181–190 of 267 posts
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There is no meaningful insulin response to noncaloric sweeteners.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7014832/
I could give a fulsome critique of it but I think the simpler thing to say just to kick this off is that I could give you a PubMed cite to back basically any claim, true or otherwise.
Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet. Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added. Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
Of course there are other things like coffee that really are not defined by sweetness and can be perfectly enjoyed unsweetened.
An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more…
Not all of them do.
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“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding fac…
Not a medical professional, but inflammation is something different from cancer that they mentioned in their website. And we need to understand also the trial scenario: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day. All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
For those who want diet cola without aspartame, there's an alternative: https://sodastream.com/products/diet-cola-4-pack
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There's not "nothing" wrong with MSG. But msg is fine in moderation, just like salt, fat and sugar are all fine in moderation too
If there's anything wrong with MSG that isn't simply due to sodium intake, I think it's unknown to science (at least in the sense that there's no theory about it with any wide uptake). MSG is also intensively studied and has a very similar mechanistic story to aspartame.
I actually _like_ instant ramen noodles and MSG, and I use MSG when cooking. But it feels like cheating when fancy restaurants also use it.
I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth. Is this a genetic thing?
Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet. Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added. Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
I think it's obvious that Japanese people generally consume less sugar than Americans do, so it's not my argument that sugar is fine or that the western diet isn't problematic.
Rather: the idea that there's some moral/health advantage to avoiding sweetness is unfounded, kind of culturally blinkered, won't hold up under scrutiny.
It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day. All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects. That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet…
It turns out, drinking a lot of what is essentially just water, is actually pretty healthy.
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I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespr…
> discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this. MSG is nearly identical to the glutamic acid in other foods. If it were true they'd be unable to tolerate parmesan cheese, soy sauce, aged meats, tomatoes, mushrooms, and seaweed.