Live data from Hacker News

Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

241–250 of 315 posts

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#241
post #4

Note that it is in rodent. Aspartame hadn't been confirmed as a carcinogenic agent in humans. That said, I don't think it's a good idea to subject to ourselves to drinking diet soda as a daily habit. It costs money, may or may not interfere with your blood sugar and the health of your gut microbiomes. As a goal, I limit my intake of any sweet and/or artifically sweetened drinks. Instead of being a chronic diet coke d…

If you need something a bit more exciting than water there's also always club soda and plain seltzer.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a combination of flavor and dopamine from drinking it. A lot of Diet Coke drinkers would rather drink water than Diet Pepsi. Not that it taste “bad”, it’s just not what they’re craving.

My wife stopped drinking Diet Coke for a month, and then decided she preferred life with that vice and started drinking it again.

I don’t/borderline can’t drink coffee. I’ve made a lot of dietary and activity chnages in the past couple years but the mainstay has been diet or Pepsi max.

I’ve straight told people it’s just gonna have to be my vice. I can eat salads and peanut butter sandwiches all day and night. But i haven’t found a way to wean myself from caffeine.

I definitely don’t like when I drink too much (see coffee comment). But I can’t just cold turkey it either.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> easily devour pounds The real problem—don't do that. Eat a salad beforehand and then keep the fruit to a serving or two. Zero doesn't work in the long term, there is no need for deprivation that squeezes out the fun in life.

Well, right, but that’s just CICO in the end. It’s not a sugar thing. That’s fully understandable. It’s the added sucrose vs fructose in fruit discussion that’s interesting.

Need to keep high-glycemic foods to a minimum to keep a moderate blood sugar level.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually evidence backed? I adore fruit. When I wanted to lose weight I had to go off fruit and substitute with diet cola. It worked really well. Ultimately, all the evidence I see points to the fact that most people can’t eat large amounts of fruit. I can, though. I’m like 170 lbs (77 kg) and I can easily devour pounds of apples or strawberries or mangoes in a sitting and eat more tomorrow. So the pro fruit…

> easily devour pounds The real problem—don't do that. Eat a salad beforehand and then keep the fruit to a serving or two. Zero doesn't work in the long term, there is no need for deprivation that squeezes out the fun in life.

How many obese/overweight people are so because they eat too many apples? I can't imagine many.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t it been proven many times that fruits are healthy, period? Let alone comparing fruits to processed/refined sugars? I never understand these claims of fruits being unhealthy — or an unhealthy substitute for processed/refined sugars — yet there are many sources stating that fruits are fine/healthy [1]. There’s more to the story than just comparing the amount of “sugar” from nutritional facts between fruits and c…

>Hasn’t it been proven many times that fruits are healthy, period? Fruits are healthy in the same sense that dihydrogen monoxide is. Infinitesimal amounts have no health consequence, moderate amounts are healthy, amounts that exclude other foods will cause nutritional deficiencies, and excessive enough amounts will result in suffocation.

Sure, but if you eat a kilo of apples a day you'll get sick of apples and eat a light lunch worth of calories. Eat a kilo of chocolate and you're eating double your daily calories. Nobody got obese because of their 10kg-a-day apple habit.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#246
post #107

From the abstract this study does not bear any resemblance to the headline and makes very little sense to me. They reevaluated tumors from a 15 year old study in rodents, to prove that the original work was correct and that there wasn't any traces of mycoplasma. And so, I presume, they argue that the cancers were caused by aspartame. But that in itself does not prove whether or not the original study was flawed, and…

Mice tend to be so inbred they all die of cancer. They should redo the study on a different animal that has less incidence of cancer normally... like Rabbits.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#247
I think the relevant question is not "does aspartame increase cancer risk" but "does aspartame cause more negative health effects than added sugar." Excessive sugar consumption itself has numerous well-known health risks, including increasing the risks of some types of cancer (mainly by driving obesity).

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#248
post #221
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).[58] Over 400 °C (752 °F) pyrolysis occurs and more decomposition becomes significantly more rapid. The main decomposition products are tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) and difluorocarbene radicals (RCF2).[58] The degradation by-products can…

Yes, it becomes toxic at high temperatures, same as many other commonly used materials, eg. wood. Should we also be concerned about widespread use of woods because it becomes toxic when burned?

If wood was sold as cookware designed to get to high temperatures. Yes.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#249

I think the relevant question is not "does aspartame increase cancer risk" but "does aspartame cause more negative health effects than added sugar." Excessive sugar consumption itself has numerous well-known health risks, including increasing the risks of some types of cancer (mainly by driving obesity).

That's a false choice, though. I can avoid both sugar and aspartame.

Re: Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> practically universally consumed I take issue with this, frankly. Aspartame seems to be particularly popular in the USA (diet sodas), and less popular the further away you go. It's used in other stuff, sure, but most products outside of the USA just use sugar or corn-syrup-based sweeteners. I don't think anyone in my circle of family or friends has had a diet soda in decades, save for exactly one individual who dri…

> Aspartame seems to be particularly popular in the USA (diet sodas), and less popular the further away you go. At least in Germany, it’s very similar. Most diet sodas here are aspartame sweetened.

Right, but how popular is diet soda? Anecdotally, there's huge differences between soda consumption in USA and Europe.
Post reply on HN