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.
I was under the impression the research showed that there was a risk but you needed to consume an exorbitant amount to get there. Around 20+ cans of coke a day which the majority of people don’t do.
Around 20+ cans of coke a day which the majority of people don’t do.
This guy has never met an American. Ever heard of a Big Gulp? We literally had private companies engineer bigger soda cups to handle how much fucking soda Americans drink.
I dont necessarily disagree with your overall point about Americans drinking a lot of soda, but I don’t think pointing out that a company makes a cup a little smaller than 3 cans of soda is a very strong counterargument to the claim that it takes 20+ to be harmful…
The largest Big Gulp is 50oz and when I was a kid, people leaned on free refills for them. A 50oz is almost a whole 2-liter.
You’re not wrong, it’s not the best example, but I’ve seen people go through numerous Big Gulps a day.
Hell, when I worked overnight as a security guard, one of my fellow guards who drink an entire 2-liter of Mountain Dew to himself every night.
It’s hard for me to think about because I can’t even get through a whole 16oz without stopping halfway because it’s too syrupy.
A 2 liter a day is still miles away from the amount you’d need to drink to reach unsafe levels.
I think you’d have to drink 3+ a day before you’re at unsafe levels if you’re 150lbs (and…well…if we are shitting on eating habits, 150 is a very light American).
Tbf, about half of a Big Gulp is filled with ice.
We literally had private companies engineer bigger soda cups to handle how much fucking soda Americans drink.
This is a really weird statement. Like it was some sort of feat of engineering to manufacture larger cups.
Very arguably, with 1970’s manufacturing standards, and how much 32 ounces of liquid weighs, it was an engineering feat at the time. So much so that the originals looked more like a milk carton.
https://physicalculturestudy.com/2017/08/31/the-history-of-the-big-gulp/
Potts’s desperation caught the attention of Coca-Cola, who in 1976 sent representatives to the merchandise manager with a strange proposition. Coca Cola wanted to create a new 32 ounce cup for their drinks, a previously unheard of amount. The largest size at the time was 20 ounces, and even that was considered to be monstrous. Instinctively Potts refused, claiming that the Cups were “too damn big” and in Potts’s defence, he was right. The design for the 32-ounce cups was square on the bottom and resembled your average milk cartoon.
Not a feat of engineering, a feat of marketing
This is fair lol. I’m Canadian and when I was 17-20 I’d consume around 4-6 cans a day which was a crazy amount to myself and most people. 20+ seems nuts just financially.
You’re not wrong, it is nuts, health-wise and financially!
Remind me of the “Parks and rec” joke about “child-sized soda”: it’s the size of a small child!
They do in Múrica. I’ve seen it
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
I don’t understand how people are so surprised to discover that experts in a particular field or industry…
GASP!
Have worked or continue to work in said field or industry!
Is it really a surprise that an expert in the subject of aspartame works or has worked for one of the biggest users of aspartame? You think aspartame experts are going to work for car companies?
Like if you wanted to find an expert on say… petroleum, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they have worked for an oil company. That said, any obvious conflicts of interest should be noted in any reports so that others are aware, but someone’s expertise shouldn’t be immediately discounted.
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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
This kind of shit makes people distrustful of science in general. Way to go, guys.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
From the start I’ve never drunk all these Zero drinks because after reading a little about just how poisonous aspartame is, it was obvious this stuff shouldn’t be consumed.
I’d rather drink sugar sugar than aspartame. Having said that I’ve just stopped drinking all of these sweet drinks all together.
I hope the truth gets out to the public
There’s no evidence of aspartame being harmful to humans and there’s been a shit ton of research on it from various people
All I can tell you is that the few times I drank it because I had no other option, I had the taste of it in my mouth all night and for several days afterwards. That’s not normal… My body was clearly rejecting it and sending it out though my tongue.
The only way to get rid of it was to scrape my tongue each time my body sent more back until it sent it all out via my tongue …
You don’t like the taste. You just don’t like the taste.
No it’s not that. It tasted fine when I drank it but to have that pure aspartame taste for days thereafter is not fun.
Same, I don’t think it’s a good habit to regularly drink sugary drinks even if they have “fake” sugar in them. It’s just these companies finding ways for us to consume more of their product without the guilt of calories.
When I’m thirsty I drink water. And very rarely will I drink something else with real sugar like juice, a beer, or even rarer an actual soda.
Did WHO know this before announcement? Lol
I mean … the people at WHO who hired them, must have known? (Conflict of interest is important in these kinds of health subjects)…
Of course they still tell diabetics to keep chugging down carbs and just buying more and more insulin…
I dont trust them.
They do?
A story as old as time: People who make decisions being paid by people who benefit from the “right” decisions.
A soft drink cabal dedicated to making sure we can still put poison in consumables.
The world just keeps getting weirder.
Why is it so hard for a company to be like… oh shit, our bad, we won’t use this! Nah. Gotta make the poisoning legal.
Nothing to see here move along
how sweet of them
