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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

#491

Post by red_trumpet »

saiya-jin wrote: post #460
penneallagricia wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the mass of people who in order to drink liters of soda every day ingest large amounts of aspartame? Is it about "circumstances" or concentration?

It literally doesn't matter if its causing cancer or not, that's outright a very bad decision to do so, you will 100% fuck up your health long term. It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so? Nobody apart from maybe sales folks ever claimed these things are safe to drink in such amounts regularly. Just like nobody ever claimed that consu…

> It doesn't matter what type or brand of given soda, if it has calories its bad for you. What else do you need to not do so?

Isn't the point that diet coke doesn't have calories[1]? This is why it uses aspartame as an artificial sweetener.

[1 https://www.dietcoke.com/products/diet-coke

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

#492

Post by berniedurfee »

elif wrote: post #440
selcuka wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy [1]. A naturally occurring substance is not automatically less carcinogen, or harmful, than a manufactured one. Coffee is associated with elevated risk for bladder cancer. Cycad trees are known to be highly…

I don't think it's a fallacy to conclude generally that consuming plants which coevolved with humans is safer than consuming chemicals which are completely exogenous to any stage of the human body's development. It would be a fallacy to suggest that one group or the other were unconditionally safer, but I find no dilemma in generalizing that the human body is more capable of processing plant-based substances. Just li…

Though, there are many plants that coevolved with humans that are toxic in various ways.

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

#493

Post by berniedurfee »

mohaine wrote: post #391
nostrademons wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading back in the early 90s a number of studies that showed elevated risks of certain brain cancers from aspartame. The evidence was pretty strong - it wasn't conclusive (hence the "possibly" qualifier in this label), but it was enough that I was personally convinced. The link between aspartame and cancer is much stronger than the one between cyclamate (banned in 1970 but legal in the EU) and cancer. My…

Sweet'n'Low doesn't contain aspartame. It is Saccharin.

Wasn’t saccharine one of the first to be shown to be a likely carcinogen?

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

#494

Post by vladvasiliu »

ahoka wrote: post #482
vladvasiliu wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may depend on the brands, but one big brand of mayo here in France (Amora) has all kinds of weird crap, apart from "whipped egg with lemon and oil". It has rapeseed oil, which to me seems dubious since it requires special processing to make it non-toxic. It only has 5.1% eggs (according to the label). It also has "flavorings", thickeners and coloring agents. So yeah, it's nothing like the homemade mayo I make, whi…

Source on rapeseed on being toxic, please.

The rapeseed oil isn't considered toxic anymore, since they take steps to remove the erucic acid from it, by growing canola bred to contain very little of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil#Erucic_acid

While it says it's "generally considered safe", I prefer not to take any chances, just like I prefer to avoid plastic containers for my food, especially if hot (even though some plastics are "microwave safe").

---

I realize wikipedia isn't the greates of sources. Here are two more

NIH https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9962393/

Says it doesn't seem to be toxic in low quantities, but should be investigated more. To me, that means "rather avoid if possible".

--

European Food Safety Authority says roughly the same:

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/4593

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

#495

Post by berniedurfee »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
arbitrage wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It should. There are plenty of chemicals that you regularly consume which, in high dosages, are fatal but are required at low dosages. Too much calcium will causes osteopetrosis (too little does as well). Too much vitamin K causes liver damage Too much vitamin B1 causes hypertension Plenty of stuff is dangerous at high levels and safe at low levels. Our kidneys and liver exist to filter and eliminate excess.

Plug for ChubbyEmu on YouTube for more examples!

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

#496

Post by randomcarbloke »

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 WHO definition of "possible carcinogen" implies only minor evidence, despite enormous numberse of studies, the schedule of this class includes such things as "Aloe Vera", "carpentry and joinery", "low frequency magnetic fields", and lots of medicines.

It's barely newsworthy and yet here we are, frontpage.

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

#497

Post by david-gpu »

xpe wrote: post #388
headwayoldest wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?”

And if something was truly dangerous then I hope they would ban it outright rather than stick a label on it. Especially when they have been sticking those same labels everywhere.

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

#498

Post by hombre_fatal »

ahoka wrote: post #481
hombre_fatal wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. This thread is talking about bread. Processed wheat products like bread and seitan are nutrient dense foods usually caught in the social media meme diet crossfire.

Bread is ultra processed.

Yes, so is chocolate and tofu. Why should I care unless it's bad for me?

Using processing as an end-all heuristic loses sight of the characteristic that the heuristic is trying to approximate.

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

#499

Post by zafka »

XorNot wrote: post #363
selcuka wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy [1]. A naturally occurring substance is not automatically less carcinogen, or harmful, than a manufactured one. Coffee is associated with elevated risk for bladder cancer. Cycad trees are known to be highly…

Cocaine is a natural plant extract as well.

And of course copious use of cocaine is known to prevent cancer.... Now the way it prevents cancer is probably not optimal......

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

#500

Post by kortex »

colordrops wrote: post #381
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…

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.

Sure, but the more links in the chain, the more control you need in order to prove the causative agent. In the absence of direct experimental evidence (give animals aspartame, they get cancer, which we haven't seen), you need to rely on huge observational studies. And these are exactly where you run into all kinds of confounders, like

Patient has standard American diet and is overweight but not obese -> that leads to sleep apnea -> chronically tired -> they develop a diet Coke habit -> slight increase in cancer risk. What's causing the cancer here, the diet, the adiposity, the sleep apnea, the lack of quality sleep, the soda itself, the effect of soda on teeth leading to gingival inflammation, or the aspartame in the soda?

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