181–190 of 584 posts
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Silica can cause cancer, in the form of asbestos fibres or silica dust. Yet, it’s safe to drink from a glass, have windows at home, and walk on sand. A lot of factors matter besides chemical composition.
Are you suggesting that aspartame in food has a different physical form that prevents it from entering the body?
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How can a layman determine the right book? Anti-vax kooks also think they're reading the right sources.
It's impossible for a layman to know because most people in accredited positions of authority lie without cessation. Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best. You might still get it wrong. Such is life.
Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.
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To expand on point number 3, the sugar industry is one of the most notorious at utilizing motivated research to its own benefit. If aspartame had even slightest chance of causing illness or cancer, you could bet on the inevitable, unrelenting smear campaign that Big Sugar would be waging against it.
Who are the players in Big Sugar who would exploit this? Can’t be the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, because they’d also be part of Big Aspartame.
They are also the ones that pushed ethanol on us and told us it wouldn't hurt our engines (even though it absolutely did. Most engines now are designed with ethanol in mind, but ethanol gas destroyed a lot of otherwise perfectly fine engines before people realized it was a huge lie. By then it was too late anyway)
With the presidential primaries coming up we'll get another big reminder about how disproportionately influential the Iowa corn farmers are.
This is awful reporting. Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria. So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
The BBC has a reasonably good article on this subject today
This is awful reporting. Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria. So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
Why is it awful reporting? The WHO’s cancer division (IARC - International Agency for Research on Cancer) is labeling it as being, quite literally, a “possible carcinogen.” That’s the actual name of the category . It’s either “Not classified,” “Possible Carcinogen,” “Probable Carcinogen,” or “Carcinogen.” Don’t like it? Bring it up with the WHO.
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It was known to be harmful back in 1920s when it was introduced
But it solved a problem that got in the way of selling you things! It's also still used in most every prop engine that flies over my house everyday at a normal schedule, so we still haven't solved the problem of leaded gas. We never will (in my lifetime).
Do you know why? I was under the impression that avgas (aka leaded gas for airplanes) was being forced out (albeit slowly) by EPA
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The average American consumes 38.87 gallons of soda year. 43% of Coke sales are Diet, I extrapolated that across the market, since Coke has a pretty dominant market share anyway. That's 16.7 gallons of diet soda per American, or 178 cans of soda. Multiply that by 150 calories/can, divide by 365, you get the 73 calories. As I mentioned before, that's a side effect of averaging across all Americans, a fraction of who d…
Makes sense; but I think it is odd to include folks that aren't relevant in the increase, though. Really, it is just weird to see a number that the only way to see an increase of 78 calories is to swap over into a half of a drink. Granted, you work with what you have. :D
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It’s actually sodium nitrite that’s carcinogenic (after being exposed to high heat), and I can find bacon without sodium nitrite here pretty much at every grocery store.
Adding to what remote_phone said, and repeating another comment of mine, that nitrite free bacon still has the same amount of nitrites (in some cases, more). https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...
Sad to learn about the celery nitrite thing. I’ve been overpaying for it for a while now, apparently. It literally says “contains no preservatives” but has “cultured celery extract” in the ingredients, so its a lie.
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Purely anecdotal, but I used to drink insane amounts of aspartame in the form of Crystal Lite. I don't know what that's made of now, but decades ago it was made with aspartame, and I'd guzzle gallons upon gallons of that stuff because it could be mixed with tap water and was therefore cheaper than buying drinks in cans. Maybe in the long term it will cause my butt to fall off in my 60s, IDK, but if aspartame causes c…
It's a common fallacy that increasing the dose necessarily increases the effects. There are a whole lot of chemicals where the relationship is more complex. There are drugs where negative effects only occur when the drug is discontinued, where the effect of the drug increases or decreases as it it taken continuously, where the effect rapidly saturates and does not increase with increasing dose, and so forth. I know e…
Can you provide an example of a chemical which has effects on the human body that are completely unrelated to the size of the dose? Just because the effects of a carcinogen may be non-linear in relation to the dosage, that doesn't mean that a greater risk of cancer incidents with a greater dose is an unreasonable expectation. Some thing can be assumed unless an exception is identified.
This is awful reporting. Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria. So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
AFAIK, most lists of "possible carcinogenic" are just lists of things people want to cause cancer but the evidence disagrees. There's something to say about lists where people put substances we don't know a lot, to call attention for studying more. But I haven't actually seen one of those, it's always lists of substances people study a lot, and publication bias set them marginally into statistical relevancy.