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We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale. We keep encountering situations

We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale. We keep encountering situations like this where a new chemical compound was introduced, becomes ubiquitous in our diets or environments and only later do we find out "Oops, it has serious health or environmental consequences." It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. We're still paying the cost of introducing lead into our environment in a myriad of subtle ways. We still don't fully understand what the cost of the introduction of microplastics or PFAS is going to be. And regardless of the whether this particular study holds up under replication it is looking increasingly likely that aspartame is not something we should be consuming. And what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause to generations.

sysadm1n 3y ago
> what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause The people were naive. It's not like they had malicious intent. 'Don't hate lazy people - they did nothing'
- kibwen 3y ago
  One of the memes that we as a species need to eliminate is the idea that apathy, laziness, or inaction cannot be malicious.
- dbingham 3y ago
  Naivety and lack of knowledge have never been a valid defense for harm. Manslaughter is a criminal charge. As is criminal negligence. And quite apart from facing criminal charges, the folks who introduced lead in the gasoline, produced microplastics and PFAS, and more all have the kind of wealth that gives them raw economic and political power and with it, the ability to do continued harm.
  - jprete 3y ago
    Lead has been connected to madness since antiquity.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Isn't that why we created regulations and other safety measures ? To avoid exposing people to danger because "well we didn't know".
  - hinkley 3y ago
    The Thames wasn’t cleaned up until a bunch of rich people fell off a pleasure cruise and most of them died before they could swim to shore. Not from drowning, but exposure to the water. See also the Cuyahoga catching on fire. Water burning is quite a poster child.
    - limbicsystem 3y ago
      Do you have more details on this? I have never heard of it.
      - Avicebron 3y ago
        I believe they are referring to the 1878 passenger steamer the "princess Alice", where > "In 1878 the passenger steamer Princess Alice sank right at the spot where the sewers released their waste into the Thames. Many survivors of the initial collision died after ingesting the polluted water." https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/pollution-river-thames-history https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/pollution-river-thames-... It is worth noting that this probably had more to do with the awful state of the city sewage system, so the water was well known to be contaminated. Luckily we've improved somewhat with sewage (I think). Although anecdotally I've had a local lake closed for weeks at least due to toxic red algae blooms related to run off from farms (I believe it's fertilizer runoff that's attributed to these blooms)
- hinkley 3y ago
  Are you talking about the sort of people who ordered their employees to dig holes and hide toxic waste in them? That’s not naivety, that’s callousness at best.
Eumenes 3y ago
> And what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause to generations. It cost exactly $0 to not drink poison
- dbingham 3y ago
  That line is much more a reference to lead in the gasoline, pfas and microplastics in the drinking water. It in fact costs quite a bit of money to avoid these compounds and in many cases the damage was already done before people were aware of the risk. Meanwhile, the investors and executives of the companies that produced these compounds are quite wealthy.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    It’s a very substantial aspect of “being poor is expensive”. Polluted places, and the sorts of places where pollution tends to collect, are undesirable and thus cheap. The rich historically buy the high land and thus are not affected as directly by flooding, which these days also comes with a dose of pollution. Ironically all of the rich people migrating to waterfront property may be what finally gets us past where we are today with waterway pollution and global warming.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    The Soviet Union also poisoned their citizens.
    - Avicebron 3y ago
      Sure, and they also suffered pretty hard in the long run ( the soviet union and citizens both)
- gre 3y ago
  Unless you live in a city with bad water like Flint, MI or any of the other cities where officials have purposefully poisoned the water supply or just never modernized it.
libraryatnight 3y ago
It's horrible you have to tell people not to poison others. I agree with all you've said it just strikes me as a shameful state of affairs when the most successful in your society are rewarded for harming and exploiting that society. Wealth accumulation is an addiction disease we will treat someday.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > It's horrible you have to tell people not to poison others. Please. This is quite an exagarated claim. You make it sounds like mustache twirling villians going around and intentionally poisoning people.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    It was a "mustache twirling villain" type though. Donald Rumsfeld was responsible for aspartame.
stavros 3y ago
Can we wait for verification before we get to "omg we're drinking poison!!!1"? As far as I know, aspartame dissolves to aspartic acid plus phenylalanine, both normal amino acids already found in the body. If a tiny increase in the amount of amino acids found in the body already can cause autism, that's really really surprising, to the point where it's much more likely that this result was just due to randomness. If you take autistic children and test a hundred things that their parents were doing, one will probably come out statistically significantly higher, just by chance.
- xxs 3y ago
  The study is also self reported over something that happened years back. It's hard to take it seriously, also it'd mean diabetic mothers would be a lot likely to have male offspring with autism with aspartame being a common substitute for sugar
  - tfehring 3y ago
    Diabetic mothers are significantly more likely than non-diabetic mothers to give birth to children with autism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181720/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181720/
- toddmorey 3y ago
  I agree. This is way too small of a sample size and it's quite a big leap to see causation from the mild correlation they found. They asked about 350 mothers to think back and recall if they drank diet soda daily during pregnancy. Of their children, 235 have since been diagnosed with autism and 121 were in a control group. From their data, the kids with autism were about 3x more likely to have moms who remembered consuming daily sodas during pregnancy. The best you can say is they have a hypothesis (inkling?), and much more research is needed.
- mistercheph 3y ago
  Either way, we won't know for a long time. I say we just lean our shoulders into this whole thing and watch the chronic illness rates climb with shrugged hands and turned heads because of just how dern complix all this stuff is that all of the beautiful minds in the world are hard at work on.
sokoloff 3y ago
Lead was introduced into the environment at least as early as the Roman Empire. It’s why we call plumbers plumbers. How much slower would we have reasonably gone to avoid lead?
- MoOmer 3y ago
  They understood and accepted the risks in that case - as an acceptable trade-off, which is different from the introduction of chemicals or compounds that aren’t well understood.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    Are you telling me the Romans knew about the ~15 point IQ decrease lead exposure causes in children?
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Not IQ specifically but there were Romans who recognized that lead, and specifically lead pipes, were harmful: Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80 BCE – c. 15 BCE) wrote: > 10. Clay pipes for conducting water have the following advantages. In the first place, in construction:--if anything happens to them, anybody can repair the damage. Secondly, water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome. > 11. This we can exemplify from plumbers, since in them the natural colour of the body is replaced by a deep pallor. For when lead is smelted in casting, the fumes from it settle upon their members, and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs. Hence, water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes, if we want to have it wholesome. That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life, for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels, yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Book_VIII https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Boo...
    - 3y ago
deeviant 3y ago
The thing is, aspartame is one of the most well studied chemicals in the human food system. It's also a favorite target of the sugar lobby. Really, what needs to happen most of all, is to let special interest out of nutritional research completely. Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely.
zouhair 3y ago
What we need is to stop throwing fearmongering articles left and right.
- mistercheph 3y ago
  Yes, stop fearmongering everyone, just kick back, relax, and crack open a can of that sweet Diet Coke and put on one of your favorite must-binge shows on Netflix.
  - xxs 3y ago
    While I don't drink 'soda' (diet or otherwise), the article findings of so prevalent odds strikes me exactly as fearmongering.
  - valvar 3y ago
    Yes?
ako 3y ago
So true, but then also for anything we might breath in: exhaust from cars & factories for example.
null0ranje 3y ago
This concept exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
baron816 3y ago
> It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. How can you ever prove something doesn't have any negative impacts? You're trying to prove a negative. Would you be willing to further delay a new medication that can help people today, but may have some averse effects for a subset of people far in the future? This is what we went through with the mRNA vaccines. We have to look at the tradeoffs. If banning aspartame means we may potentially prevent some cases of autism, but at the definite cost of large increases in obesity, would that be worth it?
- wpm 3y ago
  Does the choice of banning aspartame have to be "do you want more obesity, or more autism?" Aspartame and added sugar would both be scrutinized in this hypothetical future where we are bit more cautious. The answer is to probably ban aspartame if there is good reason to believe it is harming us, and/or tax sugary drinks until their negative externalities on society are paid for.
vegetablepotpie 3y ago
The legislation that let corporations put chemicals into the environment and say “Oops, sorry” is the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which allowed the EPA to order testing of chemicals and order to reduce their use or pull them from the market. This was overhauled with the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act of 2015, which requires the EPA to make safety determinations of new products hitting the market. It however ties the hands of states. If the EPA rules a chemical as having no unreasonable risk, states have no authority to regulate it [1]. [1] https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-toxic-chemical-safety-law-protect-us-60769 https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-toxic-chemical-safe...
PaulHoule 3y ago
(1) The process of introducing new artificial sweeteners has always been slow. There was huge controversy over aspertame (discovered 1965, limited approval in 1983) in the first decade even though the only solid case against it was that it is bad for a handful of people who have the genetic defect PKU. Sucralose was discovered in 1976 and wasn't approved in the US until 1998. The strangest case is Stevia which, since it is a natural product, has gotten into heavy use without really being approved as a food additive. (Loose Stevia rebaudiana leaves make a nice sweet tea combined with Camellia sinensis I'll grant that.) (2) If you were trying to psychologically manipulate people, "autism" is the threat you would use.
- purpleblue 3y ago
  Stevia has been used in Japan for decades, since the 1970s.
- chrisfosterelli 3y ago
  Precisely. Aspartame is one of the, if not the top, most studied food additives we use. I don't think anything else has ever received such a rigorous treatment.
- samatman 3y ago
  It isn't that strange, stevia leaf has been used for centuries by the indigenous people of its home region. That doesn't make it safe, but it's standard that traditional foods are regarded as safe to eat unless evidence emerges that they aren't.
htag 3y ago
> We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale. What specific studies should we have done to notice this association? What specific safety studies need to be done before introducing a new chemical compound into our society? Historically speaking, the only conceivable way they would have learned this if they feed aspartame to pregnant women and then studied the offsprings. This is fine for a final testing phase of safety, but is inhumane to do unless you are incredibly sure it is safe. Animal models for studying autism are flawed, and wouldn't come at all for decades after aspartame's introduction. In modern testing, we could theoretically generate a super long list of safety checks to do. This test might look like raising a large generation or two of the specific line of mice used for studying autism. Then checking the offspring autism rate of those exposed to aspartame compared to a control. This would be a single checkbox every new chemical compound would need to do, and there could easily be tens of thousands of similar tests that would need to be done. We would need to add to the list overtime, as our understanding of optimal human health improves over time. Imagine the investment required to pass these safety tests. It's a minimum price tag of 25M, if the safety tests are standardized and lab techs are trained on them and do them in an assembly line like fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost be 10-100x. At that level of investment there's two issues. The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate. The other problem is this is just the safety test portion of R&D, after spending so much money this seems like a likely target for corruption and my skepticism for the results of such a test will be high.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  > but is inhumane Is it more humane to launch it without testing, producing the same effect for a much, much larger group of people than would have been involved in the intentional study? This seems to be a fairly gaping hole in the definition of humane. It reminds me of people who see an accident and don’t help because they might be held liable for the accident and they don’t want to get involved.
  - htag 3y ago
    It's absolutely inhumane to expose pregnant women to chemicals unless you are highly certain that they are safe. Clearly it would be better if we tested aspartame exposure on a smaller population and detected this effect. I'm saying that if our confidence of it's safety is high enough to expose pregnant humans to the chemical in scientific studies our confidence of it's safety should be high enough to exposure it to the wider population.
ris 3y ago
> It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. Perspective time. Global life expectancy is higher than it has ever been at any point in history and many of these materials you want to be "cautious" about (is any level of "cautious" ever cautious enough?) are involved partially or heavily in providing those health advances. If there's anything we should be "cautious" about it's glib interpretations of subtly complex statistical studies. I'm also not sure how much the smash-the-system/anti-capitalist hand-waving helps.
rpdillon 3y ago
> Oops, it has serious health or environmental consequences I really dislike the trend of studies claiming a 'link'. It's misleading, as almost all readers interpret it as causality. The article points out the study doesn't imply causation, yet this comment highlights the 'consequences' of aspartame. It just seems like a big disconnect.
paulddraper 3y ago
How? You're going to study autism in lab rats? (Only recently has anyone come up with markers, and even then the predictive quality is suspect.) Artificial sweeteners have been labs tested many times, but not for autism.
graypegg 3y ago
I guess that’s good in theory, but there isn’t a secret “causes harm” test we can do to say for certain something is harmful. If we want to “change the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment at a mass scale”, what do we… do? We can require more research before something is offered up to the market, there’s dimensioning returns on research. The only way you’ll know FOR SURE that something is harmless is universal consumption, after many decades. Now, I am taking you saying “ensure that [new materials] are safe” to mean, we stop fucking up entirely. That’s probably not what you really mean. More publicly funded research to LIMIT harm further than we currently do, is a noble goal! Most nations have some entity that researches new drugs/additives/products before going to market. Greater funding (harder to bribe) and power (full power to stop untested substances being used) for those is a good step. But humanity will keep poisoning itself, no silver bullet there.
stickfigure 3y ago
You're still a thousand times more likely to die in a car accident. This is premature optimization.
uoaei 3y ago
Same can be said for a whole lot of tech, too.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Europe has, I will not say a perfect, but a saner approach to these sorts of things, in general. They take a more precautionary view. The notion that we must allow arbitrary things into our foods is nothing short of worshiping at the altar of "Progress"™, and Profit. The common good is sacrificed for the sake of the inferior end of making a buck. Artificial sweeteners, specifically, are a bandage over the festering wound of a culture of mindless consumption. Companies want you to consume more so you buy more, but as soon as people began to worry about the rather expected obesity resulting from gorging and constant snacking on food and drink, and mediocre food and drink at that, the only alternative in the unhinged profit-above-all-else logic of consumerism is to maintain or increase consumption exceeding actual need, but reduce the apparent consequences of mindless consumption. The common good requires a conservative legal oversight in this space where weird food additives are concerned, but it also includes abstract truths like "gluttony is evil" or "making financial profit the highest end is disordered". Our cultural and civilizational demise is rooted in things like the latter, and the intellectual and spiritual rot and resulting debasement of common sensibilities regarding such intangibles. Which is to say, regulation by itself, without appropriate cultural shifts, will, at best, function as another bandage that corporations will lobby to dilute and weaken and redefine at every opportunity.
- guraf 3y ago
  You wrote a very long and passionate love letter to the European process and how it's almost perfect. And yet all those chemicals are allowed in Europe. So what happened? Were they grandfathered in?
  - aveao 3y ago
    Aspartame is safe, that's what happened.
skosuri 3y ago
Aspartame breaks down in the digestive track and doesn't enter circulation. It breaks down into three well known compounds that are found in much greater amounts in our natural diets, phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol. The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21 https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/2281652 https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/...

sysadm1n 3y ago

> what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause The people were naive. It's not like they had malicious intent. 'Don't hate lazy people - they did nothing'

kibwen 3y ago
One of the memes that we as a species need to eliminate is the idea that apathy, laziness, or inaction cannot be malicious.
dbingham 3y ago
Naivety and lack of knowledge have never been a valid defense for harm. Manslaughter is a criminal charge. As is criminal negligence. And quite apart from facing criminal charges, the folks who introduced lead in the gasoline, produced microplastics and PFAS, and more all have the kind of wealth that gives them raw economic and political power and with it, the ability to do continued harm.
- jprete 3y ago
  Lead has been connected to madness since antiquity.
lm28469 3y ago
Isn't that why we created regulations and other safety measures ? To avoid exposing people to danger because "well we didn't know".
- hinkley 3y ago
  The Thames wasn’t cleaned up until a bunch of rich people fell off a pleasure cruise and most of them died before they could swim to shore. Not from drowning, but exposure to the water. See also the Cuyahoga catching on fire. Water burning is quite a poster child.
  - limbicsystem 3y ago
    Do you have more details on this? I have never heard of it.
    - Avicebron 3y ago
      I believe they are referring to the 1878 passenger steamer the "princess Alice", where > "In 1878 the passenger steamer Princess Alice sank right at the spot where the sewers released their waste into the Thames. Many survivors of the initial collision died after ingesting the polluted water." https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/pollution-river-thames-history https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/pollution-river-thames-... It is worth noting that this probably had more to do with the awful state of the city sewage system, so the water was well known to be contaminated. Luckily we've improved somewhat with sewage (I think). Although anecdotally I've had a local lake closed for weeks at least due to toxic red algae blooms related to run off from farms (I believe it's fertilizer runoff that's attributed to these blooms)
hinkley 3y ago
Are you talking about the sort of people who ordered their employees to dig holes and hide toxic waste in them? That’s not naivety, that’s callousness at best.

Eumenes 3y ago

> And what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause to generations. It cost exactly $0 to not drink poison

dbingham 3y ago
That line is much more a reference to lead in the gasoline, pfas and microplastics in the drinking water. It in fact costs quite a bit of money to avoid these compounds and in many cases the damage was already done before people were aware of the risk. Meanwhile, the investors and executives of the companies that produced these compounds are quite wealthy.
- hinkley 3y ago
  It’s a very substantial aspect of “being poor is expensive”. Polluted places, and the sorts of places where pollution tends to collect, are undesirable and thus cheap. The rich historically buy the high land and thus are not affected as directly by flooding, which these days also comes with a dose of pollution. Ironically all of the rich people migrating to waterfront property may be what finally gets us past where we are today with waterway pollution and global warming.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The Soviet Union also poisoned their citizens.
  - Avicebron 3y ago
    Sure, and they also suffered pretty hard in the long run ( the soviet union and citizens both)
gre 3y ago
Unless you live in a city with bad water like Flint, MI or any of the other cities where officials have purposefully poisoned the water supply or just never modernized it.

libraryatnight 3y ago

It's horrible you have to tell people not to poison others. I agree with all you've said it just strikes me as a shameful state of affairs when the most successful in your society are rewarded for harming and exploiting that society. Wealth accumulation is an addiction disease we will treat someday.

krisoft 3y ago
> It's horrible you have to tell people not to poison others. Please. This is quite an exagarated claim. You make it sounds like mustache twirling villians going around and intentionally poisoning people.
- colordrops 3y ago
  It was a "mustache twirling villain" type though. Donald Rumsfeld was responsible for aspartame.

stavros 3y ago

Can we wait for verification before we get to "omg we're drinking poison!!!1"? As far as I know, aspartame dissolves to aspartic acid plus phenylalanine, both normal amino acids already found in the body. If a tiny increase in the amount of amino acids found in the body already can cause autism, that's really really surprising, to the point where it's much more likely that this result was just due to randomness. If you take autistic children and test a hundred things that their parents were doing, one will probably come out statistically significantly higher, just by chance.

xxs 3y ago
The study is also self reported over something that happened years back. It's hard to take it seriously, also it'd mean diabetic mothers would be a lot likely to have male offspring with autism with aspartame being a common substitute for sugar
- tfehring 3y ago
  Diabetic mothers are significantly more likely than non-diabetic mothers to give birth to children with autism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181720/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4181720/
toddmorey 3y ago
I agree. This is way too small of a sample size and it's quite a big leap to see causation from the mild correlation they found. They asked about 350 mothers to think back and recall if they drank diet soda daily during pregnancy. Of their children, 235 have since been diagnosed with autism and 121 were in a control group. From their data, the kids with autism were about 3x more likely to have moms who remembered consuming daily sodas during pregnancy. The best you can say is they have a hypothesis (inkling?), and much more research is needed.
mistercheph 3y ago
Either way, we won't know for a long time. I say we just lean our shoulders into this whole thing and watch the chronic illness rates climb with shrugged hands and turned heads because of just how dern complix all this stuff is that all of the beautiful minds in the world are hard at work on.

sokoloff 3y ago

Lead was introduced into the environment at least as early as the Roman Empire. It’s why we call plumbers plumbers. How much slower would we have reasonably gone to avoid lead?

MoOmer 3y ago
They understood and accepted the risks in that case - as an acceptable trade-off, which is different from the introduction of chemicals or compounds that aren’t well understood.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  Are you telling me the Romans knew about the ~15 point IQ decrease lead exposure causes in children?
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Not IQ specifically but there were Romans who recognized that lead, and specifically lead pipes, were harmful: Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80 BCE – c. 15 BCE) wrote: > 10. Clay pipes for conducting water have the following advantages. In the first place, in construction:--if anything happens to them, anybody can repair the damage. Secondly, water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome. > 11. This we can exemplify from plumbers, since in them the natural colour of the body is replaced by a deep pallor. For when lead is smelted in casting, the fumes from it settle upon their members, and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs. Hence, water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes, if we want to have it wholesome. That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life, for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels, yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Book_VIII https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Boo...
  - 3y ago

deeviant 3y ago

The thing is, aspartame is one of the most well studied chemicals in the human food system. It's also a favorite target of the sugar lobby. Really, what needs to happen most of all, is to let special interest out of nutritional research completely. Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely.

zouhair 3y ago

What we need is to stop throwing fearmongering articles left and right.

mistercheph 3y ago
Yes, stop fearmongering everyone, just kick back, relax, and crack open a can of that sweet Diet Coke and put on one of your favorite must-binge shows on Netflix.
- xxs 3y ago
  While I don't drink 'soda' (diet or otherwise), the article findings of so prevalent odds strikes me exactly as fearmongering.
- valvar 3y ago
  Yes?

ako 3y ago

So true, but then also for anything we might breath in: exhaust from cars & factories for example.

null0ranje 3y ago

This concept exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

baron816 3y ago

> It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. How can you ever prove something doesn't have any negative impacts? You're trying to prove a negative. Would you be willing to further delay a new medication that can help people today, but may have some averse effects for a subset of people far in the future? This is what we went through with the mRNA vaccines. We have to look at the tradeoffs. If banning aspartame means we may potentially prevent some cases of autism, but at the definite cost of large increases in obesity, would that be worth it?

wpm 3y ago
Does the choice of banning aspartame have to be "do you want more obesity, or more autism?" Aspartame and added sugar would both be scrutinized in this hypothetical future where we are bit more cautious. The answer is to probably ban aspartame if there is good reason to believe it is harming us, and/or tax sugary drinks until their negative externalities on society are paid for.

vegetablepotpie 3y ago

The legislation that let corporations put chemicals into the environment and say “Oops, sorry” is the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which allowed the EPA to order testing of chemicals and order to reduce their use or pull them from the market. This was overhauled with the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act of 2015, which requires the EPA to make safety determinations of new products hitting the market. It however ties the hands of states. If the EPA rules a chemical as having no unreasonable risk, states have no authority to regulate it [1]. [1] https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-toxic-chemical-safety-law-protect-us-60769 https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-toxic-chemical-safe...

PaulHoule 3y ago

(1) The process of introducing new artificial sweeteners has always been slow. There was huge controversy over aspertame (discovered 1965, limited approval in 1983) in the first decade even though the only solid case against it was that it is bad for a handful of people who have the genetic defect PKU. Sucralose was discovered in 1976 and wasn't approved in the US until 1998. The strangest case is Stevia which, since it is a natural product, has gotten into heavy use without really being approved as a food additive. (Loose Stevia rebaudiana leaves make a nice sweet tea combined with Camellia sinensis I'll grant that.) (2) If you were trying to psychologically manipulate people, "autism" is the threat you would use.

purpleblue 3y ago
Stevia has been used in Japan for decades, since the 1970s.
chrisfosterelli 3y ago
Precisely. Aspartame is one of the, if not the top, most studied food additives we use. I don't think anything else has ever received such a rigorous treatment.
samatman 3y ago
It isn't that strange, stevia leaf has been used for centuries by the indigenous people of its home region. That doesn't make it safe, but it's standard that traditional foods are regarded as safe to eat unless evidence emerges that they aren't.

htag 3y ago

> We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale. What specific studies should we have done to notice this association? What specific safety studies need to be done before introducing a new chemical compound into our society? Historically speaking, the only conceivable way they would have learned this if they feed aspartame to pregnant women and then studied the offsprings. This is fine for a final testing phase of safety, but is inhumane to do unless you are incredibly sure it is safe. Animal models for studying autism are flawed, and wouldn't come at all for decades after aspartame's introduction. In modern testing, we could theoretically generate a super long list of safety checks to do. This test might look like raising a large generation or two of the specific line of mice used for studying autism. Then checking the offspring autism rate of those exposed to aspartame compared to a control. This would be a single checkbox every new chemical compound would need to do, and there could easily be tens of thousands of similar tests that would need to be done. We would need to add to the list overtime, as our understanding of optimal human health improves over time. Imagine the investment required to pass these safety tests. It's a minimum price tag of 25M, if the safety tests are standardized and lab techs are trained on them and do them in an assembly line like fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost be 10-100x. At that level of investment there's two issues. The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate. The other problem is this is just the safety test portion of R&D, after spending so much money this seems like a likely target for corruption and my skepticism for the results of such a test will be high.

pfannkuchen 3y ago
> but is inhumane Is it more humane to launch it without testing, producing the same effect for a much, much larger group of people than would have been involved in the intentional study? This seems to be a fairly gaping hole in the definition of humane. It reminds me of people who see an accident and don’t help because they might be held liable for the accident and they don’t want to get involved.
- htag 3y ago
  It's absolutely inhumane to expose pregnant women to chemicals unless you are highly certain that they are safe. Clearly it would be better if we tested aspartame exposure on a smaller population and detected this effect. I'm saying that if our confidence of it's safety is high enough to expose pregnant humans to the chemical in scientific studies our confidence of it's safety should be high enough to exposure it to the wider population.

ris 3y ago

> It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. Perspective time. Global life expectancy is higher than it has ever been at any point in history and many of these materials you want to be "cautious" about (is any level of "cautious" ever cautious enough?) are involved partially or heavily in providing those health advances. If there's anything we should be "cautious" about it's glib interpretations of subtly complex statistical studies. I'm also not sure how much the smash-the-system/anti-capitalist hand-waving helps.

rpdillon 3y ago

> Oops, it has serious health or environmental consequences I really dislike the trend of studies claiming a 'link'. It's misleading, as almost all readers interpret it as causality. The article points out the study doesn't imply causation, yet this comment highlights the 'consequences' of aspartame. It just seems like a big disconnect.

paulddraper 3y ago

How? You're going to study autism in lab rats? (Only recently has anyone come up with markers, and even then the predictive quality is suspect.) Artificial sweeteners have been labs tested many times, but not for autism.

graypegg 3y ago

I guess that’s good in theory, but there isn’t a secret “causes harm” test we can do to say for certain something is harmful. If we want to “change the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment at a mass scale”, what do we… do? We can require more research before something is offered up to the market, there’s dimensioning returns on research. The only way you’ll know FOR SURE that something is harmless is universal consumption, after many decades. Now, I am taking you saying “ensure that [new materials] are safe” to mean, we stop fucking up entirely. That’s probably not what you really mean. More publicly funded research to LIMIT harm further than we currently do, is a noble goal! Most nations have some entity that researches new drugs/additives/products before going to market. Greater funding (harder to bribe) and power (full power to stop untested substances being used) for those is a good step. But humanity will keep poisoning itself, no silver bullet there.

stickfigure 3y ago

You're still a thousand times more likely to die in a car accident. This is premature optimization.

uoaei 3y ago

Same can be said for a whole lot of tech, too.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Europe has, I will not say a perfect, but a saner approach to these sorts of things, in general. They take a more precautionary view. The notion that we must allow arbitrary things into our foods is nothing short of worshiping at the altar of "Progress"™, and Profit. The common good is sacrificed for the sake of the inferior end of making a buck. Artificial sweeteners, specifically, are a bandage over the festering wound of a culture of mindless consumption. Companies want you to consume more so you buy more, but as soon as people began to worry about the rather expected obesity resulting from gorging and constant snacking on food and drink, and mediocre food and drink at that, the only alternative in the unhinged profit-above-all-else logic of consumerism is to maintain or increase consumption exceeding actual need, but reduce the apparent consequences of mindless consumption. The common good requires a conservative legal oversight in this space where weird food additives are concerned, but it also includes abstract truths like "gluttony is evil" or "making financial profit the highest end is disordered". Our cultural and civilizational demise is rooted in things like the latter, and the intellectual and spiritual rot and resulting debasement of common sensibilities regarding such intangibles. Which is to say, regulation by itself, without appropriate cultural shifts, will, at best, function as another bandage that corporations will lobby to dilute and weaken and redefine at every opportunity.

guraf 3y ago
You wrote a very long and passionate love letter to the European process and how it's almost perfect. And yet all those chemicals are allowed in Europe. So what happened? Were they grandfathered in?
- aveao 3y ago
  Aspartame is safe, that's what happened.

skosuri 3y ago

Aspartame breaks down in the digestive track and doesn't enter circulation. It breaks down into three well known compounds that are found in much greater amounts in our natural diets, phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol. The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21 https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/2281652 https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/...