First, The Guardian uses statements from a no-name group "US Right-To-Know" instead of doing fact-finding themselves. Fact-finding is what good journalism is all about.
Second, it is quite bold to assume that any academic who produced a joint industrial-academic report is corrupt. Setting aside the borderline irresponsible generalisation, many universities set strict conditions for such cooperation. The most prominent is a condition not to be paid or remunerated in any other way for the joint work. The Guardian did not even try to check if any remuneration took place.
This makes it impossible for me to form an opinion about the article contents.
Indeed, I just stopped reading half way through, because it's extremely low quality journalism. A conflict of interest doesn't mean full blown corruption, they might still have done the right thing with a conflict of interest. That's the job of the journalist, to properly dig in and find evidence for their case. Instead they just introduced more noise to an already noisy topic full of controversy.
Does this change the scientific consensus? It seems like aspartame is actually safe in the concentrations we use - noted bad effects happen at very high amounts, like the equivalent of 150 cans of diet coke level high. Has anything absurdly changed on this front?
I might just be tired, but it seems like this article is poorly written. Which contention is tied to the alleged front group? Is Coca-Cola trying to get us to believe that aspartame is dangerous, or are they trying to get us to believe it's not dangerous?
It's not immediately obvious to me that Coca Cola would benefit from either argument. Don't they sell a crapload of aspartame?
From the article:
> A few months later, WHO declared aspartame, a key ingredient in Diet Coke, to be a “possible carcinogen”, then quickly issued a third report that seemed to contradict its previous findings – people could continue consuming the product at levels determined to be safe decades ago, before new science cited by WHO raised health concerns.
That contradiction stems from beverage industry corruption of the review process by consultants tied to an alleged Coca-Cola front group, the public health advocacy group US Right-To-Know said in a recent report. <
So, the second of your ideas is the correct interpretation. In my real layman's take of the timeline it went as such:
1) First report says Aspartame potentially bad.
2) Second report says, yeah, pretty sure Aspartame bad and going to go on the naughty list.
3) Third report comes out contradicting the previous reports, says everything is okie dokie artichokie.
The third report is the one being linked to a Coca-Cola front group.
It's pretty obvious in the article? The WHO put out multiple, seemingly contradictory articles a while ago (I remember reading about it, and people were confused at the time). Turns out the one that say it was safe was secretly funded by Coca-Cola.
It's fairly obvious that they would benefit from apartame's potential risks being ignored.
The WHO issued two statements against aspartame, then a third saying it was safe. The third paragraph of the article states
That contradiction stems from beverage industry corruption of the review process by consultants tied to an alleged Coca-Cola front group, the public health advocacy group US Right-To-Know said in a recent report.
The food industry in the US is making us sick. Full stop. Combine that with a healthcare industry that cares for anything but health[1] and I can't help but think we may be on the precipice of a set of problems not seen before in society.
1: My wife is a Nurse Practitioner with 20 years of experience. Her and every provider she knows that I have met have, in sadness, agreed with that statement. They got into medicine to help people but the companies they work for only see patients as profit centers.
I'm assuming you're a North American like myself. I find it shocking how attitudes towards health and food in Europe are so different from here. Flying back from France or Italy through the USA is a surreal experience -- obesity is a major problem in America and a pretty bad one in Canada as well.
I am convinced it's not a problem of willpower, but the food just being engineered to be addictive and overly flavourful at any cost.
This is so true, and so wrong. We will look back and see it as outright barbarism.
I think we're headed towards a major Constitution revision (or a sequel to the Declaration of Independence) within a couple of generations, and the "rights" we will enshrine will include things like "health care whose PKI is health outcomes and not profit" and "money cannot be a factor in elections".
Of course, voter education has to go right along with that.
While I agree with the truth of your first statement, your view seems rather black and white. Companies don’t only see patients as profit centers, most investors probably do. Anthropomorphizing corporations is of little value, arguably a dangerous abstraction.
Food industry everywhere is making everyone sick. The difference is culturally, we don’t care in the US. How many people in the US make food at home? And by make food, I don’t mean heat frozen meals or throw ready made pasta on pasta? That makes a huge difference on how sick we get.
Wait until you find out about the US cosmetics industry
> The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not require cosmetic products and ingredients to be approved by FDA before they go on the market, except for color additives that are not intended for use as coal tar hair dyes
If there were one food & safety item the Biden Administration should put its focus on, it's destroying the US addiction to sugar generally and high fructose corn syrup specifically. It would be an immense contribution to roll that backwards. And fix the mistake of proclaiming fat in general to be the problem decades past, by pushing national education on healthy / unhealthy fats. The US Government has a budget to put ads everywhere just focused on this matter.
And regarding the healthcare industrial complex. For the US scenario, there is only one approach that will work at this point: California needs to build its own universal healthcare system from the ground-up, and that includes utilizing the UC university system to train / educate its labor just to build that up. It's already understood how to model it, there are numerous good example nations to choose from (there are obviously multiple variations of a universal system that will work, and far better than what the US is doing now). California has scale and can control many aspects of a healthcare system that a smaller, weaker state can't (including manufacturing its own generic drugs if necessary).
Many prominent politicians keep trying to force universal healthcare as an idea, as though we can just slap it on top of our existing cost structure. It doesn't work right now due to the extreme cost of US healthcare (unless we want to instantly go broke nationally). You have to be able to start over from first steps and contain the cost correctly from day one. California is one of the few places that can do that, and it has the best shot at it overall (some money, majority favors universal healthcare politically, UC system, etc).
No need to bring in a distracting discussion about private vs. public health system. In Europe the public health systems are doing terrible, too.
Things I've been told by doctors in USA and Europe: "Hospitals are full of obese and old people." "A significant chunk of the budget goes to a small fraction of extremely unhealthy people who keep coming back."
Boomers are getting really old and are starting to overload the system. Anything done to make them healthier counts.
Well we've seen hockey stick shaped population level increases in obesity[1] and colon cancer[2] in the last 40 or so years. Doesn't go to say it was caused by aspartame, but I don't think it can be argued we haven't seen population level effects of something.
Population-level data, when combined with aspartame consumption, is enough to give us an approximate upper limit on how toxic aspartame is. The largest issue with estimating the upper level of toxicity would be if another unaccounted for population change decreased the risk of cancer at the same time aspartame increased the risk. Then, it's unfair to assign aspartame the entirety of that increased risk. There's probably hundreds of things introduced in modern life that have some impact on health but aren't fully accounted for in population level data.
All of this is to say, if aspartame caused cancer at the same rate as smoking, then we'd probably know about it by studying population-level data. There is a level of health impact that we should be concerned about but could get lost in all the other things happening to the population.
There could be population level effects right now.
I think the better question is wouldnt research have uncovered something more damning by now. Its very well researched and the conclusions at this point are fairly benign. Yeah, dont drink 100 cans a day or you might have problems. That basically means its harmless. That makes it less dangerous than kale or spinach which you actually can eat concerning amounts of.
The problem is we've been eating a bunch of other new industrial foods as well. There are a bunch of unexplained population-effects over the last 50 years such as increasing obesity, allergies, autism, different cancers, etc. It's just impossible to make the link between each new chemical and each new disease.
Obesity rates start dramatically rising around the time aspartame came to market in 1993. CDC's data isn't very granular[0], but there is a slight upward trend until 1976-1980, the next data point 1986-1994 is significantly higher and continues to rise at a much higher rate. Obviously correlation, but obesity is a contributing factor to a significant number of diseases and health issues.
There's a Quora answer that suggests aspartame was banned in France in 2015, but aspartame searches are so astroturfed on Google that I can't find anything that confirms that. There also doesn't seem to be any obvious obesity studies with data from France after 2010, if that's true.
At least one study suggests artificial sweeteners break satiation leading to increased consumption[1].
Aspartame may not be directly toxic, but there seems to be increasing evidence that it negatively affects dietary habits of some portion of the population, and that it does not contribute to weight reduction in human consumers[2].
Is it possible for a US federal organization to settle the science question sufficiently, in a timely manner?
And for US regulatory authorities to take any appropriate action based on that?
Also, whenever it's found that a company is knowingly creating a public health hazard, including by suppressing and falsifying scientific research, do we yet have federal mechanisms to smack that down while it's happening?
If PFAS compounds are any indication, no. Industry will successfully stall and sow doubt on the science question for decades. Regulatory authorities will act after that, at which point they switch to a similar compound and the clock resets. Fifty years later, there'll be a settlement far lower than the accumulated profits that doesn't begin to cover the damages.
I'm conflicted about this story. I fully believe that Coca-cola and other megacorps would have front groups undermining health research, but I'd normally expect it to be arguing against sugar replacements.
The linked report is done by a group that has previously found the front group working to undermine warnings about sugar and soda taxes (which despite the name are generally sugar taxes, and don't apply to low sugar sodas):
> ILSI sugar study out of ‘tobacco industry’s playbook’
> In 2016, public health experts denounced an ILSI-funded sugar study published in a prominent medical journal that was a “scathing attack on global health advice to eat less sugar,” reported Anahad O’Connor in the New York Times. The ILSI-funded study argued that warnings to cut sugar are based on weak evidence and cannot be trusted.
But I guess it's possible that both Sugar and Aspartame are bad for you and they'll just try to undermine any possible health risk from the so-called "food" industry.
It seems to me that at this point there are certain topics that trigger both superstitions and defensive reactions from industry that a totally different funding model is needed. How could we fund proper scientifc research on topics like sweeteners, Roundup or GMOs?
reproduce the science and publish the results or move on
it serves nobody to pretend as if some random group of people are going to organically put their resources into a specific study, and then act surprised when someone that is professionally familiar with the subject matter for money eventually is doing the studies
Aspartame has been a boogeyman for literally decades, and yet no solid experimental study has shown evidence of carcinogenic activity nor of any negative health effects at realistic quantities.
Any risk posed by aspartame is completely overshadowed by the risks posed by the sugary alterative.
Sugar in general is one of those topics where otherwise intelligent people will suddenly lose the capacity for critical thought-- espousing the use of fructose-based sweeteners (agave) in lieu of HFCS over some concern over fructose, or opting for "natural sucrose" over a non-caloric, zero GI option like erithrytol.
Asking questions about who is funding the research is valid but anytime someone starts coming for the non-sugar option it should raise red flags about the motive for doing so; I would argue that the sugar lobby is far more concerning than the sweetener lobby. Diabetes, not aspartame overdose, is the real killer today.
You mean the BS report that more confuses than helps people? That puts it as a “possible carcinogen” (list 2B https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/IARC_MON... ) together with a laundry list of common things that may or may not cause cancer (in doses that may or may not be realistic)
You can bet that excessive sugar and obesity contribute more to overall disease than aspartame ever will.
Artificial sweeteners are, as a class, extra fattening. They are absolutely counterproductive to anyone trying to reduce weight or indulgence in sweet foods.
The sweeteners are far sweeter than anything in nature, and so they trick the body into going into a sugar-processing mode, but there's no sugar to be had, so the pancreas goes absolutely nuts. Artificial sweeteners are essentially malware that you're putting into your body to hack its processes.
I bet they will feel more energetic and alert. They may also feel more jittery and anxious and may find it difficult to go to sleep. Coffee has triple the caffeine of Coke, and tea has double.
I would very strongly encourage people to switch to water and take notes on how they feel. Be sure to stay with it for the withdrawal symptoms to disappear.
[+] [-] smarx007|2 years ago|reply
First, The Guardian uses statements from a no-name group "US Right-To-Know" instead of doing fact-finding themselves. Fact-finding is what good journalism is all about.
Second, it is quite bold to assume that any academic who produced a joint industrial-academic report is corrupt. Setting aside the borderline irresponsible generalisation, many universities set strict conditions for such cooperation. The most prominent is a condition not to be paid or remunerated in any other way for the joint work. The Guardian did not even try to check if any remuneration took place.
This makes it impossible for me to form an opinion about the article contents.
[+] [-] carlosbaraza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdoug|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kunwon1|2 years ago|reply
It's not immediately obvious to me that Coca Cola would benefit from either argument. Don't they sell a crapload of aspartame?
[+] [-] nxoxn|2 years ago|reply
That contradiction stems from beverage industry corruption of the review process by consultants tied to an alleged Coca-Cola front group, the public health advocacy group US Right-To-Know said in a recent report. <
So, the second of your ideas is the correct interpretation. In my real layman's take of the timeline it went as such:
1) First report says Aspartame potentially bad.
2) Second report says, yeah, pretty sure Aspartame bad and going to go on the naughty list.
3) Third report comes out contradicting the previous reports, says everything is okie dokie artichokie.
The third report is the one being linked to a Coca-Cola front group.
[+] [-] ajkjk|2 years ago|reply
It's fairly obvious that they would benefit from apartame's potential risks being ignored.
[+] [-] kevinventullo|2 years ago|reply
That contradiction stems from beverage industry corruption of the review process by consultants tied to an alleged Coca-Cola front group, the public health advocacy group US Right-To-Know said in a recent report.
[+] [-] blackhaz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zelphyr|2 years ago|reply
1: My wife is a Nurse Practitioner with 20 years of experience. Her and every provider she knows that I have met have, in sadness, agreed with that statement. They got into medicine to help people but the companies they work for only see patients as profit centers.
[+] [-] mmastrac|2 years ago|reply
I am convinced it's not a problem of willpower, but the food just being engineered to be addictive and overly flavourful at any cost.
[+] [-] neolefty|2 years ago|reply
I think we're headed towards a major Constitution revision (or a sequel to the Declaration of Independence) within a couple of generations, and the "rights" we will enshrine will include things like "health care whose PKI is health outcomes and not profit" and "money cannot be a factor in elections".
Of course, voter education has to go right along with that.
[+] [-] 2devnull|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordae|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darth_avocado|2 years ago|reply
Food industry everywhere is making everyone sick. The difference is culturally, we don’t care in the US. How many people in the US make food at home? And by make food, I don’t mean heat frozen meals or throw ready made pasta on pasta? That makes a huge difference on how sick we get.
[+] [-] schleck8|2 years ago|reply
> The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not require cosmetic products and ingredients to be approved by FDA before they go on the market, except for color additives that are not intended for use as coal tar hair dyes
https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetic-products-ingredients/...
And that includes additives strongly suspected of being carcinogenic like specific estrogen-agonistic parabens
[+] [-] adventured|2 years ago|reply
And regarding the healthcare industrial complex. For the US scenario, there is only one approach that will work at this point: California needs to build its own universal healthcare system from the ground-up, and that includes utilizing the UC university system to train / educate its labor just to build that up. It's already understood how to model it, there are numerous good example nations to choose from (there are obviously multiple variations of a universal system that will work, and far better than what the US is doing now). California has scale and can control many aspects of a healthcare system that a smaller, weaker state can't (including manufacturing its own generic drugs if necessary).
Many prominent politicians keep trying to force universal healthcare as an idea, as though we can just slap it on top of our existing cost structure. It doesn't work right now due to the extreme cost of US healthcare (unless we want to instantly go broke nationally). You have to be able to start over from first steps and contain the cost correctly from day one. California is one of the few places that can do that, and it has the best shot at it overall (some money, majority favors universal healthcare politically, UC system, etc).
[+] [-] alecco|2 years ago|reply
Things I've been told by doctors in USA and Europe: "Hospitals are full of obese and old people." "A significant chunk of the budget goes to a small fraction of extremely unhealthy people who keep coming back."
Boomers are getting really old and are starting to overload the system. Anything done to make them healthier counts.
[+] [-] ttul|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/hestat/obesity_adult_07_08/obe...
[2] https://gut.bmj.com/content/gutjnl/68/10/1820.full.pdf
[+] [-] hx8|2 years ago|reply
All of this is to say, if aspartame caused cancer at the same rate as smoking, then we'd probably know about it by studying population-level data. There is a level of health impact that we should be concerned about but could get lost in all the other things happening to the population.
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
I think the better question is wouldnt research have uncovered something more damning by now. Its very well researched and the conclusions at this point are fairly benign. Yeah, dont drink 100 cans a day or you might have problems. That basically means its harmless. That makes it less dangerous than kale or spinach which you actually can eat concerning amounts of.
[+] [-] candiddevmike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downWidOutaFite|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuaxo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|2 years ago|reply
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/
I personally avoid the stuff, preferring to just limit sugar.
[+] [-] jonhohle|2 years ago|reply
There's a Quora answer that suggests aspartame was banned in France in 2015, but aspartame searches are so astroturfed on Google that I can't find anything that confirms that. There also doesn't seem to be any obvious obesity studies with data from France after 2010, if that's true.
At least one study suggests artificial sweeteners break satiation leading to increased consumption[1].
Aspartame may not be directly toxic, but there seems to be increasing evidence that it negatively affects dietary habits of some portion of the population, and that it does not contribute to weight reduction in human consumers[2].
0 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/obe... 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/ 2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7817779/
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
And for US regulatory authorities to take any appropriate action based on that?
Also, whenever it's found that a company is knowingly creating a public health hazard, including by suppressing and falsifying scientific research, do we yet have federal mechanisms to smack that down while it's happening?
[+] [-] ceejayoz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|2 years ago|reply
The linked report is done by a group that has previously found the front group working to undermine warnings about sugar and soda taxes (which despite the name are generally sugar taxes, and don't apply to low sugar sodas):
> ILSI sugar study out of ‘tobacco industry’s playbook’
> In 2016, public health experts denounced an ILSI-funded sugar study published in a prominent medical journal that was a “scathing attack on global health advice to eat less sugar,” reported Anahad O’Connor in the New York Times. The ILSI-funded study argued that warnings to cut sugar are based on weak evidence and cannot be trusted.
But I guess it's possible that both Sugar and Aspartame are bad for you and they'll just try to undermine any possible health risk from the so-called "food" industry.
[+] [-] sampo|2 years ago|reply
Not WHO. IARC declared [1]. WHO itself took a more nuanced position [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Agency_for_Resea...
[2] https://www.who.int/news/item/14-07-2023-aspartame-hazard-an...
[+] [-] zwieback|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordlimecat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spazx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|2 years ago|reply
reproduce the science and publish the results or move on
it serves nobody to pretend as if some random group of people are going to organically put their resources into a specific study, and then act surprised when someone that is professionally familiar with the subject matter for money eventually is doing the studies
[+] [-] lordlimecat|2 years ago|reply
Any risk posed by aspartame is completely overshadowed by the risks posed by the sugary alterative.
Sugar in general is one of those topics where otherwise intelligent people will suddenly lose the capacity for critical thought-- espousing the use of fructose-based sweeteners (agave) in lieu of HFCS over some concern over fructose, or opting for "natural sucrose" over a non-caloric, zero GI option like erithrytol.
Asking questions about who is funding the research is valid but anytime someone starts coming for the non-sugar option it should raise red flags about the motive for doing so; I would argue that the sugar lobby is far more concerning than the sweetener lobby. Diabetes, not aspartame overdose, is the real killer today.
[+] [-] grej|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xattt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|2 years ago|reply
You can bet that excessive sugar and obesity contribute more to overall disease than aspartame ever will.
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
The sweeteners are far sweeter than anything in nature, and so they trick the body into going into a sugar-processing mode, but there's no sugar to be had, so the pancreas goes absolutely nuts. Artificial sweeteners are essentially malware that you're putting into your body to hack its processes.
[+] [-] seanp2k2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faizan-ali|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmonk|2 years ago|reply
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
[+] [-] lawn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darthrupert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mateus1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|2 years ago|reply
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