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Aspartame: Once More Unto the Breach
- 1970-01-01 3y ago>one of the most exhaustively studied substances in the human food supply About a year ago, this single fact changed my mind about it being 'very bad' for you. If given a choice between a sugar drink (cola) and an aspartame flavored drink ('zero' cola), I will take the aspartame.
- lawn 3y ago> If given a choice between a sugar drink (cola) and an aspartame flavored drink ('zero' cola), I will take the aspartame. I don't understand why this should even be choice. Why not drink water, and know that it's the best possible option?
- 1970-01-01 3y agoWater is flavorless.
- lawn 3y agoCarborated mineral water isn't flavorless and way better than sugary drinks.
- GiorgioG 3y agoYour drink does not need to be entertainment.
- el_benhameen 3y agoSure, neither does your food. But you’re unlikely to convince anyone by moralizing about it, and you’ll probably just cause them to tune you out entirely. I say this as someone who drinks mostly plain water.
- wpietri 3y agoI don't see any moralizing in what you're replying to. I see them challenging an assumption that is an extremely common one in American culture.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> American culture People online seem to have such a fascination with finding every possible thing wrong with American culture. Then they generalize across 330 million people, and completely ignore that the rest of the world has equally incomprehensible or destructive habits. I guess we should be honored? Nobody bothers criticizing Europeans because Europe is largely irrelevant.
- wpietri 3y agoWell that's an awful lot to take from my comment. Is this some sort of "hit dogs holler" thing? I'm American. I live in America. But I'm posting in a global forum, and I'm addressing something that's very specifically American. I wasn't even necessarily criticizing. Different places have different tastes. But the top soda brands are, Red Bull aside, all American in origin: https://www.zippia.com/advice/largest-soda-brands/ https://www.zippia.com/advice/largest-soda-brands/
- ameister14 3y agoTell that to drinkers of wine, beer, juice, and tea.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoAdd a little fruit juice.
- mattlondon 3y agoBut fruit juice has loads of sugar.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoIt's typically about ten percent sugars by weight. Adding a little fruit juice to your water results in one tenth of a little sugar.
- mattlondon 3y agoOr, you know, just drink the aspartame one and be done with it.
- goda90 3y agoWhy do you need flavor in your beverage when foods have so much of it?
- 1970-01-01 3y agoI do not 'need' the additional flavor. It is simply a life enhancement.
- rootusrootus 3y agoYou do not need anything to enhance your life. You will drink your soylent and water, and be happy about it.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoMight as well be high on cocaine every waking hour
- mrmincent 3y agoI’ve never understood this reasoning, why is this a downside? You need water to live. Air has no scent and yet no one insists on only consuming air with scented candles. Besides, if you really need a flavour, squirt a little citrus juice or something in there, your tastebuds don’t need to be bombarded 24/7.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago>squirt a little citrus juice or something in there When I'm offered a drink, it's a very simple, go/no-go life decision. I don't prepare and carry fruit juices around in my pockets.
- jasomill 3y agoSpeaking as an American ex-Diet Coke addict who now mostly drinks water, I've found the off-the-shelf sweet drinks I do occasionally consume — fruit juices and ginger ale, mostly — taste better mixed roughly 4:1 with water, because less sweet. When offered a drink, aside from the occasional (non-sweet) alcoholic beverage, I typically choose (flavorless) water.
- airstrike 3y ago"I'll take sparkling water and a lime wedge, thank you"
- mattlondon 3y agoYes and we can all sit and eat flavourless rice cakes too! No one ever needs to eat anything apart from totally bland and flavourless substances! /s People eat for pleasure, and people drink for pleasure too. People like things to taste nice sometimes, get off their case.
- mh- 3y agoBut that is basically adding liquid fructose, sugar. The dose is what makes the difference here.
- bryans 3y ago> Air has no scent and yet no one insists on only consuming air with scented candles. Well that's not true at all, given that millions of households use continuous plug-in air fresheners all day, every day. Multiple industries exist solely around scenting the air. Your analogy just doesn't hold up to reality.
- meepmorp 3y agoLike many of the other commenters, I am compelled to let you know that your preference is immoral because it doesn't align with my views. You should stop doing a harmless thing that suits your taste.
- echelon 3y agoMoreover, your thoughts are so toxic that we've shadowbanned you from the community. Your opinions are not welcome here. If you attempt to create a new account, you'll be banned again and we'll publicly shame you and report you to your employer. You don't deserve health care. Get off the internet and stop breathing. (This is why we need p2p communication protocols over platforms and federation. The loud, unreasonable moderators and censors are in the minority. Most people can agree to disagree and appreciate diversity of thought.)
- meepmorp 3y agoAre we still talking about not liking the taste of water, or are you more talking about shit like thinking all gay people are child groomers?
- Zetice 3y agoI wouldn’t say this to an Italian within fighting distance, heh…
- ghusto 3y agoRight? I was reading the article and did a double take when he described the choices being either aspartame, or sugar. I think it's an American thing though. When I've been over there, everything was so sickeningly sweet.
- ameister14 3y agoI'm surprised you did a double take, considering the article is about aspartame, a replacement for sugar. What would the other choices be when you're talking about substitutes? Why would you expect the inclusion of items that are not substitutes?
- kjkjadksj 3y agoBecause sometimes people arent replacing sugar water with aspartame water, they are replacing water water with aspartame water.
- ajkjk 3y agoIf it makes you feel better plenty of Americans feel the same way. We just don't stock the stores and choose the menus :(
- renewiltord 3y agoOnce, I was given the choice between an apple and an orange, and chose a mango. This is evidence of my exceptional intellect and skill at thinking out of the box.
- ghosty141 3y agoOften sodas (non sugary or not) complement foods better than water. For example I really dislike just drinking water when eating a pizza. If I'm thirsty I'd obviously drink water, cheaper, healthier and gets the job done the same way.
- pas 3y agofor a good pizza unfortunately usually the best thing is a good beer, but maybe try mineral water with gas?
- za3faran 3y agoPerhaps, but it's also an acquired taste, and you can train yourself to enjoy foods with water, speaking from personal experience. Yogurt drinks go well with many foods as well, especially spice ones.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoPizza and caffeine free Diet Pepsi hits a special spot for me.
- binthere 3y agoBecause some people love different drinks? Water is good too but people enjoy drinking different things. I actually don't understand how so many people in this thread are completely blind to this and are like "Why don't you just enjoy the world like I do?"
- deltarholamda 3y agoWater doesn't have caffeine. I know many people who take their caffeine in the form of diet sodas instead of tea or coffee.
- clemailacct1 3y agoThis isn’t a debate about how to hydrate. It’s a debate about drinking sugar or artificial sweeteners when you want to enjoy a drink. Why is that fact lost in this discussion?
- lost_tourist 3y agoI don't like the taste of water unless I'm super thirsty and I love the taste of coke zero/diet dr. pepper. It really is as simple as that and aspartame/ace k have been shown to be safe in the doses put into diet sodas.
- toxik 3y agoI think neither are particularly dangerous, but habitually drinking soda is itself just terrible for your teeth.
- commandar 3y agoOne thing I didn't know prior to reading the article is that one of the major suppliers of aspartame is the same company that first commercialized MSG -- another compound that has been unfairly maligned and exhaustively studied as a result. Despite decades of research and hundreds upon hundreds of studies, there's never been a definitive link shown between MSG and its claimed negative effects. In fact, I've seen studies where subjects responded to placebo at a higher rate than they did actual MSG. Yet it's still very common to run into people that are absolutely convinced they have a sensitivity to MSG despite the fact that all evidence suggests that no such sensitivity actually exists.
- hhnhandgga7282 3y agoYep, it's also naturally occurring in all sorts of Asian food (due to soy or something) if I understood what I read correctly. That's why "no msg" Asian food tastes so awful.
- JohnBooty 3y agoYet it's still very common to run into people that are absolutely convinced they have a sensitivity to MSG despite the fact that all evidence suggests that no such sensitivity actually exists. Here's a pattern I've seen in at least two people here in America. I suspect it's probably pretty widespread. 1. Subject is a person who does not eat Asian/Asian-American food very often 2. Subject eats some Asian/Asian-American food, full of many ingredients they don't typically consume 3. Food does not agree with subject in some way or another 4. Subject then decides it "must be the MSG" when of course it might be just be high sodium content that is common in takeout/delivery food, or any of the other ingredients they don't normally consume, or perhaps they just got some spoiled food or something
- Gordonjcp 3y agoI wouldn't drink either, because even the ones with sugar are contaminated with aspartame.
- _ea1k 3y agoIt seems like the heart of the problem is that idea that anything can be proven to be safe. Some people have a hard time understanding that this can be impossible.
- noughtme 3y agoI think the hysteria comes from the inverse. Almost everything can be proven to be unsafe.
- slashdev 3y agoWith “proven” in quotes, since nothing is actually proven in the scenario you’re talking about.
- _ea1k 3y agoI hadn't thought of it that way, but you make a good point. It is kind of like the joke about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. A lot of things sound unsafe with the right framing.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago"Prove Apples are safe, they contain cyanide and methanol."
- pfdietz 3y agoIndeed. Pectin is just loaded with methoxy groups, which release methanol when cooked. Yet we have people complaining about methanol from aspartame.
- pfdietz 3y agoI had a person trying to tell me that aspartame is dangerous because it decomposed into aspartic acid, which is a toxin. Apparently an amino acid can be a toxin even when your body makes it and the proteins in your body contain about a kilogram of it.
- throw_pm23 3y agoThere doesn't have to be a plausible mechanism for harm to decide that we avoid something. Things we consumed for millions of years can be considered mostly safe. New things should be seen as unsafe until proven otherwise.
- tptacek 3y agoThat logic doesn't work; foods that we've consumed for millions of years also cause cancer.
- throw_pm23 3y agoThe logic mostly works, stuff that is very harmful, with early onset of disease has been filtered out that way. Stuff where harm is (statistically) less likely or appears very late can get past the filter. It could very well be that aspartame is in this latter group or may even be entirely harmless.. being extra cautious with new stuff is still rational.
- tptacek 3y agoNo, that's just not true. There are goods that have been consumed for thousands of years that eventually cause cancer, but don't do anything in the immediacy.
- throw_pm23 3y agoYes, that overlaps largely with what I said.
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- detritus 3y agoI fundamentally couldn't much care less about the supposed effects of one synthetic sweetener over another versus highly processed sugars, if it were't for the fact that as soon as I taste whatever synthetic sweetener it is, it tastes disgusting to me. I just don't get how people are content to consume this stuff - they markedly change the taste, indelibly affecting the thing they're sweetening. Heck, even stevia adds its own distinct nastiness to whatever it flavours. So, I stick with sugar, and just consume waay less of it than I used to. Though this somewhat limits the choice of soft drinks I can enjoy consuming when it comes to a treat.
- EA-3167 3y agoI will say, it's essential for gum that doesn't rot your teeth, but other than that I never want it in my mouth for all of the reasons you describe.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoXylitol gum is the best
- solardev 3y agoIt's an acquired taste, I think. Grew up with it because of a diabetic relative, and now I prefer it to real sugar...
- Zetice 3y agoYou can get used to anything if you taste it often enough.
- lr4444lr 3y agoIt frankly just tastes weird. I can't understand why people want to eat it. Americans need to retrain their palette to not need a sweet deluge every day, and just enjoy heavy sugar items as an occasional treat. And I say this as someone who cooks with MSG daily.
- yellow_lead 3y agoIf you spend some time to lower your sugar intake, heavy sugar items will taste too sweet. The problem is all American foods contain sugar, so you have to actively seek out products without it. Yes this has all been said many times.
- airstrike 3y agoCue Big Sugar
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- galangalalgol 3y agoIs MSG shown to be bad? Drink nothing but water, breath nothing but air, and don't eat any food with an ingredient list unless you assembled it yourself.
- tptacek 3y agoNo, MSG is fine.
- phatskat 3y agoThe history of the bad rap for MSG largely comes from racism (yay!) and then “studies” used to support this and to paint immigrant-run restaurants in a bad light. Like almost any substance, a lot of MSG isn’t good for anyone. In the amounts typical for cooking, it’s fine.
- _cenw 3y agoThe "MSG bad" crowd is so localized, Nongshim makes a special version of their Shin Ramyun with no MSG for the US and another one for everywhere else. Your guess which one tastes better.
- mistercow 3y agoThe WHO recently published a recommendation essentially condemning all non-sugar sweeteners. I've read through much of the 200 page report (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429 https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429), and what I found was really troubling: time and time again, the report takes a longitudinal study whose authors note "likely confounding", omits that information, and then includes the study's conclusions stripped of that context. In one case I saw, the WHO report implied that the authors had adequately controlled for confounding factors even though the authors had specifically called them out as a weakness. Even more puzzling, the WHO announcement (https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-use-non-sugar-sweeteners-for-weight-control-in-newly-released-guideline https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...) explicitly lists essentially every commonly known artificial sweetener, even though the evidence the report cites is extremely uneven and has very little to say about many of them. The studies on long term health effects, in particular, are almost entirely based on studies which examine soft drink consumption. Aside from the obvious, difficult-to-control biases is that approach (e.g. people who drink diet drinks are disproportionately people who are trying to lose weight, are diabetic, have been told to switch by their doctor, etc.), this means that virtually all of the data is primarily about aspartame, since that's the primary sweetener in most diet drinks. The cherry on top is that the WHO announcement suggests that people try to shift to "naturally occurring sugars" despite the fact that multiple studies cited by the report specifically note that the health impact of fruit juice consumption is not distinguishable from any other sugar consumption. That said, from my non-expert point of view, the one thing that does seem to be pretty consistent is evidence on gut biome effects. It kind of seems like there's some mechanism involving sweetness itself and gut biome interference, and I'm not sure what's going on there. But the WHO report is disturbing. A meta-analysis is supposed to pull together large numbers of studies in order to smooth out biases and find broader trends, but what this report seems to have done instead is to launder biases that were reported with integrity. Taken together with the WHO recommendation, a large number of sporadic and often suspicious results have been put together into a wildly sweeping conclusion which does not look to me like it's at all scientifically justified.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- baxtr 3y agoInterestingly enough it’s the same conclusion that this guy came to (1). He also reads and summarizes a lot of papers. Bottom line of the article above and (1): aspartame is not a health concern you should have. (1) https://physiqonomics.com/aspartame/ https://physiqonomics.com/aspartame/
- impissedoff1 3y ago"Note that this study was funded by Ajinomoto via some kind of blind-trust arrangement" Tells you everything about that all important often cited paper
- meepmorp 3y agoIt tells me that they funded a study in a way that was intended to separate themselves from the research to prevent influencing the outcome. What does it tell you?
- impissedoff1 3y agoYou honestly believe that? If they touched the funding there's always influence. Having been part of medical studies, I can say there's always agendas and those involved in the studies will push the boundaries and fudge the data
- teunispeters 3y agoI'm intolerant to aspartame in particular (it causes me migraines) and most artificial sweeteners (upset stomach). But that doesn't mean no one else should have them.
- meindnoch 3y agoSo, are you intolerant to aspartic acid, phenylalanine or methanol?
- teunispeters 3y agoUnsure. Never been able to narrow it down.... never needed to so far, unlike with say - propylene glycol which has hospitalized me several times. (I react badly to most "alternative sugars", which might be related). But then I also have some problems with fructose.
- Octokiddie 3y agoAt face value, it's far from clear how this molecule was discovered. Nothing about the structure indicates that it would taste sweet. Wikipedia offers this account: > Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by James M. Schlatter, a chemist working for G.D. Searle & Company. Schlatter had synthesized aspartame as an intermediate step in generating a tetrapeptide of the hormone gastrin, for use in assessing an anti-ulcer drug candidate. He discovered its sweet taste when he licked his finger, which had become contaminated with aspartame, to lift up a piece of paper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame But the Washington Post seems to disagree: > It has been 17 years since chemist James M. Schlatter, who was tinkering with an anti-ulcer drug at the time, dipped his finger into a mixture of asparatic acid and phenylalanine and, for reasons that remain unclear, brought the result into contact with his tongue. Now, after a long legal and scientific struggle, the stuff that was on Schlatter's finger that fateful day in 1965 can be on your finger too, or dissolved in your coffee, or stirred into your yogurt, or sprinkled over your cinnamon toast. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/09/22/the-market-is-sweet-on-aspartame/104de9dd-ca6f-40ec-84a8-58166cf23585/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/0... There was a time when reporting the taste of a newly-synthesized organic molecule was not uncommon in the literature. It's possible that Schlatter was just doing something that was not unusual at the time. An account of the discovery, written by one of the authors of the original research paper reporting the discovery (Mazur), and reportedly based on an affidavit gives this account: > In December 1965 I was working with Dr. Mazur on the synthesis of the C-terminal tetrapeptide of gastrin. We were making intermediates and trying to purify them. In particular, on an occasion in December, 1965, I was recrystallizing aspartylphenylalanine methyl ester (aspartame) ... when the mixture bumped [spilled over while boiling] onto the outside of the flask. As a result, some of the powder got onto my fingers. At a slightly later stage, when licking my finger to pick up a piece of paper, I noticed a very strong, sweet taste. Initially, I thought that I mush have still had some sugar o. my hands from earlier in the day. However, I quickly realized this could not be so, since I had washed my hands in the meantime. I, therefore, traced the power on my hands back to the container into which I had placed the crystallized apsartyl-phenylalanine methyl ester. I felt that this ... was not likely to be toxic and I therefore tasted a little of it and found that it was the substance which I had previously tasted on my finger. - Aspartame: Physiology and Biochemistry, edited by Stegink and Filer
- nailer 3y agoMy general feeling regarding phenylalanine is there anything that turns my bowels into Jackson Pollock cannot be good for me.
- rootusrootus 3y agoThe fact that I would die without it makes me feel differently.
- pfdietz 3y agoIt's an essential amino acid. You will literally die if it's not in your diet. So, yes, it's good for you, unless you are set on dying.
- nailer 3y agoI know that aspartame is an essential amino acid. I read the article. I am discussing a popular side-effect of it as a sweetener in its most well known form, Diet Coke.
- nateburke 3y agoThis article does not address the cognitive aspect of aspartame. What is the impact of 'faking out' the sugar processing components of our metabolism? Specifically is there anything bad associated with our brains thinking that we're getting sugar and some, perhaps incomplete, chain of reactions taking place to prepare the body for sugar processing, and then the sugar never showing up? I haven't read any of the literature on it but I imagine that some of those metabolic components stay "flipped on" for longer than they would if they had real sugar exposure, because they never get what they are prepared to receive by our brains upon consumption. Disclosure: my grandfather died of pancreatic cancer and was a heavy consumer of artificial sweeteners (daily, in tea).
- seizethecheese 3y agoMy grandfather died of lung cancer and didn’t smoke.
- lost_tourist 3y agoIt happens but it's like 1000 times less likely than in smokers. Any tissue can get cancerous, it's just that smoke multiplies that chance by like 1000x, maybe more.
- jokowueu 3y agoMy sister died in a car accident and she doesn't even drive .
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoMy aunt died of plague and she didn't even plagiarise
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- siliconc0w 3y agoIMO more damaging fact is that it doesn't work. The evidence is pretty clear it doesn't actually help you lose weight and in some cases there is actually an increase in weight, obesity, and type-2 diabetes. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28716847/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28716847/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27129676/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27129676/) For me this can be pretty easily observed eating a meal with water vs with diet soda. Especially if it's like a 'bad' meal with fast/fried food. There is definitely something that causes you to crave/eat more.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoIt seems likely to me that people get used to certain flavour profiles and the heavy use of sweeteners is going to prime people into desiring sweet foods and drinks. I don't know if the body then responds with hunger if it's promised sweet, highly calorific food/drink and then receives fake calories.
- Drybones 3y agoNo, that is called reverse causality. The type of people likely to drink artificial sweeteners most are those that are overweight, obese, or have diabetes. There is no insulin response from artificial sweeteners. And as an amateur bodybuilder, I utilize a lot of artificial sweeteners daily to curb my cravings while eating rice, chicken, and turkey to help me cut. Sweeteners won’t make someone overeating stop overeating. But they can be used to lower overall caloric energy intake and reduce cravings as a tool.
- landemva 3y ago>> I utilize a lot of artificial sweeteners daily to curb my cravings What mechanism makes the cravings subside for you? Is it chemical or also like lifting a cigarette to your lips for nicotine?
- kbenson 3y agoYou provide two reviews, the article provides many more, along with 8 that they decided did not meet their standards, but they linked them anyway. In comparing reviews of reviews of medical papers, I find myself more swayed by the article. Perhaps you'll have a different take on that part and can provide compelling evidence of why your studies should carry more weight or why the authors conclusion is flawed. I would definitely be interested in a more critical reading of that, since I'm somewhat neutral but may have some biases towards wanting aspartame to be both safe and effective.
- jacksnipe 3y agoI have some beef with the methodology for excluding analyses from the lit review. If authors being from “obscure institutions” is a problem, then so too should authors employed by companies that manufacture aspartame or funded by companies that manufacture aspartame. 2 of the 3 reviews that the author considers very high quality have this problem.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoNot sure what their criterion is for "obscure institutions", but as a professor from a small, peripheral university that almost no one knows outside my own country, but who has managed to achieve an international reputation in my field (not nutrition-related); that does rub me the wrong way, to be honest. There's already plenty of unconscious bias around (I've had experiences of people using my contributions and citing some followup paper from Google or Stanford rather than the paper where the contribution was actually made) without actively legitimizing it.
- odc 3y agoI love this article! It is not the first time I hear the bad reputation of aspartame is unfounded. AFAIK, there was only one study which said aspartame was dangerous: they fed a rat with a HUGE amount of it (like way more than a human could consume, in proportion) and the rat got ill or died I don't remember. That "study" was obviously flawed yet the media kept talking about it everywhere. At that point, it wouldn't surprise me if the sugar industry is behind this.
- celtoid 3y agoThough Donald Rumsfeld is mentioned once in the article, his part in the approval of aspartame should be more generally known. Aspartame is equally as toxic as Rumsfeld was. "Dr. John Olney, who founded the field of neuroscience called excitotoxicity, attempted to stop the approval of aspartame with Attorney James Turner back in 1996. The FDA's own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and that it violated the Delaney Amendment, which forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause cancer." [0] [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-rumsfeld-and-the-s_b_805581 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-rumsfeld-and-the-s_b_8...
- meepmorp 3y ago> The FDA's own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and that it violated the Delaney Amendment, which forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause cancer. Except, of course, that's contradicted by the subsequent epidemiological evidence and countless studies. And that's ignoring the complete lack of a plausible causal mechanism. You can dislike Donald Rumsfeld, but that doesn't mean shit about aspartame.
- wnevets 3y agoAspartame and pickled vegetables share the same carcinogen designation. If you are concerned about one then logically you must share the same concern about the other. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230630-aspartame-what-else-is-possibly-cancerous https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230630-aspartame-what-e...
- _cenw 3y agoBut one sounds scary.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoPeople aren't replacing their daily water intake with pickle brine or sauerkraut though. I’d imagine there are orders of magnitude differences in terms of dosage between your average pickle fan and diet coke drinker.
- wnevets 3y agoFrom the article I linked. > According to the US Food and Drug Administration, the acceptable recommended intake for aspartame is up to 50mg per kg of body weight each day, equivalent to the amount in around 19 standard-sized cans of Diet Coke (other brands are available) for the average American woman.
- matricaria 3y ago> If you look on Wikipedia, you’ll see that aspartame is a methyl ester of the aspartic acid phenylalanine dipeptide, which isn’t, like, comforting. The aversion most people have to anything sounding chemical is crazy. Chemically speaking, this is a relatively simple molecule. „Dipeptide“ means it consists of two amino acids, which are ubiquitous and make up every protein. „Methyl ester“ is the product of a reaction between an acid, in this case the amino acid phenylalanine, and an alcohol, in this case methanol. Also very common throughout chemistry and biology.
- icoder 3y agoTbf the author doesn't hold this against aspartame but rather uses this sentence to set the mood before making a case for aspartame (being safe).
- matricaria 3y agoSetting the mood with a substance’s name the author doesn’t not understand does not seem fair.
- ajkjk 3y agoI find it a bit odd that this review only discusses the things it's metabolized into and not either of the things that seem more relevant (at this point: the effect of tasting it psychologically, and then whatever it is in your gut that does the metabolizing. Like, great, I believe that if you inject those chemicals into me in the right spot I'll be fine. But didn't you skip a few steps? Not that I care much either way. It sounds like it's safe, toxicologically and epidemiologically speaking. But there's still a difference between eating things that taste sweet and not doing it at all-- beyond the molecules that end up in your blood.
- baerrie 3y agoThe effect aspartame has on the gut biome before it breaks down into the safer constituents is still a large gap. As we learn more and more about the importance of our gut biome as a living system parallel to the much more rigorously studied blood and lymphatic systems, I think deeper understanding of wholistic effects could emerge.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoThis article is well-written to appeal to people who want to be "scientific." I found it convincing. My wife did not. She found this far more credible source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8227014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8227014/ To summarize: - Aspartame is linked to premature menarche in girls aged 9 and 10 - Aspartame, especially when used with another common sweetener is linked to genotocixity. - Aspartame causes increases in behavioral disorders - Aspartame causes neurodegeneration with long-term use - Aspartame can induce contact dermatitis > Safety studies have found the metabolic products of aspartame (aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol) to be more harmful to the body than the original substance itself... > ...In humans, there have been reports of premature birth as well as allergic reactions and weight gain in the newborns. Studies involving girls aged 9–10 have shown that aspartame increases the risk of an early first menstruation (<11 years). So for me... I have to think that there remains a high likelihood that aspartame is harmful, and this article draws wrong conclusions.