Does it have atomic mass? Then it probably can cause cancer.
This is a good rule, especially for things that change their own atomic mass.
Does it interact in any way whatsoever with the electromagnetic spectrum?
Yeah that’ll give you cancer alright
I have atomic mass … am I … Doctor Manhattan?
Good to know, I’ll stick to sodas full of sugar, no problem can come from that 👍
The article says that sugar based drinks are far worse for your health than diet versions.
Your average pseudoscience obsessed health hobbyist is never going to notice that particular detail though.
What kind of sugar? High fructose corn syrup or sugar?
HFCS is metabolized in the liver making it far more damaging to the body. And soda that uses real sugar typically has a lower sugar content. Soda with real sugar also imparts a feeling of fullness, typically resulting in people drinking less.
I am going to need a source that HFCS is worse than sucrose for your liver.
People hear “high fructose” in High Fructose Corn Syrup and assume it’s in comparison to other sugars, it is not. High Fructose corn syrup is a name to differentiate it from regular corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose.
Let’s look at the real differences between HFCS and sucrose or table sugar. Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. HFCS is usually 55% fructose in beverages and 42% in most other HCFS sweetened products. This means that typically the High Fructose corn syrup has less fructose than regular sugar.
You could focus on beverages, but 5% isn’t a huge difference, and if your going to talk about the dangers of sugary beverages it’s always important to remind people that fruit juice has A LOT of fructose (go figure).
Sugar itself is the problem, monitor intake. HCFS is only an issue because the price drove down the cost of sweetening foods to everyone’s detriment.
(Here’s a study on the liver effects.)[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6549781/]
It doesn’t specifically say that fructose has a worse effect on the liver than sucrose, but it does say that fructose is 2x sweeter than glucose, which makes it more addicting, which causes you to drink more because you crave it. So I went looking up sweetness scales and fructose is also sweeter than sucrose (which is still sweeter than glucose), sometimes by a significant margin.
So if both are bad on the liver, fructose could possibly be worse because of a higher level of addiction due to sweetness level, which causes you to consume more than you might with just sucrose.
But sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose. And HFCS is either 42/58 or 55/45. They are basically the same thing.
My brother in Christ, why is sucrose bad for your liver? Because it is metabolized into glucose and… Fructose
The metabolism of sucrose into glucose and fructose happens in the small intestines. Fructose enters the bloodstream and is metabolized by the liver.
Don’t most sodas have corn syrup and stuff instead of sugar?
In the US.
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You probably meant sucrose. Sucralose is a calorie-free sweetener.
And, as a quick aside, a side effect of the sweetener is to damage DNA.
Most of the smaller soda brands in the US use sugar, too. Just the big boys still using corn syrup at this point.
Here’s another year old article that came out in response to this.
TLDR: You should not worry, and the only people who might think about worrying are those drinking 12 cans of diet soda a day — so basically no one.
“Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most consumers,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at the WHO, during a press conference in Geneva. He said the problem is for “high consumers” of diet soda or other foods that contain aspartame. “We have, in a sense, raised a flag here,” Branca said, and he called for more research.
But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it disagrees with this new classification, pointing to evidence of safety. In a written statement, an FDA official told NPR that aspartame being labeled by the WHO “as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer.”
The WHO has long set the acceptable daily intake, or ADI, of aspartame at a maximum of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. So, a person who weighs 60 kilograms (about 130 pounds), could consume up to 2,400 milligrams per day, which is roughly equivalent to 12 cans of Diet Coke — much higher than most people consume.
I beg to differ I know for fact my dad drinks 12 cans or more a day. Hell I did at one time but with regular Dr Pepper. It not hard to go through a 12oz can of soda.
Bro drink some water.
Oh I do a ton. I was referring when I was younger.
I have a coworker who has a 1.5L bottle of coke zero beside him everyday.
How big is said coworker? And I remember working in call center when I was younger and always having a 20oz bottle of soda. Looking back I know how dumb that was, but shit I smoked cigarettes back then too so wasn’t all they bright.
Regular Coke, sure not hard. Diet, though?
The few people I’ve known that would drink that much daily drink diet only. It has been pretty obvious throughout my life that people who have no self-control are more likely to go for things like diet sodas and “lite” whatever. I hate sweeteners, I can’t stand diet anything both because it tastes bad to me and it makes me feel ill, but to me it still seems like it would be easier to drink 12 cans of diet soda than the same amount of “normal” soda. It’s a disgusting amount either way.
The Vox article comes to the same conclusion.
In Mexico and other countries there are cities where you cannot drink the water so you end up drinking soda your entire life. Coca-Cola buys the good water and pollutes the rest so that they are the only safe drinking option.
I came in here ready to defend delicious aspartame from people who aren’t science literate and was surprised to see many really good arguments and comments already posted. Lemmy, you’re pretty cool as a community right now.
Realistically what it means is that millions of people will react with “meh, still gonna use it.” I mean, have you met humans? We knew lead was toxic since at least the Roman era, but that didn’t stop us from using it in everything - including food and drink.
The difference is that you can completely avoid lead poisoning if you eliminate exposure to lead, but you can’t completely avoid cancer even if you eliminate exposure to carcinogens.
And eliminating exposure to aspartame would have only a minimal effect, at best, on your overall risk of cancer.
And they’ll do that while standing in bright sunlight without sunscreen, drinking beer, eating red meat, processed food, candy with real sugar and driving in fossil fuel cars which are in the same or higher category of cancer risks.
candy tastes good, beer gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and i ain’t paying 10x more money for a car just so i get to spend 10 hours a week at some charging station so my tablet with wheels can go whirrrr.
Are you somehow defending leaded gasoline?
there is no lead in gasoline anymore
Unfortunately, there is actually. Aviation fuels, even “low-lead” variants still use lead. Virtually all small propeller aircraft use leaded gas.
well, i never said i fly. and with lithium being the “best” battery technology, electric planes would be a little heavy.
Don’t forget cell phones, which are in the same risk category as aspartame.
So according to WHO, aspartame is more cancerous than glyphosate
A few months ago, Ann Reardon released a good video covering this
That was genuinely an excellent video, thanks for sharing. :)
Science Vs did an episode on this years ago.
Science Vs: Artificial Sweeteners - not so sweet?
Episode webpage: https://gimletmedia.com/science-vs/
That’s cool. I just suggested the Ann Reardon video because she’s addressing the findings from the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that’s also mentioned in this article.
Mexican coke > regular Coke
Mexican coke Lite > Diet coke
Sorry y’all that’s just coke math.
colombian coke >
No sugar, no aspartame, just pure taste
EDIT: This is, in fact, false information! Please refer to @FlowVoid@lemmy.world’s comment for the facts.
Mexican coke has been found to have no sugar in it, it also uses High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Any flavor enhancement over regular coke appears to be placebo, possibly an effect of the glass bottle.
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The study he references suggests that Coca-cola is essentially lying, because no one other than that study bothered to test if there was Sugar or HFCS in the soda labeled with Cane Sugar.
Considering Coca-Cola is a company known for being willing to murder union organizers, I don’t think it’s a stretch that they’d lie about that for profits.
The study he references also did not bother to test for sugar, only fructose.
When they later repeated their analysis, they found that Mexican Coca Cola actually does contain sugar, unlike American Coca Cola.
The paper cited in that video had serious flaws in their methodology.
A repeat analysis by the same group found that Mexican Coca Cola actually does contain table sugar (sucrose) as well as fructose, whereas American Coca Cola contains no table sugar and more fructose than the Mexican version.
Cheers for that information! I’ve corrected my post to reflect this.
I never trusted the stuff. We use to say this matter-of-factly when I was a kid, about thirty years ago. I’m glad to see that my unfounded confidence and speculation turned out to be right!
Ehhh, not so much. Honestly the rating for carcinogenic substances is very shaky and can be very misleading. Like many things, poison depends on the dose and the same with carcinogens. Bacon is a group 1 carcinogen, and cigarettes are a group 1 carcinogen. Despite the same rating, cigarettes are BY FAR much more carcinogenic.
For group 2b “possible carcinogens”, it usually coincides with the frequency of the product. For this rating they review what a cancer victim typically eats/consumes/interacts with. Aspartame and many other ingredients, are labeled as possibly carcinogenic, as many victims have eaten them, but there is no strong correlation.
The problem is however, many of these ingredients are so common that almost everybody eats them. It’s like saying “everybody who drinks water dies, it’s poisonous!”.
“possibly”
Not exactly. In this context “possibly causes cancer” translates to something like ‘we have no credible evidence that it does, but we can’t prove that it doesn’t.’
In the early days of YouTube, after I saw a video where they boiled a can of Coke and found 13 spoons of sugar. I stopped drinking that stuff. Aspartame or not, I’d rather drink water.
yeah def dont drink calories for no reason especially this stuff
Damn. I’ve got the Mountain Dew drinkers riled up.
“Possibly causes cancer” is sufficient for me to never the touch the stuff. Please stop drinking these things. They’re literally addictive.
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Your dad has been wrong for almost 40 years.
Depends on if he made the statement in California or not.
In California sand has a warning label.
To be fair, eating, drinking, or inhaling sand is not great for you.
Oh crap, now what am I going to have for lunches.
One thing I have observed with sodas containing aspartame, is the short shelf life, I think normally they give sodas 1 year but after 6 months the soda starts having an off taste that only gets stronger.
I have tried drinking a can of zero that was 2 years past the expiration date, and it tasted like cat piss.
Ps: I guess the aspartame molecules are not very stable in a soda mix?
