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

theguardian.com

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

#551

Post by pleb_nz »

tptacek wrote: post #516
pleb_nz wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a global community, would we assume bacon means all types of bacon cut? I have been but maybe I've been wrong. Surely we're not just referring to streaky bacon or American bacon

Yes, we would assume here that bacon means pork belly bacon. The reason nitrates are such a big deal with American bacon is that they're an important part of the flavor of the bacon (nitrates create "hammy" flavor). If there's genuinely un-cured pork loin "bacon" in Germany or New Zealand or whatever, that's great, but it's a less interesting claim than that there's real nitrate/nitrite-free American bacon (I don't b…

Sorry my question wasn't about nitrates. It was about the use of the term bacon being used to define all bacon's as we're a global community or whether people in general on this community would think of bacon being used for only streaky bacon.

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

#552

Post by xpe »

colordrops wrote: post #397
xpe wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common writing, even from well-regarded sources, is often unnecessarily vague wrt statistics. Claim: we would benefit by building a culture where basic probability ranges are expected and used. Idea: Serious publications could: A. Set basic guidelines for talking about probability estimates; something akin to what you see in government or business intelligence publications. For example, maps terms to ranges: “highly…

Maybe it's because I'm tired but I don't see what that has to do with what I said. Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Perhaps :) Point taken. Re-reading, it looks like I skipped a transition sentence from the comment to what I wrote. (Or maybe the parent comment got edited? Not sure.)

> You can get cancer from not getting enough sleep. There are plenty of innocuous substances that look fine chemically but disrupt sleep. It doesn't have to be directly mutagenic to cause cancer.

I agree with the comment as written, though it strikes me that virtually no mainstream publications use writing that clarifies or quantifies these kinds of indirect relationships.

I see a lot of intellectual laziness or dumbing down. Two categorical errors happen often:

(A) writing “everything is connected”. This can be true in some sense while also being useless. The more interesting framing is to ask “to what degree” and under what modeling assumptions.

(B) Writing about various linkages without clarifying probability and impact dilution.

The connecting idea in my head was something like this: when most publications talk about cancer they tend to lack even a basic statistical language.

Backstory: Having hundreds of interactions with ChatGPT, which is trained on much mainstream writing, made this interaction pattern obvious and tiresome.

Another way of saying my complaint: It feels like otherwise intelligent people hit a barrier where they start speaking vaguely. They pretend like this is the best we can do. It ideally isn’t; we have extensive scientific and statistical studies. There is no reason why we as a culture have to accept such statistical phobia as quality writing.

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

#553

Post by xpe »

tech2 wrote: post #448
antod wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mix the definitions, biweekly and bimonthly can even be the same timeframe!

Or, since we have a word already, we could use that... Fortnightly. Biweekly needs to mean, specifically, twice a week.

I like that. And we could use halfweekly to mean twice a week. And halfmonthly to mean somewhere between 14 and 15.5 days.

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

#554

Post by xpe »

boxed wrote: post #447
xpe wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These notices are ineffective to say the least. Saying “everything causes cancer” is pointless because it ignores the key questions of “how often?” and “with what severity?”

Or maybe they are extremely effective, because the purpose is for the companies who sell REAL cancer inducing chemicals to muddy the waters so they can keep doing business.

Product warning labels are indeed subject to all manners of nonscientific meddling, often with a barely disguised goal of protecting a powerful industry. History is not usually kind when evaluating these kinds of compromises made to appease powerful corporations.

And now, a short conversation between two people to illustrate the rhetoric in play:

Person 1: “Let the market handle that; it will innovate and adapt to customer needs!”

Person 2: “Except the top three players in that industry are quite profitably killing people.”

Person 1: “But how can the industry recover if we act too drastically?”

Person 2: I will quote what you said just above: > You were just saying that the market is adaptable! It seems like you are conflating the idea of protecting bad actors with the idea of setting the conditions for a healthy market. A healthy market does not kill its consumers.

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

#555

Post by tptacek »

kortex wrote: post #373
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…

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…

I had fun reading this comment to my son (early-career biochem) pretending I was coming up with it as I went along. "Does it have any alkylators? NO."

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

#556

Post by tptacek »

pleb_nz wrote: post #551
tptacek wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we would assume here that bacon means pork belly bacon. The reason nitrates are such a big deal with American bacon is that they're an important part of the flavor of the bacon (nitrates create "hammy" flavor). If there's genuinely un-cured pork loin "bacon" in Germany or New Zealand or whatever, that's great, but it's a less interesting claim than that there's real nitrate/nitrite-free American bacon (I don't b…

Sorry my question wasn't about nitrates. It was about the use of the term bacon being used to define all bacon's as we're a global community or whether people in general on this community would think of bacon being used for only streaky bacon.

I totally understand. I know "bacon" is a thing everywhere, and it doesn't mean cured strips of pork belly everywhere. I guess I'd say "bacon" in popular culture refers to the American product, whose flavor is heavily derived from the interaction of sodium nitrite with pork belly. To tell an American "you can get bacon without the nitrites" is a little like saying "you could just go eat an apple". True, but irrelevant! :)

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

#557

Post by tptacek »

grvdrm wrote: post #528
tptacek wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop with nitrates and nitrites? Acrylamide is a known human carcinogen, and occurs in a huge variety of cooking processes (including baking, frying, and grilling). If you eat potatoes, you're almost certainly putting yourself at more risk than aspartame is: we've got epidemiology and mechanism of action to back up the potato risk.

Serious question: do you have kids and if so, what do you feed them if you avoid acrylamide? I’m constantly looking for alternatives for my kids and it feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole such that they do, sometimes anyways, eat the processed things because I can’t eradicate the junk from everything.

I don't avoid acrylamide! How would I? :)

(I have 2 kids, but both are in their early 20s.)

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

#559

Post by hilbert42 »

kortex wrote: post #373
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…

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…

Right, I'm more worried about Sucralose with all those chlorines hanging about.

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

#560

Post by kelipso »

tptacek wrote: post #545
kelipso wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to post that link if you're on the site? I'm guessing you're looking at cancer mortality rates rather than cancer diagnosis rates. Because while the former has decreased since 1950 due to improvements in treatment, I'm pretty sure the latter has risen since 1950.

I closed the tab since last night, but if you Google "IARC dataviz" you're probably going to get it as the first Google search result. It's a site IARC runs itself, with historical data visualizations.

Right it was as I thought. Cancer incidence rate was increasing since 1960

https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...

while cancer mortality rate was decreasing since 1980

https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...

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