- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- news@beehaw.org
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This has been a thing since forever. I remember there being a big doobadoo about the shit in Diet Coke back in the 90’s. They showed it gave mice cancer.
It used to be called NutraSweet.
The thing is that the study with the mice was seriously flawed. There’s been more research since then, which is why we’re getting this announcement now (even though the announcement itself is little more than “oh hey there might be something to this? We definitely need more research before we can know for sure.”)
Aspartame gives me mad headaches anyway.
Aspartame insulted my mother and kicked my dog
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I’d make a strong argument that one Diet Coke a day is still healthier even if it’s carcinogenic vs one regular coke everyday. Sugar is that bad for you.
Of the basis WHO is using here, most if not all longterm studies (the kind you’d want for assessing things like cancer risk) are based on observational evidence. That is, a study where the participants typically aren’t asked to do anything they don’t already normally do. For this topic, that means generally speaking the participants are going to be people that already normally drink low calorie sweetened beverages.
It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.
I can’t really make sense of their recommendation. The data required to recommend for or against just isn’t there. The totality of short term data is all very showing a very strong association between sweetened drinks and weight loss. Wish they’d just explain this stuff properly so we didn’t have to rely on the dumbass media to interpret advice meant for medical professionals
Do you have data suggesting overweight people are more likely to drink sugar free sodas? You could just as easily intuit that health conscious folks drink less calories.
I didn’t, but I just found a few papers showing a relationship between awareness/use of nutrition claims/labels and obesity.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7622-3
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214001328?via%3Dihub
That second one sums up my logic pretty well:
The analysis revealed that people with excess weight display a high level of interest in nutrition claims, namely, short and immediately recognised messages. Conversely, obese individuals assign less importance to marketing attributes (price, brand, and flavour) compared with normal weight consumers.
Generally people that engage with products marketed as “diet” options are more likely to be people that want to improve their diet. In turn those people are more likely to be overweight. And people that are not overweight are more likely to select based on other product attributes.
Edit: The use of low-calorie sweeteners is associated with self-reported prior intent to lose weight in a representative sample of US adults - https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20169
In cross-sectional analyses, the expected relation between higher BMI and LCS [low calorie sweetener] use was observed, after adjusting for smoking and sociodemographic variables. The relation was significant for the entire population and separately for men and women (see Table 1). The relation between obesity (BMI ⩾30 kg m−2) and LCS consumption was significant for LCS beverages, tabletop LCS and LCS foods (see Figure 1a). Individuals consuming two or more types of LCSs were more likely to be obese than individuals consuming none (42.7% vs 28.4%) and were more likely to have class III obesity (7.3% vs 4.2%).
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To be fair the vast majority of scientists will take other factors into account. If you thought of “this could also be because of that” then you can be sure that the scientists and the ones reviewing the publication also thought about it and addressed it. There are exceptions, sure, but don’t just assume everyone is bad at their job.
This is absurdly stupid. I’m sorry… But it is. The naivety involved in this comment is staggeringly rough.
Even if we pretend what you’re saying is true, it suggests that scientists are not prone to error or tunnel vision. What do you believe scientists are funded by? Knowledge? No… Not in this shitty world… They’re funded by money here, something Coke has plenty of.
I don’t know. Who would say that?
I already told you who.
So who would say that?
That’s what I said!
But who did say that?
Who did!
I don’t know, that’s what I’m asking you
I already said who!
Don’t worry you’re only drinking the recommended amount of carcinogens.
Everything is a carcinogen pretty much though.
Eat meat? Better boil or steam everything because any bit of char on meat is a carcinogen. Especially avoid all red meat and sandwiches in general.
Don’t heat potatoes or a lot of other vegetables too high either. They can produce acrylamide, another carcinogen that’s also found in tobacco smoke.
Never drink alcohol either because it’s a carcinogen.
Don’t fry anything. Causes cancer.
Peanuts and peanut butter are laced with aflatoxins that are carcinogenic.
Literally everyone gets cancer several times in life. Most of the time your body kills it off. It’s only when that fails that we catch it. The longer we live and the more we minimize other factors, the bigger cancer will become as a cause of death.
Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.
This thread is fucked with astroturfing. Welcome to Lemmy, everyone! It’s easier to do this shit here… It’s kind of a massive fucking problem.
Who’s astroturfing, exactly?
It is a term used by people that think that everything is a conspiracy theory. Most likely OC meant that comments here are payed shills of soft drinks companies trying to downplayed the significance of these news.
In reality, it’s full of reasonable people that don’t immediately jump on the boogieman bandwagon but simply critically look at the announcement and provide context for it so people don’t immediately stop consuming sugar-free consumables in favour of sugared ones as we know the latter to be deadly.
It’s weird to think someone would only disagree with you if they were trying to drum up fake support in support of a company.
I drink a lot of Coke Zero and mainly went on it because sugar taxes were making regular Coca Cola far more expensive.
The notion that big soda corporations are giving us cancer is quite concerning.
The almost certainly aren’t. Typically the quantities used in these tests are absurd if scaled up to a human. It also very well may not have the same effect in a human.
As long as you aren’t shoveling aspertame into your mouth, it’s almost certainly less than the equivalent amount they tested on these mice.
Quote from the article: “An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda such as Diet Coke daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks”
Aka, you’re fine.
“Look, it may give you cancer, but honestly at this point what won’t. And at least the cancer has a chance to take you out before the catastrophic collapse”
With the amount of aspartame I drink, I’d like the process to hurry up already, please.
You’re going to need to eat it by a spoonful to even have a chance of it causing cancer.
Don’t tell me how much coke to drink
Aspartame is nasty anyway
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just an FYI, the rum is probably much more carcinogenic. WHO has had a statement on that for some time https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health
Just a little, light cancer.
Good riddance. Regardless of whether the allegation of being dangerous are true or not, anything that takes aspartame out of the food industry is good.
If aspertame replaces sugar or removing aspertame causes more sugar consumption, hell no. You might not care for the flavor, but sugar is much worse for people than aspertame. There are better sweeteners though. Stevia is pretty good, in my opinion, and you can grow and extract your own with fairly little effort.
How exactly are you comparing sugar consumption to aspartame consumption?
Sugar is very unhealthy and aspertame is maybe carcinogenic, but almost certainly only in quantities much higher than likely any human (potentially with a few very unhealthy individuals) is consuming. I don’t need to compare the quantities consumed really. Less sugar is better always.
From the article: “An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda such as Diet Coke daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks”
I asked how are you comparing them, not what the maximum dose is.
If you’re so opposed to sugar or sugary drinks, do you not see how it’s a problem to keep promoting these confusing liquid dessert forms which are literally owned by the same corporations that make the sugar drink?
I’m not sure what you mean by how am I comparing them. Do you mean how do I compare 1g of sugar to other sweeteners as a measure of harm, or do you mean it as a rhetorical “they aren’t comparable” comment? If the former, I don’t really need to. Artificial sweeteners do not have measurable harm on normal human consumption scales, where sugar does. If the later, they are comparable. Sugar has caused massive issues in out society and artificial sweeteners are a way to alleviate some of that harm without people dramatically changing.
I don’t promote sweet foods or drinks. I hardly drink or consume them. I rarely eat deserts, and when I do they’re on the much less sweet side. I also usually drink coffee and tea black, or with a tiny splash of milk (alternative). If I had my way, we wouldn’t have sweet foods/drinks everywhere. The current state is that we do though, and the best way to help things isn’t to convince people to not like sweet things, but to convince them they can consume sweet things but they should avoid sugar where possible.
