardless of origin or caloric load. As an intuition, the fact that you taste something as sweet indicates that your brain has received a strong signal, and your hormonal responses are mostly regulated by signals sent from the brain to specialized organs. In practice, the data strongly supports any well-studied sweetener increasing the risk of diabetes and also increasing hunger sufficiently to at least partially mitigate any caloric benefits. The rest of the data I've seen on artificial sweeteners is a dogmatic quagmire with respect to cancers, neural issues, and whatnot, so I wouldn't personally want to draw many conclusions based on it, especially given the conflicts of interest in how most of it was generated. However, on both sides of the debate I think it's worth honestly considering at least those two dangers, especially considering the aggressive marketing of "natural" sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit with a strong implication that being natural means it's safe, and especially with detractors on the other side pointing to a bunch of shitty science over the years as evidence that sugar substitutes are probably safe.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Regardless of chemistry, toxicity, or biology, I consider it morally wrong to lie to myself. Sweeteners are lies. They are lies to yourself about what you are eating. Scary effective lab-synthesized coctails or refined natural extracts, it's all LIES. If I want sweet, I eat sugar. If sugar is bad, then by applying a bit of self-discipline I just don't buy it. People are always looking for the easy way out. Cheap, industrially manufactured lies so you don't have to face the truth: Your self-discipline sucks. Put some effort into it and you'll not only stop lying to yourself and improve your diet, you'll also become a better human being.
- oweiler 4y ago
  This is the only sane answer.
  - NLPaep 4y ago
    But... He is “lying” to his body by adding sugar to food in the first place
    - loa_in_ 4y ago
      Sugar is a valid source of nutrition at the very least. It does both stimulate the sweet taste buds, prompting body to expect additional energy and it provides the energy.
- NLPaep 4y ago
  That’s not going to work. Sugar is highly addictive and, as you can see by this obese world, just shouting at people to have better discipline doesn’t do much.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
When I was a child in the late fifties and early sixties sweet fizzy drinks were a once a week treat. If we wanted a drink in between times we drank water. We brought up out children (late '80s to late '90s) the same way, in fact that was not particularly unusual at the time here in Norway. When we visited friends in the US they were taken aback when my children asked for a drink of water instead of fizzy sweet stuff. It seems to me that a lot of the problems associated with sugar and other sweeteners would be solved simply by ingesting less of them. But I don't know how to convince anyone else to try bringing their children up that way.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
This reads a bit like someone looking critical at the dieting advice for pre diabetics if “eat more vegetables” and coming out with the conclusion that as one would assume if you eat too many vegetables you will still end up obese and still be in the high risk group for getting diabetes. The posting a headline of “Are vegetables actually healthy!?”

138 points by lxm 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

The confounding outcome here is profoundly negative. People are being misled into believing a short term benefit of (from the article) around 3 months of weightloss translates across the board into longterm replacement for sugar without risk. Better to stop wanting to taste sweet things all the time, than wind up type 2 diabetic or risk heart disease.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
Indeed. After being abroad for long periods of time, when I return to eat meals in US restaurants, they are soooo salty. We get habituated to strongly flavored foods. The real diet drug they need to concoct would be one that inhibits that habituation. Sugar or salt saturated foods would taste gross.
adrian_b 4y ago
The right way to avoid the effects of eating too much sugar is not to replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners, but to limit the daily intake of sugar. I have seen the recommendation that the daily sugar intake should be up to 50 grams, i.e. up to 25 g of fructose. This seems a plausible value, which is equivalent with 500 g per day of most cultivated fruits, e.g. apples, pears or blueberries, or 300 g per day of the sweetest fruits, e.g. grapes or fresh figs. The refined sugar is not bad per se, as it is the same substance found in all vegetables, but it is bad because it easily allows its wrong use when food is made which is too sweet and which facilitates the eating of too much sugar every day. Limiting the daily sugar intake is easy if you cook at home, but it is difficult if you eat industrially-produced food. Unfortunately for those who like them, the first measure to reduce the sugar intake is to stop drinking any industrially-produced beverages.

torstenvl 4y ago

These articles are always divisive and lacking in substance. The science is usually exceedingly poor: I've only seen one posted to HN that actually looked at alternative sweeteners individually rather than assuming, say, xylitol and stevia do identical things to your body. And with it comes a strong prescription to change dietary habits yet again. Honestly, because these are thought pieces, because they seek to influence behavior, and because of the long history of the sugar lobby doing pernicious things to influence the public (even to the point of starting wars), I don't think they should be on HN unless the link is to a peer reviewed, reproducible, high-quality study. BL: Without a large-N variable-isolated longitudinal study that distinguishes between different sweeteners, articles like the OP are indistinguishable from sugar-lobby FUD.

barbariangrunge 4y ago
Which wars? Do you mean colonial era, or recent ones?
- torstenvl 4y ago
  Dutch West India Co. and colonial wars over Caribbean islands, mostly. There's also an argument to be made that, in addition to cotton, the sugar trade contributed to the intense economic incentive for American slavery, leading to the American Civil War; that argument is weaker, however, since sugar wasn't as important as cotton to the South at large and since (to my knowledge) there wasn't a large consolidated commercial enterprise like DWIC for sugar (or Chiquita for bananas and the banana wars).
jiggawatts 4y ago
(Disclaimer: what I'm about to say meets none of your requirements.) An explanation that I "like" for why all artificial sweeteners can be lumped in together is that the salient effect is the taste, not some unknown biochemical effect on gut bacteria or whatever. Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame had an interview where he vividly described the experience of going on a potato diet. The concept is that you eat nothing but potatoes (and multivitamins) for a month, and this "resets" your relationship with food and also resets your tastebuds in some sense. There are two effects here, so lets unpack them a bit. In terms of relationship with food, eating bland food makes you enjoy the process of eating less, which reduces the addictiveness. Fewer dopamine hits makes the whole process less enticing, so you don't snack as much (or whatever). I'm not sure about this one, so let's just ignore it for now. What I definitely can believe is that if you eat a lot of any strong taste, you'll get accustomed to it. Your body will seek homeostasis, downregulating the associated receptors. That's why chilli heads can eat a ton of super spicy foods, their taste receptors (or associated neurons) change over time to compensate for the level of capsaicin. My partner loves spicy food so I got used to it, but if I go travelling for work for a month and eat bland food, my tastebuds reset and her cooking becomes inedible... for a week or two and then I can eat it again. Similarly, I can drink tonic water neat, and beer tastes sweet to me. For most people those are intolerably bitter. This is not some inherent trait that I have, my tolerance of bitter flavours is because I drink tonic water regularly. When I stop for a while, I can't drink it undiluted either... for a week or two. Sweet is no different. If you overload your receptors with excessive amounts of any source of sweetness -- artificial or natural -- they'll adapt. You will taste things as less sweet, and add more sugar to compensate. You'll add more BBQ sauce, more honey, more syrup, etc... And therein lies the source of the weight gain. Penn describes going off the potato diet. His friend invited him to have a burger at their favourite burger place and Penn could not eat the burger because it tasted like overly sweet cake. That's what a burger is! The bun has sugar in it. The sauce has sugar in it. The meat patty is even grilled to caramelise the outside in a Maillard reaction! When I drink diet softdrinks regularly, burgers taste meaty to me. When I stop, I can't have burgers from most places because they taste sickly sweet. I've literally put down half-eaten burgers because they were just "too much". This could even be tested scientifically, and it wouldn't even be a difficult experiment. Run four groups: 1) Control. 2) Taking tasteless pills with 'x' amount of artificial sweetener in it. 3) Adding 'x' amount of sugary drinks, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants. 4) Adding 'x' amount of artificially sweetened diet drinks to the diet, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants Where 'x' is measured equivalent sweetness, not grams. Do this for a month or two and see if group 2 has any effect distinguishable from group 1. I bet there's no or minimal difference. Similarly, I bet both groups 3 and 4 gain weight relative to groups 1 and 2, but 3 ought to be the worst. I also bet that you could try different artificial sweeteners, and it wouldn't make much difference as long as the equivalent sweetness amounts were used.

nuc1e0n 4y ago

I don't drink diet coke to lose weight. I drink it to avoid diabetes. I know it affects the gut microbiome, but sometimes killing off gut bacteria is a good thing (stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria). I eat yogurt as well to compensate.

Georgelemental 4y ago
I don't think it necessarily kills off gut bacteria, it affects the balance of what bacteria are present - bacteria that can digest the sweetener win big, others lose out.
- nuc1e0n 4y ago
  Then I think it comes down to what balance is best for the available resources. I'd rather drink a can of diet coke with aspartame in it than tap water with chlorine in it or bottled water with microplastics in it. Have there been studies comparing the effects of that on the gut biome or what the relative purity in non water ppm is? A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them. Plus, I like the taste of diet coke more than just water. Cans are easier to recycle than plastic bottles as well.
  - bongoman37 4y ago
    Coke and other soft drinks and bottled water have a similar supply chain for water. Chlorine is a non-issue.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    > A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them. What a rotten situation to be in. Last time I was in India, there was a story on the local news about how the Coca Cola bottling plant managed to contaminate the product with motor oil somehow.
    - nuc1e0n 4y ago

amluto 4y ago

There’s no need to invoke the microbiome to come up with a general mechanism by which artificial sweeteners could have effects on those who eat them: you have taste receptors in your digestive tract! https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/62/10/3336/17466/How-Sweet-It-Is-Intestinal-Sweet-Taste-Receptors https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/62/10/3336/174...

clnq 4y ago
Thanks for the very interesting article. But man, is it filled with needlessly complex language. > The upper gastrointestinal tract is well-endowed with taste and fat receptors, with sweet taste being detected, as elsewhere, by a heterodimer of the taste 1 receptor (T1R) family, T1R2/T1R3. These receptors have been localized to intestinal brush and enteroendocrine cells, and are coupled with α-gustducin as the α-subunit of the G protein (Fig. 1). They recognize sugars, d-amino acids, sweet proteins, and artificial sweeteners. Of importance to a possible role in the incretin response, these receptors are colocalized with glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and L cells containing peptide YY (PYY) and K cells containing glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) (3). Incidentally, fatty acid responsive GPRs are also coupled to GLP-1 release, but are found predominantly in the colon (5). Can be restated in plain English: Cells in the GI tract between one's mouth and duodenum have similar sweet taste receptors - T1R. Some of these cells are endocrine and store GLP-1, PYY, and GIP (incretin) messenger hormones. For context, messenger hormones cause changes in cells receptive to them, including the nervous system. Indirectly, these hormones can affect metabolism and feeling of hunger or fullness (this is not in the paper but is known). The paper then discusses inconsistent (but meaningful) evidence for sweet taste receptors influencing the messenger hormone release and insulin-glycemia response. Notably, the author suggests sucralose sweeteners consumed before carbohydrates might spike postprandial (after-meal) blood sugar and insulin response. However, the extent of this effect could depend on an individual's genetics. The link between messenger hormone release and sweet taste receptors is established because this effect is diminished in vivo in mice lacking specific sweet taste receptors.
- bawolff 4y ago
  I'm not a biologist but that doesn't sound that complex for a science paper. Your average CS paper would have a similar level of complexity (if not worse)

Proven 4y ago

kmoser 4y ago

> A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege Sugar isn't the only thing that causes tooth decay. Isn't it also the acids in the drink? I'd guess if you currently drink soda flavored with sugar and you're looking to reduce tooth decay, switching to water would be far more effective than switching to an artificially flavored soda.

tgv 4y ago
Acid definitely does. Sugar is bad for your teeth because it feeds bacteria that consume sugar and produce acid. It's the acid that erodes the enamel. The plaque (where these bacteria live) is not influenced by acid, AFAIK. Perhaps there's a dental expert around to enlighten us?
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Acid wears away the enamel, which allows plaque to get near the actual tooth, which in turn is fuelled by sugar and burrows in to the core of the tooth -> Ow. No acid -> tooth decay has a harder time getting through enamel. Acid, but no sugar -> enamel wears off and tooth decay will eventually get in unless you clean your teeth regularly and/or eat a very low sugar diet (keto-levels).
  - Hnrobert42 4y ago
    My father, a dentist, told me about a patient of his with horrible teeth. The man was in his 30s and otherwise a beautiful specimen. He was a body builder with a super healthy diet. For breakfast, he only ate a grapefruit and always brushed his teeth afterwards. And that was the problem! The acid softened his enamel and the brushing removed it.
    - jakub_g 4y ago

spfzero 4y ago

Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body that will then respond similarly than they would when encountering sucrose/fructose. Probably not all, but probably some. The insulin response seems like a good candidate and studies have shown people gain weight on diet sodas kind of the same as they do on sugared-sodas, so it is not out of the question that artificial sweeteners are not benign.

pkulak 4y ago
> Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body Fool? Taste buds aren’t sentient. So maybe you mean “activate”? But even then, just because something has taste, that doesn’t imply anything else at all.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  That is exceedingly pedantic, and not necessarily correct. The point is that taste buds exist to detect the presence of sugars like sucrose or fructose (and some other substances like sweet proteins), for their high caloric content and easy access to energy. Artificial sweeteners happen to activate those same receptors, but they are neither high in calories nor an easy way to access stored energy, so they are essentially "fooling" those detectors. Just like we can say that an SQL Injection payload is fooling the server to perform some operation, without having to attribute actual intelligence to a simple program.
  - pkulak 4y ago
    It's not pedantic, it's me fighting back against all these non-scientific logic shortcuts. Taste buds don't exist "to do" anything; they just exist. We can't anthropomorphize everything all the time, and then use those attributed human qualities to make our points. "Taste buds want do taste sugar because they know how many calories sugar has, but they are fooled by this mean chemical, and it makes them feel bad, so blah blah blah." It gets so tiring.
hedora 4y ago

data_maan 4y ago

The engineer's fallacy: thinking you can outsmart complex systems with simple "improvements". Even worse, not habting respect for complex systems! For some reason this type of thinking and "just fix" attitude seems to be particularly prevalent among the US, in particular Silicon Valley types. ("Too much sugar is bad, so replacing it with a sweetner solves the problem"). I'm sure to have stepped on a few toes, so let's hear who says "ouch".

theshrike79 4y ago

Sugar free additives (at least aspartame and asesulfame K, jury is out on sucralose, stevia and the others) make my intestines ... not work according to empirical studies. I drank exclusively sugar free drinks for a good 15 years and started to notice that my farts started smelling _really_ bad. Like "_I_ need to leave the room" bad. Thought it was gluten or wheat, it wasn't. Changed to sugary drinks for a few weeks -> boom, bowel/intestine issues gone. Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened. Now I'm a Coke drinker, not because I like it, but because it's the only one that's sweetened only with sugar.

sdze 4y ago
Did you gain any weight due to the switch?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Or even lose weight?
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Not really, I can't drink that much of sugary colas. I start feeling icky from the sweetness after 0,5l or so. The artificial ones I could literally drink like water, there are no satiation signals going to my brain so I could easily down 3 litres of Pepsi MAX a day.
poisonarena 4y ago
to counter your anecdote with another one, my grandpa drank 10 diet cokes/diet dr. peppers a day for maybe the last 15 years of his life and suffered no illness until a sudden heart attack in his late 70s
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Not everyone's gut flora is the same. People are _very_ different. I'm pretty sure your grandpa could also eat endless amounts of wheat products. If my grandpa tried that, he'd literally shit out his intestines because of the gluten (celiac's disease).

vouaobrasil 4y ago

This article is exactly why I prefer reading the abstracts from primary research articles. The title here is overly suggestive, it is way too wordy, and moreover attempts to suggest more than there might be: (use of the word "harm" in "harmless" rather than something more direct). A better title would be "artificial sweetener may affect blood sugar and XYZ", and it could have summarized the findings in 1500 words instead of 4600. I realize it's a bit unkosher to criticize the article itself here but c'mon....this is over the top.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago
You're right and the wording can lead for some to evoke existing implicit (or explicit!) biases one might have (like I do! But I didn't need research to tell me the stuff tastes nasty :D)
- 93po 4y ago
  The entirety of journalism these days hinges on biased language to push narratives. There is no neutrality in journalism now, and I don't know enough about its history to say whether there ever was any.
pgt 4y ago
Could you kindly repost this comment as the abstract to the article’s referenced studies? Then you may have an upvote, sir.

langsoul-com 4y ago

Let's be real here, both sugar and sugar free alternatives are bad. Everyone knows that, but it just tastes so damned good.

runeks 4y ago
Let’s not be this simplistic. There’s nothing bad about either in reasonable doses.

Gatsky 4y ago

Some comments here seem ignorant of the key study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35987213/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35987213/ It’s very compelling - some sweeteners have adverse metabolic effects and it is mediated by the microbiome [1]. Aspartame and stevia seem better than sucralose and saccharin. In theory, thaumatin should also be fine. [1] As always this varies between individuals.

Semaphor 4y ago
I’m still ignorant of it because it’s sadly not on Sci-Hub :/ That was the first thing I looked at because it sounded like an actually interesting study (pretty much the opposite of the article).

mateuszbuda 4y ago

On a related topic, here is an article which presents interesting findings based on nutrition data scraped from Walmart food products: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart It turns out that sugar is the main nutrient in half of the products, even if you exclude cookies and candy.

sph 4y ago

Sucralose actually having an effect might explain why modern diet soda is so bloody good, to the point that every single time I get a Fanta Zero I double check after my first sip that I didn't get the sugary version instead. You could taste the aspartame in Diet Coke, but Coke Zero, Sprite Zero and Fanta Zero are, in my opinion, better tasting than the original thing. But perhaps as unhealthy, if not worse. I'm in UK, in case there are regional differences.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
I think there are regional differences. I noticed in Greece that Fanta has pulp or something cloudy in it. That’s not the case in the US. It also tastes more sour. But I agree about the Zeros tasting good.
robert_dipaolo 4y ago
Not for me unfortunately, I've yet to try a sugar free drink or sweet that doesn't taste bitter and chemically (if that's a word!). I don't get any sweet flavour at all, so can't drink any of them.

DuckFeathers 4y ago

Who is "we"? Nobody outside of PR and marketing for these companies actually thought that random chemicals were more harmful than sugar.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
Do you mean less?

beeforpork 4y ago

This discussion is important! Nutriscore is a proposed system to mark products as 'healthy' on a scale of 5 colour-coded values. It takes into account fat and salt and sugar (high amounts are 'unhealthy'), but not artificial sweeteners or other additives like preservatives or MSG. I hate this. It will push sugar out of products, but, of course, artificial sweeteners will be put in instead. I've already seen artificially sweetened sweet-n-sour hering without any normal sugary alternative, because companies will of course try to produce few variants for efficiency. This is awful. I find the whole idea of condensing 'healthy' into a single small integer rather absurd as no amount of sugar or fat or salt or MSG is simply 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' on a scale of 1..5.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

I will never understand how people would think artificial sweeteners even taste like sugar. Particularly as it relates to soda, it always tastes distinctly ... chalky or at least an under-taste of bitterness. Can't people taste that? I associate that taste also with the feeling I get, like drinking tea on an empty stomach, a touch nauseated. When younger in the 80s-90s, my sister and mother would gulp down Diet sodas, but I would never touch it - they were nasty tasting. My wife experiences the same sort of feelings also. Here in Norway (I grew up in the US), Pepsi Max or Coca-Cola "uten sukker" (without sugar) is heavily marketed. Regular Pepsi and Coca-Cola or local/generic brands are much better (and much more moderate tasting than the American counterparts, with hyper-sweet corn syrup), but cost a few kroner more because of the sugar tax. The sugar-frees are equally terrible tasting, like as if there was no real progress in actually making "sugar-free" satisfying. I don't drink much soda anyway, and if it is, it will just be the store brand - it's a treat more than diet staple. Even too much sugared soda will catch up to me. Like alcohol, I have never deliberately moderated myself, but just have. It's not a point of pride, just something that happened. Because of this, I am not as tolerant to either alcohol or any type of sodas. I get buzzed too fast and I start feeling the soda after a little too much that I get a bit scared of both. Just like alcohol, I feel like people will rationalize sugar-free soda consumption based on some values that they have. The article mentioned that "diet" soda is a "guilt-free" treat - whether that's an value alignment to sell more or this is a genuine response from the consuming public, it is something I will not understand. I mean, in the end, TANSTAAFL ... despite my sweet tooth, knowing I can get carried away (and my body lets me know!), I'd rather just eat sugar than chemical concoctions.

BbzzbB 4y ago
You're implying that Diet Coke is not meant to have a distinct (aspartame) taste. Coke Zero is the one meant to be an imitation, and it is much closer.
- bigpeopleareold 4y ago
  I vaguely remember in the past there was suggestions in advertising that Diet Coke was like regular Coke. By naming it the same thing, it does suggest an affinity, particularly on the dimension of taste. I am probably wrong, but this can be my own "consumer" expectation, giving the naming. Coke Zero or the local variant still doesn't taste like Coke, but bitter fizzy water, to me :)

protortyp 4y ago

Not directly related to the article, but I just wanted to share my experience with using artificial sweeteners to overcome a sugar addiction. Based on the recommendation from my fitness coach, I found that aspartame-based sweeteners were really helpful in reducing and eventually eliminating added sugars from my diet. I used a FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor to monitor my glucose levels and was surprised to find that the Monster drinks I drank whenever a craving kicked in didn't have any effect on my glucose levels. It took me about three weeks to get rid of the sugar habit, and now I only consume small amounts of sugar through an apple a day and protein powder in my morning porridge. I'm also back to water only. I figured I'd share in case it could help anyone else out there struggling with strong sugar cravings.

quotha 4y ago
Were the monster drinks the zero sugar versions or the original?
- protortyp 4y ago
  Yes, I only drank the Monster Zero Ultra drink (the white can). It was the only one that didn't have that classic energy drink taste, but it reminded me more of a sprite.
Bluecobra 4y ago
One thing that might help is sparkling water. I grew up with an an unhealthy daily soda habit and eventually kicked it but would still crave a Coke after and couple of weeks. What helped me kick that is drinking lots of plain sparkling water (Pierrer/La Croix). I think what I was really looking for was that carbonated “kick” after all.
- nazgulsenpai 4y ago
  Even at establishments that don't serve bottled sparkling water, you can usually get carbonated "soda water" from the dispensers. This is also how I kicked my soda habit!

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

I am a diet soda addict and I am not a scientist, but personally I think articles like this tend to bury this point: > One problem with sweeteners in the diet of children, Sibson says, is that the more children consume them, the more they develop a sweet palate and therefore crave sweetness in all its forms, with or without sugar Drinking sweet things gives you a sweet tooth! If we assume sweeteners are perfectly safe, wouldn't we still expect people who e.g. drink sweetened drinks instead of plain water to be more likely to gain weight overall, because they have a preference for sweet things and lots of sweet things have calories? Personally I'm not worried about it: my high consumption of sweetened drinks has not stopped me losing weight by the conventional method of eating less. There is another ingredient in soda that's more problematic (caffeine can mess up your sleep, and if you sleep badly it's a lot easier to gain weight).

vanilla-almond 4y ago

This was a frustrating read. The article freely used the term "sweeteners" but without making the distinction between artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame) and natural-derived sweeteners (stevia, xylitol). Later in the article, the term "artificial sweeteners" imply that all sweeteners are problematic (including natural-derived sweeteners). There are more natural-derived sweeteners now available, although they may be heavily processed. Examples of natural-derived sweeteners: stevia, xylitol, inulin, erythritol, monk fruit extract. The following paragraph from the article is sloppy: > "A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege." The linked study (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6405.12749 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6...) does not mention stevia at all. The linked study refers to "sugar-sweetened beverages". But misleadingly the article author start with stevia (a natural-derived sweetener) then switches to the term "artificially sweetened" and links to the study. The reader is left the implication is that all sweeteners cause toothache.

Retric 4y ago
There is zero inherent difference between natural vs artificial chemicals. It’s only a question of what effect each chemical has have on the body as “natural” chemicals run the full range from mandatory to lethal in minute quantities.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  There are some relevant differences regarding byproducts, contaminants, etc. No production process is entirely clean.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The same is true of refining products from organic sources. You don’t directly get 1lb of table sugar from planting a sugar beet, you need to separate the sugar. At scale this involves adding bleaching agents etc which end up in the final product along with whatever contaminates show up. Run a chemical analysis on several brands of natural sugars and your going to find stuff like sulphur dioxide used as a preservative and trace amounts of industrial lubricants etc.

amelius 4y ago

I'm getting slight addiction/depression symptoms from Diet Coke, and I'm getting severe gut problems from drinking Coke Zero. The former is probably caused by the caffeine, and the latter is probably the sweetener. I guess I can't drink any cola anymore, certainly not on a regular basis.

greenbush 4y ago
Cola is highly acidic, which causes gut problems, especially when drinking it on an empty stomach. It caused GERD for me and I had to take omeprazole to fix the damage. And, of course, I mostly stopped drinking cola, especially on an empty stomach.

pandemicsoul 4y ago

I'm not going to bother reading this because it's obviously click-bait, but I just want to relate that when I was in high school in the 90s, I remember being in a class where a guest speaker gave a talk and tried to convince us all that artificial sweeteners would "rot our brains" and give us alzheimers. For years, I avoided them because of that – until it became clear that real sugar was destroying my health and putting me on the path for diabetes. Since then, I've not only tried to minimize sugar in my diet, but also tried to sparingly use artificial sweeteners (specifically Stevia, whenever i can) to offset when possible. Point being: Don't listen to this shrill health BS that purports to have new revelations about what's good for you or not, since this health advice comes in cycles. We saw the same thing with butter/margarine. First butter was good, then it was the devil and margarine was the only way to go. Then margarine was the devil and butter was the only way to go.

donclark 4y ago

When the HN community "breaks down" articles/topics like this, are those arguments, facts, data repurposed somewhere into an organized fashion so that they can be referenced? *Instead of regurgitating similar arguments over-and-over as similar articles are posted? Is this an opportunity for A.I.? Could the AI solution that is created could be repurposed for other communities/forums/Discord Channel/Slack/Mastodon/youtube/etc?

denton-scratch 4y ago

I have no idea whether the research this article is based on is sound. What seems interesting is that the non-caloric sweeteners they tested are completely different chemicals, and yet they all were correlated with weight gain or diabetes. It's as if just being a sweetener is enough. That makes some sense to me. If a jolt of sweetness primes the metabolism for a glucose rush that never comes, perhaps the subject starts (unconsciously) hunting for another food that will provide the rush - starch might fit the bill, I guess. Or alcohol. Someone noted that the article title is clickbaity. Of course it is - this is The Guardian, which is now effectively a tabloid. It's not really a newspaper of record any more.

pitaj 4y ago
In the past, they've found that the causation is actually the other way. People with diabetes etc terms to switch to sweeteners as a way of reducing their sugar intake.

greenbit 4y ago

Whenever I see the gleeful declaration "NO SUGAR ADDED!" on the front of a product I'm considering, usually an inspection of the ingredients list reveals plenty of artificial sweeteners added instead. Seems like the label designers are hoping that shoppers will conflate "no sugar added" with "unsweetened".

shigawire 4y ago
I'm not sure about most shopper. Most shopper probably want it sweetened with no caloric downside.

mabbo 4y ago

One of very few saved comments I have on HN is on this topic. > I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440236#9440566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440236#9440566

hansvm 4y ago

The increased diabetes risk is at least somewhat expected from all sweeteners, regardless of origin or caloric load. As an intuition, the fact that you taste something as sweet indicates that your brain has received a strong signal, and your hormonal responses are mostly regulated by signals sent from the brain to specialized organs. In practice, the data strongly supports any well-studied sweetener increasing the risk of diabetes and also increasing hunger sufficiently to at least partially mitigate any caloric benefits. The rest of the data I've seen on artificial sweeteners is a dogmatic quagmire with respect to cancers, neural issues, and whatnot, so I wouldn't personally want to draw many conclusions based on it, especially given the conflicts of interest in how most of it was generated. However, on both sides of the debate I think it's worth honestly considering at least those two dangers, especially considering the aggressive marketing of "natural" sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit with a strong implication that being natural means it's safe, and especially with detractors on the other side pointing to a bunch of shitty science over the years as evidence that sugar substitutes are probably safe.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago

Regardless of chemistry, toxicity, or biology, I consider it morally wrong to lie to myself. Sweeteners are lies. They are lies to yourself about what you are eating. Scary effective lab-synthesized coctails or refined natural extracts, it's all LIES. If I want sweet, I eat sugar. If sugar is bad, then by applying a bit of self-discipline I just don't buy it. People are always looking for the easy way out. Cheap, industrially manufactured lies so you don't have to face the truth: Your self-discipline sucks. Put some effort into it and you'll not only stop lying to yourself and improve your diet, you'll also become a better human being.

oweiler 4y ago
This is the only sane answer.
- NLPaep 4y ago
  But... He is “lying” to his body by adding sugar to food in the first place
  - loa_in_ 4y ago
    Sugar is a valid source of nutrition at the very least. It does both stimulate the sweet taste buds, prompting body to expect additional energy and it provides the energy.
NLPaep 4y ago
That’s not going to work. Sugar is highly addictive and, as you can see by this obese world, just shouting at people to have better discipline doesn’t do much.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

When I was a child in the late fifties and early sixties sweet fizzy drinks were a once a week treat. If we wanted a drink in between times we drank water. We brought up out children (late '80s to late '90s) the same way, in fact that was not particularly unusual at the time here in Norway. When we visited friends in the US they were taken aback when my children asked for a drink of water instead of fizzy sweet stuff. It seems to me that a lot of the problems associated with sugar and other sweeteners would be solved simply by ingesting less of them. But I don't know how to convince anyone else to try bringing their children up that way.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

This reads a bit like someone looking critical at the dieting advice for pre diabetics if “eat more vegetables” and coming out with the conclusion that as one would assume if you eat too many vegetables you will still end up obese and still be in the high risk group for getting diabetes. The posting a headline of “Are vegetables actually healthy!?”