Aspartame Sweetener, Used in Products From Coca-Cola Diet Sodas To Mars' Extra C...
source link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/06/29/0850255/aspartame-sweetener-used-in-products-from-coca-cola-diet-sodas-to-mars-extra-chewing-gum-set-to-be-declared-a-possible-carcinogen?sbsrc=md
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Aspartame Sweetener, Used in Products From Coca-Cola Diet Sodas To Mars' Extra Chewing Gum, Set To Be Declared a Possible Carcinogen
One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators. From the report: Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said. The IARC ruling, finalised earlier this month after a meeting of the group's external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence. It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators. However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC's assessments can be confusing to the public.
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by geekbelief ( 2039836 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @04:56AM (#63642388)
Most sugar replacements are terrible. They generally taste bad and their benefits generally questionable too. Donâ(TM)t get me started with corn syrup.
It really seems like it better to consume real sugar, but moderate the quantity. if anyone says their weight is genetic, while consuming bucket sized sodas, probably has bigger issues to deal with ?
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The problem is that a) they are sugar replacements which already makes them bad because they trick the body into a wrong reaction and b) sugar is pretty bad, so if a sugar replacement is better than sugar, it can still be very unhealthy.
The whole idea of sugar replacement is flawed. Consume less sweet stuff, regardless of how it was made sweet.
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Our body didn't evolve to drink sugar water, the slight sweetness of sugar locked up in fruit never prepared us for this. We're robust though and a little sweetener isn't going to tip the balance.
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If it were only "a little", yes. But for many people it is actually "a lot".
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A lot of ppms is not a lot.
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> Our body didn't evolve to drink sugar water
Give it time, we're still evolving. You never hear about diabetic Humming birds.:)
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So, if sugar is bad and other sweet-tasting chemicals are bad, how to make food taste sweet? Brain implant? Electric pulses to some nerves?
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You keep the sugar, but you consume less if it. So 1 cup cake a day, instead of 4, for example. Sugar is considered a bigger obesity risk than fat.
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The problem with sugar is that in the U.S. at least its put in almost everything. Much like sodium as anyone that's gone Keto can attest. Sugar is added to tomato sauce, even to most breads or really anything that also contains a real amount of gluten (Most pastas). It doesn't have to be of course but it often is. This makes tracking your sugar intake quite a challenge and why most people that try Keto find out they have very limited options.
There is also the problem of labeling of fiber and sugar, both a
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by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @07:44AM (#63642604)
How do you make punches in the face hurt less?
The answer is don't get punched in the face as much.
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You can make punches to the face hurt less with drugs though. Alcohol, some illegal drugs or anesthetics.
So, considering that I want to drink sweetened tea, how to do it in a way that is not as bad?
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by junkname ( 8623905 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @08:52AM (#63642754)
I highly recommend forcing yourself over to unsweet tea. In my younger years, I was a "the sweeter the better" tea drinker. I forced myself to switch to unsweet years ago, and after I got used to the lack of sweetener, I realized I could now actually taste the TEA, not just the sweet. I enjoy tea even more now - no milk, no sugar, no sweetener, and I can taste the various flavor variations between various kinds of tea (english black, earl grey, etc etc). Many times I can identify the brand of tea being served in restaurants now. So there are benefits to drinking unsweet tea, even beyond the fact its healthier.
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by jDeepbeep ( 913892 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @11:33AM (#63643330)
I can taste the various flavor variations between various kinds of tea (english black, earl grey, etc etc). Many times I can identify the brand of tea being served in restaurants now.
Agreed. I currently drink tea daily, and with no sweetener. Why? I find sugar masks the subtler flavors, which can be really enjoyable, especially in oolongs and the greens.
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> You can make punches to the face hurt less with drugs though. Alcohol, some illegal drugs or anesthetics.
All those things have some pretty nasty side effects - say nothing of the injuries you'll sustain from the punches themselves. You're still better off doing less of it in the first place - then you need less of the drugs, get less side effects, less injuries, etc.
> So, considering that I want to drink sweetened tea, how to do it in a way that is not as bad?
Your choices are:
1) Do less of it
2) Do i -
Yes, sure, manipulate the senses.
But that won't change the physical effects on your body. Like a broken nose may not hurt if you're on enough anesthetics, but your nose being broken will have other negative effects that will impact the function if your body. That's the point there.
And the suggestion is to consider trying to reduce your dependence on sweetness in foods. Which doesn't mean that you absolutely must reduce it to zero, which is a very common strawman when it comes to such suggestions of reduc-
Manipulate the senses is something that I would want to do though. Taking the punch in the face analogy, what if I wanted to feel like I got punched in the face, but not sustain any injuries? This is pretty much what the artificial sweeteners are supposed to do - taste sweet, but not have the calories etc or real sugar. Though, I guess, the ones we know of and use have their own negative sideffects. I wonder what is worse - real sugar or the equivalent "sweetness" amount of various substitutes?
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From what we know so far is that if you normalize over sweetness then a lot of the substitutes appear to be better, in certain regards.
Of course there's a lot of other considerations to make here, like what kind of regards and of course in which quantities things are being consumed. Because to me it seems that a lot of people are under the impression that because the sweeteners (of which not all are of an artificial nature) are very low on calories when normalized over sweetness, you can consume a ton of t
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Same way you smoke cigarettes in a way that's not as bad: Do it less.
Sugar isn't inherently bad. But like anything else, it needs to be consumed in moderation.
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by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:43AM (#63643138)
How do you make punches in the face hurt less?
The answer is don't get punched in the face as much.
Eating sweet things is highly addictive. I've never seen someone suffer actual withdrawals from not getting punched in the face enough.
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by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:29AM (#63642862)
You take a few weeks off of slamming buckets of sugar down your gullet and everything tastes a lot sweeter to you. When I dropped sodas, cookies, and other high-sugar content foods from my diet, I was shocked how much sweeter everything else tasted. We've been brainwashed in the states into believing everything should be syrupy sweet by the sugar industry. It works as a seasoning agent, in quantities similar to salt, if you don't go out of your way to suck down massive quantities of it. Of course, now you have to go out of your way to not consume massive quantities of it. But you'll feel better if you do. No more huge rushes followed by huge crashes.
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No idea what you are talking about. Either I have not consumed as much sugar as needed for this or I have not noticed the effect.
I do not drink a lot of sodas. Sure, I'll drink some once in a while, but usually I drink tea, with 2-3 teaspoons (so, about 10-15g) of sugar in a 0.5L cup. Sometimes ice tea and sometimes coca-cola or some other carbonated drink (the other ones are tastier, but coca-cola is cheaper).
I know that food in the US is a lot sweeter than here, I think Subway had to change their bread, b
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It could be a metabolism thing too. Some people get way bigger sugar rushes than others. But yes, in the US it's tough to find low-sugar foods. Even in bread. I like to make my own. I can either go full sourdough (no sugar at all) or slow-rise regular (teaspoon or less per loaf of sugar to kick-start the process). Store-bought is all way too sweet.
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I've noticed that too. I can't stand soft drinks anymore. At the soda stand About 1/3 sweetened tea and rest unsweetened is fine.
The recipe for raspberry crisp calls for 3/4 cup sugar for 4 cups of berries. I use 1/4 cup sugar with 5 cups of berries. It's still plenty sweet.
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Sugarless sweet products abound in nature. The "trick" is fully understandable from an evolutionary point of view: if you're a plant trying to make a fruit you want animals to eat, which would you rather do: invest a ton of energy into producing actual sugar, or trick the animal with a small amount of an extra-sweet substance and bulk the fruit up with water?
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That's not an evolutionary point of view - that's corporate America's point of view.
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It very much is evolution's point of view. And running counter to that, animals have evolved the (imperfect) ability to discern sugar from sweet non-caloric compounds.
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Is it actually true that theybtrick the body into the wrong reaction?
They trick the tongue, sure, by tickling its sweetness receptors, but apart from our brain's pleasure centres does that trigger anything substantive in the body? Presumably nothing in your digestive system will mistake sweetener for sugar unless it is structurally sugar-like? (and I don't know whether sweeteners are)
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by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @07:49AM (#63642614)
https://medium.com/discourse/t... [medium.com]
"At least in animal studies, the consumption of artificially sweetened diets has been shown to increase adiposity (fat deposition), drive hyperinsulinemia (insulin spikes) and cause insulin resistance during diet-induced obesity."-
Stevia also not great, at least in rats:
https://diabetesjournals.org/d... [diabetesjournals.org]
although an earlier study reckons it doesn't particularly affect diabetes-related indicators in (a tiny sample of) obese humans
https://diabetesjournals.org/d... [diabetesjournals.org]
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Yeah, none of it is "good" for you. Just a matter if you want to poison yourself with sugar, or poison yourself with fake sugar. I just wish the US would quit adding sugar to EVERYTHING. Like seriously, why is there 5 grams of added sugar in a slice of bread?
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Technically, artificial sweeteners have you consume "less sweet stuff" Aspartame is 200x sweeter than sucrose, so you would typically use just 0.5% as much as you would real sugar. So if they say x grams of aspartame per day is carcinogenic, remember that you would be consuming less than 1 gram unless you were on the extreme end of consumption.
As far as additives, I would be far more wary of artificial colors or preservatives that are actually in significant doses.
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People consuming substances shown to be highly addictive should consume less of those highly addictive substances to improve their health. Now give me my nobel prize.
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For me the point was to save my teeth, not my weight. So what to try next, sorbitol?
Then again, how many gallons per day do I have to drink? I remember the cyclamate scare, that was much ado over very little.
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by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @07:06AM (#63642558) Homepage
Corn syrup is sugar. Indeed, it has almost the exact same fructose-glucose ratio as sucrose does (either 42% or 55% frucrose, while sucrose is 50%). You're not going to get healthier by switching from corn syrup to cane sugar. You need to cut out the sugar.
Also, corn syrup absolutely is "real" - what sort of nonsense is that? All sorts of different naturally sweet foods have entirely different ratios of different sugars. Why does corn syrup's suddenly not count as "real"? You think you're looking at a fictional product? Want an *actually high* fructose syrup? Try agave syrup - commonly used, ironically, as an alternative to corn syrup.
As for aspartame:
It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume
Well, then don't issue a statement until you have this information for crying out loud. Most things are toxic in some quantity - the question is how much of it you have to consume to be a threat. Check any random herb or spice in Wikipedia, check out its essential oil composition, and start clicking to the articles on the individual chemical components. I'll give you the Cliff's Notes, it'll go like this: toxic, toxic, allergenic, toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic, genotoxic.... etc. Essential oils are defensive compounds; we just happen to like their aroma and flavour. The question is how much you consume. In most cases, we've decided that it's acceptably small. In some cases however (such as safrole in sassafras) regulators decide that there's too much risk (though people will always debate where the line should be in those sorts of decisions).
Given how little aspartame people consume, it better be pretty damned carcinogenic for a declaration to be justified.
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Corn syrup isn't less healthy than sugar. It just doesn't taste as good. Neither are perfectly pure - the impurities in corn syrup make it taste bad, while the impurities in white sugar are actually just remnants of molasses which taste very good (to me). Even cheap beet sugar, which is not nearly as good, tastes better than corn syrup.
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Corn syrup is made from GMO corn, which is full of pesticides. Sugar doesn't come with pesticides.
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Most sugar is made from beets, which are showered with pesticides like everything else. If the sugar doesn't come with pesticides, it's because it's been chemically processed.
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Sugarcane cultivation also frequently uses significant amounts of pesticides.
The main problem with corn syrup is one most people for some reason seem not to talk about: it's cheap. Before corn syrup, manufacturers / bakers were incentivized to minimize sugar content because sugar was significantly more expensive in most places than other bulk dry ingredients like flour. But that's not the case with corn syrup. And consumers tend to prefer sweeter goods over less sweet goods, because sweet = addictive. So
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Based on what? This current designation aside there's a bit of evidence that artificial sweeteners aren't perfectly healthy, but they are almost universally far better than sugar for any similar level of sweetness flavour.
Sugar has far more to answer for than people's waistlines.
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