It uncovered eight WHO panelists involved with assessing safe levels of aspartame consumption who are beverage industry consultants who currently or previously worked with the alleged Coke front group, International Life Sciences Institute (Ilsi).
Their involvement in developing intake guidelines represents “an obvious conflict of interest”, said Gary Ruskin, US Right-To-Know’s executive director. “Because of this conflict of interest, [the daily intake] conclusions about aspartame are not credible, and the public should not rely on them,” he added.
Okay, corruption like that should be corrected. Regardless, there’s no scientific evidence that aspartame is harmful. Let alone a biochemical reason for why a dipeptide of two amino acids, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, that dissociates in the stomach into its constituent components and some byproducts would be harmful in the first place.
Unless you have phenylketonuria, but you have much bigger problems in that case and, if that is the case for you, kudos on being at an age and capability to read and understand this post, you are incredible.
Edit: Also, just noticed the part about US Right To Know, which is a well known anti-science group that’s been pushing pseudoscience and fearmongering about other topics, such as biotechnology, for years. So them being involved here raises questions.
Absolutely… Aspartame is safe
Aspartame isn’t only safe, it also goes GREAT with a cold glass of Coke Zero™! *
*these statements have not been approved by the FDA
I especially like the part where they get away scot free, and the guy is just telling us to ignore them… maybe fire them for the conflict of interests? Ugh.
I want to get rid of it because I want a non sugar coke that doesn’t taste like burned tar soaked in urine
Drink Olipop or Poppi.
Dude, Olipop Vintage Cola is next level. That perfect vanilla cola without being too overpowering. I love to have it with a great sandwich and chips or dinner!
This reads like an ad straight from the 60s lol
I like their Cherry Vanilla. It goes right through me, though. The apple cider vinegar they use cleans you out. 🤐
Then drink the Diet Coke with Splenda one? There’s also Coke Life that has stevia instead. They basically made sure they have a version with each type of sweetener.
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Fuck yes. Why is there sugar added to applesauce and fruit juice? Why is it so hard to find low calorie drinks that don’t contain artificial sweeteners? The way to curb sugar intake is moderation.
Were I live sugar is added to cider, making it basically extra sweet apple juice with a touch of alchool.
Oh god, Okanagan Cider is so, super sweet. Might as well drink sugar water with added alcohol.
I live near a cidery, and everything is a dry or semi-dry. So much better.
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Sugar is antibacterial, hence why honey can stay good like forever. It’s a cheap way to increase shelf life that also makes people really like the food because we evolutionary seek that stuff out. It’s not right though. We work long hours so convenient foods should allow us to buy back some time. But when they’re all like this, you end up either having to do it yourself or risk your health. There should absolutely be limits. But with food costs as they are, who is going to fight for that? The alternatives are more expensive, or you reduce shelf life. It’s much better regulated here in the EU but we too are still not there, obesity is still on the rise.
It’s tasty, cheap, antibacterial and gives attractive colors (caramel). That’s why companies like to put it everywhere, it’s just awfully convenient.
I live in the UK and was astounded at the sugar consumption when I visited the US.
The most interesting one was bread - it was so sweet, almost like cake, while our bread is just plan savoury bread.
There seems to be an OTT approach to added sweetness that I thought was bad in the UK but is next level in north America.
Another key difference was the milk in coffee shops. I went into Double cup and found some half and half (semi skimmed milk?) and dumped a bunch of it in my coffee. Nope literally half cream half milk. Blllerchhhh.
That just doesn’t even exist over here.
You can also just get fruity syrup and make syrup juice with a lot of water.
Nope, not an option. If I want a glass of coke after I brushed my teeth - I don’t want any sugar in it
Drinking coke - sugar free or otherwise - right after you brush your teeth will still fuck up your teeth.
It’s rammed full of acid.
Except it doesn’t stay in your mouth for hours because you salivate. With sugar, judging by how my mouth feels, the bacteria stays and probably has a whole ass banquet for hours after
Splenda is worse… Stevia is fine
I find that Stevia has a vaguely creamy flavour to it. Which works well in some instances, and not in others.
Aspartame just tastes awful, for me I get this weird sticky/bitter sensation over the roof of my mouth and turn my throat.
Splenda/Sucralose tastes fine, but has noticeable effects elsewhere, which are a bit TMI.
Stevia tastes just awful to me. I wish I liked it.
That’s not better. Splenda just tastes odd. And I haven’t seen that in stores in years, and I don’t remember liking it the first time around
Splenda legit causes digestive problems… Aspartame is fine… Especially in comparison
No matter what they say, i’ll assume aspartamine is poison and refuse to eat anything that has it.
I think the same thing about everything! Never believe anything that doesn’t align with my personal beliefs no matter how much evidence exists to the contrary!
I just dont want to risk it, because i’ll be the only one who faces the consequences if it causes cancer after all. It also tastes awful anyway, i’d rather drink completely unsweetened drinks.
A soft drink cabal dedicated to making sure we can still put poison in consumables.
The world just keeps getting weirder.
I think it’s sort of a catch 22. The people that tend to be the most knowledgeable about a particular science often have industry experience doing the exact thing you want them to study now. The idea that people could study the effects of aspartame for decades but are now “tainted” because they used to work for a soda company doesn’t necessarily square up to economic reality.
If however, you choose to put your foot in the sand there you’re going to have a bunch of people on a committee that have no idea what they are doing (which by the way people will also criticize you for) Remember when Trump appointed senior cabinet positions to people with completely unrelated experience? Such as Ben Carson (a former medical doctor) being appointed secretary of housing.
It’s a lose/lose situation I’m not sure what you all are expecting.
Similar to how oil companies researched global warming. They have the scientists in the right field and the data, but corporate interests will cover up things that don’t align to their business models.
Overall if the study is sound, other scientists can chime in and prove or disprove their results. Really the laymen should take studies (done by anyone) with a grain of salt until the wider community comes to a consensus,
It’s almost as if it’s not necessarily a dichotomy at all
That situation is a bit different. Oil Companies performed proprietary research internally and promoted those results as scientific. Whereas, the implication in this post here is that anyone who ever worked for an oil company in climate science can no longer do climate science for an agency.
Literally every fucking health org has studied the chemical and found no evidence of health issues connected to it. It’s only this one study that the IARC cites. And IARC doesn’t take dosage into account either.
Regardless of people’s taste for aspartame, it is literally not dangerous. It does taste dry. It doesn’t taste like sugar. You do not have to enjoy it. But it is not bad for you.
edit: my badly worded comment got some discussion going which is great. I just want to say that I was being as hyperbolic as the worried people and I’m sorry. Of course it’s not black or white. There are factors to consider, but what I was trying to express was that aspartame leans to the safe side rather than dangerous.
Obviously do not drink 25 cans of soda a day, obviously do not compensate for the fact that you’re drinking a “light” product by consuming more of it. But a can a day isn’t gonna ruin your health.
One thing I always like to remind people of: The fact that these effects are, if at all existent, so small that they can barely be observed also means that if they do turn out to be harmful, it’s not too bad, as the harm is also small. It’s not like e.g. lead in the water where you can very clearly prove a significant harm.
You can almost never say that something is not dangerous, unless it’s practically mathematically proven…
This applies especially for food etc.
I think we have to be much more conservative with food and substances we put into it. A lot of (Meta-)meta-studies suggest, that processed food is a health risk.
And this may sound a little bit far-fetched, but I think a good amount of the idiocracy in (especially) the USA may be related to the food (as also a lot of studies have found connections to brain/psychological health).
Yeah, actually.
And, like, literally EVERYTHING has an LD50 value.
For some things, the value is astronomically gargantuan, though.
Like, if you have to consume more than your body weight of a substance within thirty minutes in order for it to have a lethal effect, it’s very improbable to ever happen by accident, and very difficult to make happen on purpose.
Allegedly, the LD50 for aspartame is 10,000 mg per kg of body weight
(I fucked up the math on the line that used to be here and got justly called out for it; 10,000 mg is only 10 grams. If someone weighs 60kg it would only be 600 grams which is still A LOT but not nearly what I thought it said at first) (And that’s how much to get to a fifty percent chance of dying - I don’t know what the shape of the curve was leading up to this point, it could be nonlinear.) HOWEVER, I can’t recall if LD50 only accounts for acute mortality, or if it also accounts for chronic mortality; like, if it gives you a type of cancer that takes 20 years to kill you somehow, is that even known? no idea.10,000 mg equals 10 g, not 10 kg, so you would only need 1/100 of your body weight. Still an unrealistic amount, but far away from 10x.
10,000 mg per kg of body weight you would literally have to consume 10x your body weight in aspartame
10g/kg is actually 1/100th your weight, not 10 times it
Shit, yeah, I fucked up that math good and hard
Additionally to what the others already said:
LD50 and “bad for your health” are quite separate things.
Vitamin D for example has an LD50 of ~30mg per kg. So according to your logic, it’s way unhealthier than aspartame (factor ~100). Though in reality you would die without vitamin D intake.
Except for the fact that a decade ago aspartame was shown to create pre-diabetic conditions in the gut, like sugar, except worse. And that studies proved that because psychologically people think it’s “light” they drink more soda and actually gain weight. Yeah if you ignore those pesky little facts it’s totally is 100% harmless. So definitely go around telling people it’s 100% harmless.
Do you have stock in diet Coke or what?
A story as old as time: People who make decisions being paid by people who benefit from the “right” decisions.
I still wonder if artificial sweeteners mess with metabolism, say by training people to ignore satiety signals, which would be why we saw that study a few days back saying artificial sweeteners are associated with weight gain.
Sweeteners are worse than sugar.
One theory is that the body doesn’t know if the sweetness is sugar or sweetener. So it produces insulin to take care of it. When the level of insulin gets too high the body tries to compensate by eating more. If that “more” is more sweetener…
Unless I’m missing something this seems trivial to test. Just test blood sugar before and after drinking a diet soda. If bloods sugar goes down then the sweetener likely caused a release of insulin. If it doesn’t change then it didn’t.
It seems petty far-fetched. If artificial sweeteners caused a runaway insulin spike then I would expect them to cause a lot of cases of diabetic shock.
Never experienced hypoglycemia while on keto and using sweeteners lol
You heard it here guys, this dude is pretty sure it never happened to him, so it’s definitely fine.
It’s just as valid, if not maybe a little more, than the guy claiming it is the reason. People are allowed to discuss their personal opinions and they should need to include that it’s only a sample size of one and not independently verified. No one should be stupid enough to think they’re claiming otherwise and need to say it out loud that they don’t trust it.
Anecdotes are not “personal opinions” and they certainly aren’t valid or valuable in the context of evaluating scientific claims.
No, it isn’t valuable for scientific evaluation. They are valid though. Anyway, the other comment was just a claim without any supporting evidence for it but no one felt they needed to point that out.
Nobody claims it’s fine, it’s just a personal example
The insulin response you’re talking about is very small and it doesn’t lead to a chain reaction.
While I’m no expert, that doesn’t sound correct to me. I’d expect highly specific binding dependent on the chemical structure of glucose would be required to elevate insulin. A quick search seems to support that. I’m sure there are lots of studies on this that you could find if interested.
Would this fall under the purvey of regulatory capture?
Regulatory bodies tend to act purely as pipelines getting people jobs in the industry they are supposed to be regulating.
Profits before people, as always.
This kind of shit makes people distrustful of science in general. Way to go, guys.
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Don’t worry, it’s all worth it in the end because the corpos made more money! /s
It should make you distrustful of politics, lawmakers, lobbyists, and capitalism not science itself. Pure science is unbiased and systematic, by definition.
Science is done by people, and people are inherently biased at all times and about all things, consciously or not.
The issue here isn’t bias, it’s a conflict of interest.
The WHO is rotten to the core. They are in bed with WEF corpos.
these kinds of conflicts of interests need to be disclosed properly, clearly and up front, and folks need to be critical until its sufficiently peer reviewed
whether other findings agree with these isnt relevant, its still extremely important that folks know that corporate interests might be colouring any given paper
researchers in a given field are practically always going to have jobs with big players in those fields, but taking biases into account is still important for interpreting findings
Okay, so, let me get this straight. This panel said aspartame is safe, but it’s got a conflict of interest, so we should ignore all that and fall back to the conventional wisdom that…aspartame is safe?
Nothing to see here move along
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That site is sketch as fuck. Covid bullshit, the works.
Oh shit, you’re right. I’ll delete.
Just looking at the list of topics (“All topics” button in the menu) raises some major alarm flags about the trustworthyness of usrtk.org as a source.
They’re a pretty well known anti-science group.
I deleted it, it was linked to a WHO article so they got me. Sorry about that.
The biggest issue I’m seeing is there’s other research that is the opposite of that so it keeps going back and forth which is problematic and hard to parse.
Edit: Like others stated that site is extremely sketchy and I’m very skeptical of their credibility.
Also it tastes like ass
bad news : “Guideline on Diet Coke ingredient by consultants tied to industry is ‘obvious conflict of interest’ and ‘not credible’, report says”
protip : don’t drink or eat anything with any amount of Aspartame in it, as it isn’t safe, or, you know, party on garth, it’s your life, how long and healthy it will be sometimes is completely up to you
People are on so much garbage now it’s hard to pinpoint what makes them sick. I told someone about aspartame giving me headaches that felt like what they described and it cured them of the headaches they where getting bc they didn’t realize it could be a factor.
