Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

news.un.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 210 posts

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#161

Post by kendalf89 »

pitched wrote: post #73
doxeddaily wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm super dubious about their conclusions here. Fat people drink diet soda because they are trying to avoid sugar. Diet soda actually tastes damn good these days, there isn't really a reason to drink regular soda.

Aspartame has a negative effect on the myelin sheath of neurons: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6014252/ As far as I know, all of the sugar alternatives have some (usually neuro?) downside that makes them scarier to me than sugar!

I haven't heard anything bad about stevia yet.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#162

Post by hackerlight »

hendersoon wrote: post #101
Someone1234 wrote: post #10

This was posted when it was published in May. To use an analogy their argument is: Vaping is bad for you, don't do it. While ignoring that a ton of people quit smoking using vapes and that they're letting the perfect be the enemy of good. Same thing with NSS. While NSS are a useful tool for sugar reduction, studies have shown that over the medium-long term, you'll want to reduce artificially sweat foods and even swea…

Well, exactly right. I'm not choosing between putting a packet of splenda in my coffee or drinking it black. I'm choosing between a packet of splenda or two packets of sucrose. I'd find a study telling me which one of those is the better choice to be very helpful.

> I'm choosing between a packet of splenda or two packets of sucrose.

The claim is that that's not what you're choosing between, because if that were the real choice, then the people who chose splenda would lose more weight than the people who chose sucrose, but that's apparently not the finding. So maybe the real choice is between two packets of sucrose, or splenda+two packets of sucrose, because the splenda causes you to eat more sucrose (or other trash) without your conscious realization.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#163

Post by simplyinfinity »

codexb wrote: post #139
hospitalJail wrote: post #103

Ever since I found out WHO is fine with doing anti-science things like having a 'panel of experts' make health proclamations without evidence; I'm not sure who uses the WHO. (A panel of 'experts' said if a 1 month old watched tv for 1 second, they would have detrimental effects. No science to cite, 0, but like 9 names of random old people were cited.) If the WHO says something, you need to go through all the work of…

Yeah, I realized WHO was completely anti-science when they started publishing World Healthcare Rankings where 60% of the score was based purely on how socialist a country's healthcare system was and only 40% was based on the actual quality or results of the healthcare.

If no one can afford it, does it matter if it can cure everything? On an individual scale it matters. On a massive scale like a country, more affordable but less good is overall better for the whole country,but not for the individual.

As an example, in the US you pay thousands for an ambulance call, get to hospital, pay hundreds of thousands, insurance (for which you pay thousands more per year) covers most of it, except they're trying to cheat you out of as much as possible so they pay less, and in the end, all amerikans are one incident away from bankruptcy.

In most if not all of Europe, you pay health taxes, but not in the upper thousands, get good doctors, and don't end up bankrupt for breaking your arm or hip. And the ambulance is free (as in your taxes pay for it).

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#164

Post by tmedina »

aidenn0 wrote: post #112
bbatha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask someone from 100 years ago to sweeten a glass of lemonade "to taste" and you'd get something so weak that a consumer of diet soda would mock it like the meme "hint of hint of lime" or "transported on a truck near strawberries" flavors of LaCroix. This is quiet a suspicious claim if you've studied food or beverage history. We have cocktail recipes dating back 150 years, and punch recipes dating back almost 500.…

I think normalization is the problem but not because people didn't drink sweet things; my suspicion is that previously they were drunk rarely and in smaller quantities (due to cost, if nothing else). We've gone from "Twelve full ounces, that's a lot" to a 12oz can being the smallest commonly available size, and a 20oz bottle being common in vending machines. Over my lifetime, the "medium" size soda at a fast-food res…

Well thankfully shrinkflation is helping curb this. They now sell those mini-cans for as much as the regular sized one.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#165

Post by Insanity »

whiskers wrote: post #150
busyant wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to create a "new normal" or new baseline where an e.g. strawberry is sweat again. Just an interesting story. About 5 years ago, I tried to cut out all processed carbs from my diet. After several months, I was away from home and I had to eat something ---the only thing open was a Dunkin Donuts. I ordered an egg-white sandwich on a plain English muffin, and for kicks I took a bite out of the English muffin. Holy shit…

I've been in America only once while overnighting in a hotel near LAX en-route to New Zealand from the UK. Everything I ate at that hotel tasted sweet from the pizza I ordered that night to the toast I had in the morning. What should have been delicious and savoury was instead sickening and unpleasant - it was so weird.

I’m from Europe and had a similar experience on the first visit to the US. It’s like the sugar level is set to max for everything lol.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#166

Post by throwawaylinux »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #114
AHOHA wrote: post #107

In all honesty, after and during Covid19, I find it hard to trust WHO or anything coming from hospitals’ doctors, integrity was lost, or maybe clear it was gone long ago.

The reality is, this stuff is hard to get right, especially in the middle of something - someone is unlikely to be right 100% of the time. Who are you following that's getting everything right? Or getting more things right than The WHO?

The even bigger reality is that people chase money and follow orders, even going against their better judgement or the interests of those they are charged to care for.

Anybody who believes there is an almighty assembly of "experts" out there with super-human integrity, incorruptibility, and infallibility, is sadly deluded.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#167

Post by jimmygrapes »

simplyinfinity wrote: post #163
codexb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I realized WHO was completely anti-science when they started publishing World Healthcare Rankings where 60% of the score was based purely on how socialist a country's healthcare system was and only 40% was based on the actual quality or results of the healthcare.

If no one can afford it, does it matter if it can cure everything? On an individual scale it matters. On a massive scale like a country, more affordable but less good is overall better for the whole country,but not for the individual. As an example, in the US you pay thousands for an ambulance call, get to hospital, pay hundreds of thousands, insurance (for which you pay thousands more per year) covers most of it, ex…

As an American living with and around other Americans, none of whom make more than 40K a year (myself included) but also make too much to qualify for low income coverage through combinations of community, city, county, state, and federal coverage (all of which exist and can overlap or stack depending on the specifics)... none of us have paid out of pocket for healthcare except when services are performed by explicitly private entities for services not considered necessary to preserve life, limb, eyesight, mental health, or communicable disease. Dental health appears to be the only exception.

Every other service is "nice to have" rather than "need to have" and I would certainly argue that many of those "nice to have" services ultimately will prevent the need for "need to have" services, so there is definitely room for improvement in my opinion. However, this trope of "Americans have to sell their home to afford an ambulance rode" and other snark needs to be tempered with the reality that those situations are almost entirely because of people intentionally opting out of (or being ignorant of) the existing systems to prevent such financial burden.

I'm sure many will have anecdotes to the contrary. I'm also sure many of those anecdotes will stem from someone either being unaware of available resources or choosing not to use them for one reason or another.

I also know plenty people who believe they will have to pay for things and therefore they don't get help. They don't pay for services bevause they don't get them, and they don't get services because they think they will have to pay for them out of pocket. That mentality comes (in part) from people who keep spouting the same myth that you posted. Please don't spread that rumor, it kills people.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#168

Post by zouhair »

user_7832 wrote: post #143
zouhair wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the guideline[0] it is way more circumspect. There are a lot of "probably" all over it. There is a need for way more research for a definitive guideline as it is stated in this guideline. [0]: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240073616

Thanks for your comment. Having read the conclusion, it is more of the authors saying "NSS could be responsible for hypertension/T2 Diabetes etc but it's not really conclusive". I'll likely still consume some NSS'es though that is more due to my preexisting condition.

They are following the science where it's going. The guideline will change when new science arise. But still we have ways to go in popularization of science.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#169

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Someone1234 wrote: post #10

This was posted when it was published in May. To use an analogy their argument is: Vaping is bad for you, don't do it. While ignoring that a ton of people quit smoking using vapes and that they're letting the perfect be the enemy of good. Same thing with NSS. While NSS are a useful tool for sugar reduction, studies have shown that over the medium-long term, you'll want to reduce artificially sweat foods and even swea…

From the article:

"Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control in the long term. People need to consider other ways to reduce free sugars intake, such as consuming food with naturally occurring sugars, like fruit, or unsweetened food and beverages,” says Francesco Branca, WHO Director for Nutrition and Food Safety.

"NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health."

If I read that correctly, the WHO is recommending that the overall amount of sweet foods consumed should be reduced and that replacing sugar with other sweeteners will not cut it.

Re: WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners

#170

Post by zouhair »

inversetelecine wrote: post #105
zouhair wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite sad that even in Hacker News are people lacking basic knowledge on how science works.

It's hard, because sometimes I'm told "The science is settled" then other times I'm told it's always changing.

"Settled" does not mean it cannot be tweaked by new information.

It is best explained by Isaac Asimov in his small essay "The Relativity of Wrong"[0].

[0]: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

Post reply on HN