One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body.
  •  medgremlin   ( @medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
    42•1 year ago

    Oh my fuck. I hate news stories like this. Aspartame falls into the same cancer risk category as eating red meat sometimes and being kinda lazy. A rigorous systematic review was conducted of dozens of studies of aspartame and they did not find a plausible biologic mechanism by which aspartame could cause cancer. Epidemiologically, it’s vaguely correlated, not causative of cancer.

    Also, in the Reuters article it notes that a 132-lbs adult would have to drink 12 to 36 cans of diet coke a day for the dose/exposure to become relevant to the risk they’re talking about. This article is talking about one study that is at odds with the systematically reviewed data from 40 human observational studies, 12 experimental animal studies, and 1360 assay/experimental end points to look for the supposed link.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691522007475#sec5

      •  medgremlin   ( @medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
        2•1 year ago

        Being lazy is vaguely kinda sorta correlated with cancer… but that doesn’t account for the fact that humans who are regularly active are also less likely to make other lifestyle choices that are more significantly tied to cancer like smoking and drinking.

        This is the problem with a lot of population based studies. Obesity is linked with a lot of health problems like cardiovascular disease, but only some aspects of cardiovascular disease have causative links to obesity and others are sequelae of other factors that tend to be associated with obesity. For example, extra weight/adipose puts more stress on your heart by there just being more body mass to deliver blood to and more oxygen demand from muscles to just physically move the weight around (also a cause of joint problems)… but it’s the poor diet full of cholesterol that clogs up the arteries (aka atherosclerosis) causing myocardial infarction (heart attack).

    •  voidbanana   ( @voidbanana@feddit.nu ) English
      3•1 year ago

      Agree, though just because we currently have not been able to establish that something is harmful, we should still be open to reevaluating that assumption given new evidence.

      Consider PFAS, which we for a long time thought was completely inert and harmless, at least after production. Only recently we’ve discovered or perhaps rather accepted that it has adverse effects on human health.

      Another example is freon. A completely awesome product, until we found that it caused the ozone hole and we had to ban it.

      •  medgremlin   ( @medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
        2•1 year ago

        I agree that we should always be open to new evidence, but in this case, the study parameters and methods do not appear to be any different and it is highly unlikely that further study with the same techniques will yield novel results.

  •  Stewie   ( @StewieTheThird@beehaw.org ) English
    6•1 year ago

    Being completely transparent I don’t care if there are any health risks associated with it for the greater population. I am just allergic to it and it gives me the worst shits possible, so if we could stop putting it in things that would be killer. It’s in every gum now so I just can’t buy gum anymore.

    •  HannahBecz   ( @HannahBecz@beehaw.org ) English
      1•1 year ago

      I remember my spouse about 10 years ago now telling their grandfather he shouldn’t drink so much Diet Coke because the aspartame used in it could give him cancer - so I’d say it’s been known a while.