Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation

Aspartame (1965) was approved by the US FDA in 1974/1981. This is commonly paired with acesulfame-K (1967) to provide sweetness in low-calorie drinks and sodas.

Saccharin (1879) was the first artificial sweetener, followed by cylcamate (1937). Low calorie sodas (Tab, etc) using these sweeteners were introduced in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1980’s diet sodas sweetened with the combination of aspartame and acesulfame-K reached the market.

This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation. I think it’s interesting that the introduction and increased consumption of diet drinks paced the increase in America’s waistlines. U.S. adult obesity rates went from 15% to 30.5% to 41.9% (1980/2000/2020). U.S. childhood obesity went from 5.5% to 13.9% to 19.7% in the same period.

Others have made a case that aspartame, acesulfame-K and sucralose (discovered in 1976, US approval 1998) play a role in the etiology (causation) of the obesity epidemic: people who want to lose a few pounds switched their beverage consumption to artificially sweetened low-calorie drinks. The insulin released by the sweet taste of aspartame lowers people’s blood sugar level, thereby amplifying their hunger. This causes the diet-soda drinker to consume more total calories than if they’d had a HFCS-sweetened beverage.

There are certainly more important contributing factors to “the obesity epidemic”, but I think this is an example of simplistic science: it's technically accurate that low calorie sweeteners have fewer calories than sugar, but they are not that helpful for weight loss. I'd wager it'd be better to consume an 8oz can of HFCS soda than 12oz of 'diet' soda.

Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners? How about herbal sweeteners? If you regularly consume diet sodas, do you combine your diet drink with calories, or is most of your aspartame consumption on an empty stomach?

Here's why everyone is fat in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

It's not "aspartame". It's eating out twice as much as we did in early 70s [1], rise of fast food consumption, and huge portion sizes.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumption-nutr...

Sweeteners are processed food. Timeline shows more processed food hitting the market, period. Obesity rises. Coincidence? Doubt it.

It's not just the sweetener itself. It's the whole shift. More processed crap in everything, sweeteners included. Cheaper, easier, engineered to be addictive. That's the real change that lines up with the weight gain.

Focusing just on sweeteners is missing the point. They're just one piece of the bigger processed food takeover. That's the simpler, more likely explanation.

I'm not overweight, but I observed the following:

- All artificial sweeteners when consumed on empty-stomach, causes very strong feelings of hunger in a short time. My guess is that this can more than cancel out the reduced calorie content.

- Sucralose gives me headaches.

I wonder if it's correlated with cars.

We do know that walking rates, across the country, have fallen significantly. In 1969, approximately 50% of children walked or bicycled to school, with approximately 87% of children living within one mile of school walking or bicycling. Today, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren walk or bicycle to school. And we see this generally across the board, where for the most part driving to work alone dominates commute habits. If the only walking you do is from the door to the car, you are not getting much routine physical activity.

This would also actually well correlate with the rate of fast food consumption, since it's primarily car-centric, and is more car-centric than other types of eating out.

https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/sites/default/files/pd...

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I also don't think it's really any sort of secret that fast food companies like return customers and engineer the types of food that become addictive. There is a book called the Dorito Effect which theorizes that not only has artificial food become more flavorful over time, but that our industrial scale food production has made the base products less flavorful in favor of prettier or hardier varietals.

https://foodcrumbles.com/the-dorito-effect-book-review/