Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports • Hacker News Board

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#501

Post by kortex » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 1:51 PM UTC

headwayoldest wrote: post #380

kortex wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big challenge is from a SAR (structure-activity relationship) point of view, it's completely benign looking from just about any way you look at it. It's two peptides, and a methanol (which yes, gets converted to formaldehyde, but so does fruit pectin). There's nothing zany about its structure, it's not particularly lipophilic, no receptor bindings of note, no spicy reactive groups, no alkylators, no interca…

So you're telling me there's a chance? Warnings like these quickly hit the Prop 65 problem - the notices are so ubiquitous you go blind to them.

Prop 65 is especially dumb because it doesn't make producers say what the risky ingredient(s) are or how potent it is. I got some fish sauce from the Asian grocer which has a p65 warning. What is it? Are there heavy metals in the fish? Nitrites? Is it smoked and thus has trace PAH? Did they find PFAS? I have no clue, but it's goddang fish sauce and so potent I put like two drops in my stir-fry (which would itself probably warrant prop 65), so idgaf.

When you put the exact same warning on food as lead-containing special solder, cadmium paints, and other very obvious "don't eat this" industrial materials, it loses all efficacy.

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#502

Post by 6510 » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

The US research history has to be one of the weirdest possible. Large financial incentive, actual fraud, repeated animal trials where everything goes wrong.

Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)

But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#503

Post by hnfong » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #246

xormapmap wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most bread you get from a supermarket (even outside the US) is highly processed garbage, as are many common sandwich fillings (mayo, salami, margarine). The typical sandwich is probably up there with many of the other least healthy things you could eat, so yeah, ground up wheat with filling to make it taste good is probably fair.

Mayo is processed garbage?? Please explain. It’s whipped egg with lemon and oil, maybe some salt.

Mayo is mostly oil. Usually the cheapest oil the manufacturer can source. That oil is highly refined, which usually involves dissolving ground up seeds in some solvent like hexane, then some high heat process to extract and de-odor the oil. Given that seed oils usually comprises polyunsaturated oils which due to their multiple double bonds are more reactive, the chemical processes probably tend to create more undesirable by products.

I mean, unless you prefer to drink the cheapest cooking oil you can find in your supermarket, you might want to avoid the mayo as well. (disclaimer: I occasionally drink EVOO directly)

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#504

Post by CyberDildonics » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

valval wrote: post #452

copperx wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sucralose (Splenda) has been linked to cancer quite convincingly last week. It's the only artificial sweetener that I used, and now there are no options except sugar alcohols. Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.

Why use artificial sweeteners in the first place? Honey is a great sweetener.

Honey is sweet because it has sugar in it, the same reason people would be using an artificial sweetener in the first place.

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#505

Post by pieter_mj » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #233

The challenge you have here is that aspartame isn't just one of most widely studied substances in the food chain, but that it's also one of the most widely and vigorously consumed. People drink a lot of diet soda; a lot of people drink it to the exclusion of all other liquids. So it's going to be tricky to get the epidemiology to match up with the claim here: if aspartame is meaningfully carcinogenic (meaning: more t…

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#506

Post by nuc1e0n » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

Maybe. But is this like how Bananas are radioactive? i.e. almost not at all? How carcinogenic would the equivalent amount of sugar be?

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#507

Post by 2devnull » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #233

The challenge you have here is that aspartame isn't just one of most widely studied substances in the food chain, but that it's also one of the most widely and vigorously consumed. People drink a lot of diet soda; a lot of people drink it to the exclusion of all other liquids. So it's going to be tricky to get the epidemiology to match up with the claim here: if aspartame is meaningfully carcinogenic (meaning: more t…

Cancer can take 50 years to develop. Aspartame is from the 80s, so maybe we’d only now be noticing the beginning of the wave of cancers, assuming our ability to notice is not limited, which I think the pandemic should make you wonder about. And how many other things started in the 80s. Cigarettes were relatively easy to notice, but even great minds like Fischer couldn’t see it. A 50 year lag makes a lot of things hard to notice.

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#508

Post by rootusrootus » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #372

indymike wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From NIH's National Cancer institute: * Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data). This is no where near 50% of people "having cancer". * The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 442.4 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 cases). (.442%) * The cancer death rate (cancer mortality) is 158.3 per 100,000…

Those numbers are context-less. Cancer is what happens to you if something else doesn't kill you first.

Exactly this. The prevalence of cancer in my family is pushing 100%. However, the onset is almost always in the mid/upper 80s to early 90s. So it's not really that cancer is a problem for my family as much as it seems like living long enough to get killed by it is.

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#509

Post by KMag » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 3:19 PM UTC

elif wrote: post #335

copperx wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sucralose (Splenda) has been linked to cancer quite convincingly last week. It's the only artificial sweetener that I used, and now there are no options except sugar alcohols. Monk Fruit has also been linked to cancer.

My Peruvian climbing guide turned me onto stevia which doesn't fall into any of your categories. It is really a wholesome plant extract instead of something chemists have invented which leads me to have confidence in its (so far as we know) lack of carcinogenicity.

Appeal to nature[0] is a poor mental shortcut. There are tons of natural carcinogens, notably aflatoxins and cycacins.

Clothes, refrigeration, and Pasteurization are all extremely recent on an evolutionary timescale. They're all artificial and extremely beneficial to human well-being.

Also, the idea that something is good because we've evolved with it gets the mechanism of evolution backward. Even if it were true that evolution's stochastic gradient descent had found the global maximum 15k years ago (instead of perhaps approximating a local maximum), that would imply no changes to the human would improve human reproductive success. It would not imply that no changes to the environment (such as available foods) would improve human reproductive success.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

Re: Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports

#510

Post by rootusrootus » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 3:26 PM UTC

cookiengineer wrote: post #463

freshpots wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People still drink chlorified water and governments still are too lazy to use a biological cleaning process all over the world..." What biological cleaning process are you referring to? How does it prevent bacterial growth in the water distribution system?

This [1] and [2] are a pretty good primer on how Kläranlagen are built in Germany where we use a biological water treatment process and are recycling 96% of sewage water. The remaining ~4% (the Schlacke) usually are used as fertilizers for farming or are burned in biogas energy plants. The latter happens when the quality is not good enough or the sewege plant doesn't have a stage 4 filtration system. The German wikip…

Admittedly I don't read German, but I read the translated version and ... it looks very much like a typical sewage treatment plant in the US? What's unique about it?

Not adding any chlorine is an interesting choice in any case, you can start out with perfectly pure water and still end up with contamination along the way to your tap. A tiny amount of chlorine prevents that, and it evaporates quickly after the water leaves the tap.