This article is exactly why I prefer reading the abstracts from primary research articles. The title here is overly suggestive, it is way too wordy, and moreover attempts to suggest more than there might be: (use of the word "harm" in "harmless" rather than something more direct). A better title would be "artificial sweetener may affect blood sugar and XYZ", and it could have summarized the findings in 1500 words instead of 4600. I realize it's a bit unkosher to criticize the article itself here but c'mon....this is over the top.
You're right and the wording can lead for some to evoke existing implicit (or explicit!) biases one might have (like I do! But I didn't need research to tell me the stuff tastes nasty :D)
The entirety of journalism these days hinges on biased language to push narratives. There is no neutrality in journalism now, and I don't know enough about its history to say whether there ever was any.
This was a frustrating read. The article freely used the term "sweeteners" but without making the distinction between artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame) and natural-derived sweeteners (stevia, xylitol). Later in the article, the term "artificial sweeteners" imply that all sweeteners are problematic (including natural-derived sweeteners).
There are more natural-derived sweeteners now available, although they may be heavily processed. Examples of natural-derived sweeteners: stevia, xylitol, inulin, erythritol, monk fruit extract.
The following paragraph from the article is sloppy:
> "A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege."
The linked study (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/1753-6...) does not mention stevia at all. The linked study refers to "sugar-sweetened beverages". But misleadingly the article author start with stevia (a natural-derived sweetener) then switches to the term "artificially sweetened" and links to the study. The reader is left the implication is that all sweeteners cause toothache.
There is zero inherent difference between natural vs artificial chemicals. It’s only a question of what effect each chemical has have on the body as “natural” chemicals run the full range from mandatory to lethal in minute quantities.
One import distinction is that artificial chemicals were not part of the environment our bodies evolved in, whereas some of the natural chemicals were. Furthermore, most of the natural chemicals would be more closely related to other chemicals we did evolve in contact with. The ones that are less novel to our bodies are less likely (in a very general sense!) to cause trouble.
For example, cyanide is otherwise lethal but widely present in plants, so our bodies are actually pretty good at dealing with it.
So along that axis you could probably lump stevia and aspartame closer together, while sorbitol (which is very much naturally occurring) would be much closer to sucrose.
The problem showed up because we where concentrating chemicals found in plants in the first place. We aren’t adapted to large quantities of refined sugar and repeating the same process with some other sweeteners runs into the same issue. Evolution adapts to specific environments not every single chemical your ancestors encountered even a minuscule quantity of.
I can see why you might find it comforting but it’s really just a just so story. Evolution is really slow and needs significant pressure to result in adaptation, just look at how slowly humanity has been adapting to lactose.
Finding an obscure chemical that humans find sweet and then concentrating or manufacturing massive quantities of it isn’t inherently safe even if trace amounts of it are in some plant.
You're correct that concentration is important. "The dose makes the poison", as they say.
But it's not about being "comforting", it's about having a heuristic to make decisions when you don't have enough hard data. So in general, I try to avoid novel chemicals. It's not a guarantee of anything, but it's good enough for first-pass decision-making.
The thing is, we may have evolved to deal with chemicals that killed us and/or caused serious harm, but there's no evolutionary mechanism that selects for good health - surviving and reproducing are all that matters.
You're alive today, so surely you know better than to go around eating random mushrooms even though those mushrooms are natural. Natural is in no conceivable way a usable heuristic for nontoxic. Trying to actually use that heuristic is a one-way ticket to Pain Town.
The same is true of refining products from organic sources. You don’t directly get 1lb of table sugar from planting a sugar beet, you need to separate the sugar. At scale this involves adding bleaching agents etc which end up in the final product along with whatever contaminates show up.
Run a chemical analysis on several brands of natural sugars and your going to find stuff like sulphur dioxide used as a preservative and trace amounts of industrial lubricants etc.
Yes it is true that any process will have degrees of contamination. I was just contesting that the distribution is “the same”, entirely process/substance dependent!
You're implicitly assuming natural compounds are better than artificial ones. That's not necessarily true. It is maybe more likely to be true, since we may have evolved with exposure to the natural chemical, and our bodies may handle it better. But that's equivalent to saying men are more likely to earn more than women. True on the whole, but nearly completely useless when looking at a particular individual. You really have to examine each compound on its own merits.
> You really have to examine each compound on its own merits.
Isn't this the crux of the issue, that lacking clear predictive models of side-effects (short, mid, and long term) it is better to err on the side of caution with this heuristic. If we can definitively assert outcome, then yes, go with the science.
Also, disagreement regarding equating a cultural phenomena (demographics & earnings) with a biological one. This is an error which leads to false analogies and conclusions.
We're not lacking information though. There are huge amounts of studies available for every FDA approved artificial sweetener. There is more information lacking for some of the less common natural ones.
Also disagree about your disagreement on principle without a structurally valid argument.
> A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child’s risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege
Sugar isn't the only thing that causes tooth decay. Isn't it also the acids in the drink? I'd guess if you currently drink soda flavored with sugar and you're looking to reduce tooth decay, switching to water would be far more effective than switching to an artificially flavored soda.
Acid definitely does. Sugar is bad for your teeth because it feeds bacteria that consume sugar and produce acid. It's the acid that erodes the enamel. The plaque (where these bacteria live) is not influenced by acid, AFAIK. Perhaps there's a dental expert around to enlighten us?
Acid wears away the enamel, which allows plaque to get near the actual tooth, which in turn is fuelled by sugar and burrows in to the core of the tooth -> Ow.
No acid -> tooth decay has a harder time getting through enamel.
Acid, but no sugar -> enamel wears off and tooth decay will eventually get in unless you clean your teeth regularly and/or eat a very low sugar diet (keto-levels).
My father, a dentist, told me about a patient of his with horrible teeth. The man was in his 30s and otherwise a beautiful specimen. He was a body builder with a super healthy diet. For breakfast, he only ate a grapefruit and always brushed his teeth afterwards.
And that was the problem! The acid softened his enamel and the brushing removed it.
I have experimented with swishing a little baking soda in water around to neutralize the acid before brushing after coffee (just a rinse, not swallowing it). I have no idea how to measure the effect but it does feel better.
FYI - Sugar alcohol (e.g. xylitol, sorbitol, erythritol) taste just like sugar and the bacteria try to eat it like sugar but can't digest and it halts their growth.
The sugar alcohols are either near zero on the glycemic index or actually zero (erythritol). Many sugar alcohols like xylitol are natural and are found in small amounts in the food that we eat.
I don't understand why people still use these artificial chemical sugars, when the natural alternatives seem to have lots of health benefits.
> the bacteria try to eat it like sugar but can't digest and it halts their growth.
Some sugar alcohols have antibacterial effects against tooth decay bacteria (e.g. there's some evidence for xylitol and erythritol against streptococci). Some sugar alcohols neither promote nor inhibit their growth (e.g. sorbitol, as far as I'm aware).
> I don't understand why people still use these artificial chemical sugars, when the natural alternatives seem to have lots of health benefits.
I'm guessing cost has something to do with it. Artificial non-nutritive sweeteners, being hundreds or thousands of times more potent than sugar, can be hundreds of times more expensive per gram than sugar alcohols and still be cheaper to use. Sugar alcohols aren't even as cheap per gram as sugar, nor as potent. I wish that weren't the case :/
(There is also, of course, the side effects of consuming too much. Most people could eat an abnormally large dose of artificial sweeteners without any major immediate gastrointestinal problems. When people eat too much sugar alcohols, they have the kind of problems that made Amazon reviews of sugar-free gummy bears famous...)
Yeah but they're often used in products like chewing gum because of the underlying assumption that you won't normally consume it in quantities where that becomes a problem. I think there's also a label warning that "excessive consumption" can make it act as a laxative.
I am a diet soda addict and I am not a scientist, but personally I think articles like this tend to bury this point:
> One problem with sweeteners in the diet of children, Sibson says, is that the more children consume them, the more they develop a sweet palate and therefore crave sweetness in all its forms, with or without sugar
Drinking sweet things gives you a sweet tooth! If we assume sweeteners are perfectly safe, wouldn't we still expect people who e.g. drink sweetened drinks instead of plain water to be more likely to gain weight overall, because they have a preference for sweet things and lots of sweet things have calories?
Personally I'm not worried about it: my high consumption of sweetened drinks has not stopped me losing weight by the conventional method of eating less. There is another ingredient in soda that's more problematic (caffeine can mess up your sleep, and if you sleep badly it's a lot easier to gain weight).
Not directly related to the article, but I just wanted to share my experience with using artificial sweeteners to overcome a sugar addiction. Based on the recommendation from my fitness coach, I found that aspartame-based sweeteners were really helpful in reducing and eventually eliminating added sugars from my diet. I used a FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor to monitor my glucose levels and was surprised to find that the Monster drinks I drank whenever a craving kicked in didn't have any effect on my glucose levels.
It took me about three weeks to get rid of the sugar habit, and now I only consume small amounts of sugar through an apple a day and protein powder in my morning porridge. I'm also back to water only. I figured I'd share in case it could help anyone else out there struggling with strong sugar cravings.
One thing that might help is sparkling water. I grew up with an an unhealthy daily soda habit and eventually kicked it but would still crave a Coke after and couple of weeks. What helped me kick that is drinking lots of plain sparkling water (Pierrer/La Croix). I think what I was really looking for was that carbonated “kick” after all.
Even at establishments that don't serve bottled sparkling water, you can usually get carbonated "soda water" from the dispensers. This is also how I kicked my soda habit!
Yes, I only drank the Monster Zero Ultra drink (the white can). It was the only one that didn't have that classic energy drink taste, but it reminded me more of a sprite.
One of very few saved comments I have on HN is on this topic.
> I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities.
There’s no need to invoke the microbiome to come up with a general mechanism by which artificial sweeteners could have effects on those who eat them: you have taste receptors in your digestive tract!
Thanks for the very interesting article. But man, is it filled with needlessly complex language.
> The upper gastrointestinal tract is well-endowed with taste and fat receptors, with sweet taste being detected, as elsewhere, by a heterodimer of the taste 1 receptor (T1R) family, T1R2/T1R3. These receptors have been localized to intestinal brush and enteroendocrine cells, and are coupled with α-gustducin as the α-subunit of the G protein (Fig. 1). They recognize sugars, d-amino acids, sweet proteins, and artificial sweeteners. Of importance to a possible role in the incretin response, these receptors are colocalized with glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and L cells containing peptide YY (PYY) and K cells containing glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) (3). Incidentally, fatty acid responsive GPRs are also coupled to GLP-1 release, but are found predominantly in the colon (5).
Can be restated in plain English: Cells in the GI tract between one's mouth and duodenum have similar sweet taste receptors - T1R. Some of these cells are endocrine and store GLP-1, PYY, and GIP (incretin) messenger hormones.
For context, messenger hormones cause changes in cells receptive to them, including the nervous system. Indirectly, these hormones can affect metabolism and feeling of hunger or fullness (this is not in the paper but is known).
The paper then discusses inconsistent (but meaningful) evidence for sweet taste receptors influencing the messenger hormone release and insulin-glycemia response. Notably, the author suggests sucralose sweeteners consumed before carbohydrates might spike postprandial (after-meal) blood sugar and insulin response. However, the extent of this effect could depend on an individual's genetics. The link between messenger hormone release and sweet taste receptors is established because this effect is diminished in vivo in mice lacking specific sweet taste receptors.
So HN, where’s that browser plug-in wrapping that GPT-3 prompt “Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand”, written in Rust?
> The upper part of your digestive system has lots of special cells that can taste things and sense fat. These cells have tiny helpers inside them called receptors, and when they taste something sweet, they send a message to your brain using a special chemical called alpha-gustducin. These receptors can also taste things like sugar, special proteins, and fake sweeteners. These cells also help your body make hormones that tell your pancreas to make more insulin when you eat something sweet. There are also other cells in the upper part of your digestive system that can sense fat, but they mostly live in the lower part of your digestive system.
It's not wrong. But it's not very right in conveying the essential parts of the article. For example, the fat and non-sweet protein sensing seems a bit adjacent to the author's point. I'm not sure why they went on these tangents.
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the exact moment you said "Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand" a freak wormhole opened in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried your words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvunt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. As a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, the Vl'Hurg challenged his vile enemy to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in its sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words "Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually the error was detected, but over two hundred and fifty thousand worlds, their peoples and cultures perished in the holocaust.
You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.
I'm not a biologist but that doesn't sound that complex for a science paper. Your average CS paper would have a similar level of complexity (if not worse)
Generally, I don't particularly appreciate how unreadable academic articles are. It makes them ineffective at communicating their ideas. And worse - there are a lot of pieces where jargon is used as a substitute for content.
Yes, it's not unexpectedly complex for a science paper. But like many academic papers, it is needlessly complex. As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.
I often wonder - would it be that difficult to present academic writings in simple English, or at least to provide a plain English abstract? Publishing a paper takes months; what're the extra 10 minutes to make it more effective and readable?
> As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.
You've taken a paragraph that contained a lot of details and was quite precise, and replaced it with wishy washy language. For example, they day that the cells they found are heterodimers of the T1R cells on your tongue, specifically T1R2/3. You replaced this precise explanation with the single word "similar", which could mean that they are enitrely different cells that are tautologically "similar" in also detecting sweet tastes.
They were also explaining exactly what the cells detect, which you thought is not worthy of mention.
The single short clear phrase "upper GI tract" you replaced with the longer and more akward "the part of the GI tract between the mouth and the duodenum".
Overall, your phrase would sound more complex and awkward to a practitioner, and you have reduced the information significantly. There is a reason technical language is used in technical papers - it allows you to be concise, information dense, and precise.
Who do you think the audience is for the papers published in academic journals? I imagine the intended audience is their peers and therefore the precise, unambiguous language is much more effective at conveying the ideas. Jargon exists for a reason, it isn't invented in a vacuum.
If the audience is the layperson, then of course you are right. The ideas being expressed will be completely lost upon the audience because they won't understand half the terminology used. But I suspect you might be in the minority if you think academic journals are intended to have an audience that broad.
I am definitely in the minority, but let's not appeal to the masses. Excessive jargon is becoming more and more unwelcome in academia as readers and reviewers are getting tired of insubstantial jargon-padded papers bordering fraud. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of jargon in communication is now generally better comprehended. For example, jargon makes the articles difficult to consume for non-English speakers, enthusiast audiences, practitioners of applied science, and academics in different domains of research. There is a small counter-culture forming that embraces the value of effective plain English communication in research and I am a part of it.
Of course, I appreciate the value of jargon where it is necessary to convey meaning. Although Wikipedia has shown us plain English often conveys the entire meaning and details just fine, making jargon superfluous.
This paper, however, isn't the best example of jargon abuse. Some phrasing in it triggered me and I've reacted too strongly. Overall, it is relatively well-written.
But removing all the details and jargon that the lay person might not understand isn't even the right way to go about making the jounal articles more comprehensible to a general audience. That thows away most of the information.
The confounding outcome here is profoundly negative. People are being misled into believing a short term benefit of (from the article) around 3 months of weightloss translates across the board into longterm replacement for sugar without risk.
Better to stop wanting to taste sweet things all the time, than wind up type 2 diabetic or risk heart disease.
The right way to avoid the effects of eating too much sugar is not to replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners, but to limit the daily intake of sugar.
I have seen the recommendation that the daily sugar intake should be up to 50 grams, i.e. up to 25 g of fructose.
This seems a plausible value, which is equivalent with 500 g per day of most cultivated fruits, e.g. apples, pears or blueberries, or 300 g per day of the sweetest fruits, e.g. grapes or fresh figs.
The refined sugar is not bad per se, as it is the same substance found in all vegetables, but it is bad because it easily allows its wrong use when food is made which is too sweet and which facilitates the eating of too much sugar every day.
Limiting the daily sugar intake is easy if you cook at home, but it is difficult if you eat industrially-produced food. Unfortunately for those who like them, the first measure to reduce the sugar intake is to stop drinking any industrially-produced beverages.
Indeed. After being abroad for long periods of time, when I return to eat meals in US restaurants, they are soooo salty. We get habituated to strongly flavored foods.
The real diet drug they need to concoct would be one that inhibits that habituation. Sugar or salt saturated foods would taste gross.
These articles are always divisive and lacking in substance. The science is usually exceedingly poor: I've only seen one posted to HN that actually looked at alternative sweeteners individually rather than assuming, say, xylitol and stevia do identical things to your body. And with it comes a strong prescription to change dietary habits yet again.
Honestly, because these are thought pieces, because they seek to influence behavior, and because of the long history of the sugar lobby doing pernicious things to influence the public (even to the point of starting wars), I don't think they should be on HN unless the link is to a peer reviewed, reproducible, high-quality study.
BL: Without a large-N variable-isolated longitudinal study that distinguishes between different sweeteners, articles like the OP are indistinguishable from sugar-lobby FUD.
(Disclaimer: what I'm about to say meets none of your requirements.)
An explanation that I "like" for why all artificial sweeteners can be lumped in together is that the salient effect is the taste, not some unknown biochemical effect on gut bacteria or whatever.
Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame had an interview where he vividly described the experience of going on a potato diet. The concept is that you eat nothing but potatoes (and multivitamins) for a month, and this "resets" your relationship with food and also resets your tastebuds in some sense. There are two effects here, so lets unpack them a bit.
In terms of relationship with food, eating bland food makes you enjoy the process of eating less, which reduces the addictiveness. Fewer dopamine hits makes the whole process less enticing, so you don't snack as much (or whatever). I'm not sure about this one, so let's just ignore it for now.
What I definitely can believe is that if you eat a lot of any strong taste, you'll get accustomed to it. Your body will seek homeostasis, downregulating the associated receptors. That's why chilli heads can eat a ton of super spicy foods, their taste receptors (or associated neurons) change over time to compensate for the level of capsaicin. My partner loves spicy food so I got used to it, but if I go travelling for work for a month and eat bland food, my tastebuds reset and her cooking becomes inedible... for a week or two and then I can eat it again. Similarly, I can drink tonic water neat, and beer tastes sweet to me. For most people those are intolerably bitter. This is not some inherent trait that I have, my tolerance of bitter flavours is because I drink tonic water regularly. When I stop for a while, I can't drink it undiluted either... for a week or two.
Sweet is no different. If you overload your receptors with excessive amounts of any source of sweetness -- artificial or natural -- they'll adapt. You will taste things as less sweet, and add more sugar to compensate. You'll add more BBQ sauce, more honey, more syrup, etc...
And therein lies the source of the weight gain.
Penn describes going off the potato diet. His friend invited him to have a burger at their favourite burger place and Penn could not eat the burger because it tasted like overly sweet cake. That's what a burger is! The bun has sugar in it. The sauce has sugar in it. The meat patty is even grilled to caramelise the outside in a Maillard reaction!
When I drink diet softdrinks regularly, burgers taste meaty to me. When I stop, I can't have burgers from most places because they taste sickly sweet. I've literally put down half-eaten burgers because they were just "too much".
This could even be tested scientifically, and it wouldn't even be a difficult experiment.
Run four groups:
1) Control.
2) Taking tasteless pills with 'x' amount of artificial sweetener in it.
3) Adding 'x' amount of sugary drinks, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants.
4) Adding 'x' amount of artificially sweetened diet drinks to the diet, otherwise eating and drinking whatever the subject wants
Where 'x' is measured equivalent sweetness, not grams.
Do this for a month or two and see if group 2 has any effect distinguishable from group 1. I bet there's no or minimal difference.
Similarly, I bet both groups 3 and 4 gain weight relative to groups 1 and 2, but 3 ought to be the worst.
I also bet that you could try different artificial sweeteners, and it wouldn't make much difference as long as the equivalent sweetness amounts were used.
There was a diet show ages ago that had a family who used salt like it was ketchup.
They did a baking sheet of fries in the oven and the mom literally put in a handful of salt on it. "Because it doesn't taste like anything otherwise".
They also didn't eat any vegetables for the same reason, the whole family was accustomed to bonkers levels of salt in their food so nothing "natural" tasted like anything to them.
The host had them do a similar thing like Penn's "potato diet" to reset their taste buds and it actually worked.
But this article does describe a study of the sweeteners individually. It’s not a super large N nor longitudinal, but it does isolate aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, and stevia.
Dutch West India Co. and colonial wars over Caribbean islands, mostly.
There's also an argument to be made that, in addition to cotton, the sugar trade contributed to the intense economic incentive for American slavery, leading to the American Civil War; that argument is weaker, however, since sugar wasn't as important as cotton to the South at large and since (to my knowledge) there wasn't a large consolidated commercial enterprise like DWIC for sugar (or Chiquita for bananas and the banana wars).
I don't drink diet coke to lose weight. I drink it to avoid diabetes. I know it affects the gut microbiome, but sometimes killing off gut bacteria is a good thing (stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria). I eat yogurt as well to compensate.
I don't think it necessarily kills off gut bacteria, it affects the balance of what bacteria are present - bacteria that can digest the sweetener win big, others lose out.
> bacteria that can digest the sweetener win big, others lose out.
Artificial sweeteners tend to be very sweet, so the actual amount consumed is quite small, which means that their caloric content available to hypothetical bacteria that can digest them is also small.
I imagine that something else is going on here, likely involving the fact that sweeteners taste sweet and that the act of eating something sweet may have some effect in and of itself.
Then I think it comes down to what balance is best for the available resources. I'd rather drink a can of diet coke with aspartame in it than tap water with chlorine in it or bottled water with microplastics in it. Have there been studies comparing the effects of that on the gut biome or what the relative purity in non water ppm is?
A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them.
Plus, I like the taste of diet coke more than just water.
Cans are easier to recycle than plastic bottles as well.
> A lot of people in the third world trust the cola cola company more than the local water supply to not poison them.
What a rotten situation to be in. Last time I was in India, there was a story on the local news about how the Coca Cola bottling plant managed to contaminate the product with motor oil somehow.
That's bad. Problems can happen without proper safety checks in place. Assuming no contamination otherwise it'd still be better than drinking water from the Ganges though right?
Drinking water from the Ganges is probably not worse than having sugary drinks as your primary source of water. You develop immunity to all the germs at least, and a lot of the industrial pollutants cause developmental issues so if you're an adult male it requires a far higher level to see ill effects. It's a moot point, since bottled water is an option anyways (and cheaper than soda).
The streams running through Bangalore were black with all the stuff dumped into them. Although - I hear the whole city has changed massively since last I visited (almost 10 years back now). I would love to learn that things are better.
No, but it has been distilled. The energy needed for that has an associated cost. I wonder what of the waste liquid was in the source to begin with? If you remove pure water from water with impurities you'll be left with concentrated impurities.
How can these individuals feasibly react in a rational way knowing such things, with their local regulations being poor? Were the water sources reliable before these corporations moved in?
> How can these individuals feasibly react in a rational way knowing such things, with their local regulations being poor? Were the water sources reliable before these corporations moved in?
Generally no; biological contamination came along with population growth and a lack of regulations, now you have biological contamination plus potentially industrial contamination (depending on where you are).
More plastic to potentially leech out into the drink? I don't know. I'm not a chemist.
But if only a thin layer is needed it probably doesn't ablate much.
Also, less plastic used means less plastic that has to be disposed of somehow.
The amount of microplastic you get isn't really limited by the overall amount of plastic. But rather, it is limited by how fast they can break off the main plastic layer. The more surface area that's in contact with the drink, the more can leach. The leached amount is minuscule compared to the total amount, but it may have health impacts regardless.
Aluminum Coca-Cola cans are lined with BPA plastic on the inside. Although Coca-Cola and other companies using it with food say it's safe, independent studies suggest many unfavorable health effects of consuming BPA. For example, increased risk of hypertension, diabetes and cancer.
Hmm. That's worth conducting more independant investigations over. If it is a problem hopefully better alternatives can be found. Contaminating the drink with metal traces is not great either. Maybe some kind of wax lining instead perhaps?
Many years ago I have stopped drinking milk at breakfast, and for some years I have replaced it with various herbal teas.
Then I have realized that the teas did not provide anything that I cannot get better from other sources, so I have stopped adding the teas to the water, drinking just the plain warm water and compensating by increasing the amount of fresh or defrozen fruits that I eat at breakfast.
I have UC (IBD) and yoghurt causes the inflammation to flare up. One pot of yoghurt and I'm on the toilet for the next week. Been this way for ~5 years.
Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body that will then respond similarly than they would when encountering sucrose/fructose. Probably not all, but probably some. The insulin response seems like a good candidate and studies have shown people gain weight on diet sodas kind of the same as they do on sugared-sodas, so it is not out of the question that artificial sweeteners are not benign.
Sure, but if using artificial sweeteners take me in a calorie deficit, I will lose weight. If I use sugars instead, that would give me more calories and I would gain weight.
The studies show the opposite. The caloric sweeteners make you hungry and slow down your metabolism.
Even if you are calorie counting (like the mice) the weight gain from lower metabolism is greater than the weight gain from having an equivalently sweet drink made from sugar.
High fructose corn syrup has a similar effect, but also delivers calories. If you want to drink soda, or eat sweetened things while losing weight, your best bet is to eat real sugar.
Sure, that makes sense in the short-term, but is overly reductive and does not take into account second-order effects that may matter in the long-term.
Calorie deficit will surely make you lose weight, but should only be taken as a guiding star when the goal is to lose weight and maintain it over the long-term.
> Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The body has a wide variety of sensing systems, and many receptors come in variants. A selective agonist is a molecule that activates some variants more than the others. Such a common and useful thing that there is a name for it.
Artificial sweeteners make your body go "Ooh incoming sugar!" and it "opens up" to receive huge amounts of energy in an easily digestible form.
When no sugar arrives, your body just grabs whatever it can, basically supercharging it's ability to suck out energy from any food.
The anecdotal advice I got was that it's OK to drink artificially sweetened drinks between meals as a snack, that way your body has nothing to grab. Just don't drink them with a meal, use water instead.
Your body is fooled into thinking it detects rising blood sugars, releasing insulin. But there is no rise in sugar, which might lead to hypoglycemia. At least, that's a plausible hypothesis. I think that has been confirmed in research, but I didn't check myself.
> Any molecule that can fool your tastebuds, can also fool some of the other receptors in your body
Fool? Taste buds aren’t sentient. So maybe you mean “activate”? But even then, just because something has taste, that doesn’t imply anything else at all.
That is exceedingly pedantic, and not necessarily correct. The point is that taste buds exist to detect the presence of sugars like sucrose or fructose (and some other substances like sweet proteins), for their high caloric content and easy access to energy. Artificial sweeteners happen to activate those same receptors, but they are neither high in calories nor an easy way to access stored energy, so they are essentially "fooling" those detectors.
Just like we can say that an SQL Injection payload is fooling the server to perform some operation, without having to attribute actual intelligence to a simple program.
It's not pedantic, it's me fighting back against all these non-scientific logic shortcuts. Taste buds don't exist "to do" anything; they just exist. We can't anthropomorphize everything all the time, and then use those attributed human qualities to make our points.
"Taste buds want do taste sugar because they know how many calories sugar has, but they are fooled by this mean chemical, and it makes them feel bad, so blah blah blah." It gets so tiring.
Sugar free additives (at least aspartame and asesulfame K, jury is out on sucralose, stevia and the others) make my intestines ... not work according to empirical studies.
I drank exclusively sugar free drinks for a good 15 years and started to notice that my farts started smelling _really_ bad. Like "_I_ need to leave the room" bad. Thought it was gluten or wheat, it wasn't. Changed to sugary drinks for a few weeks -> boom, bowel/intestine issues gone.
Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened. Now I'm a Coke drinker, not because I like it, but because it's the only one that's sweetened only with sugar.
> Had a second bout of "issues" when Pepsi sneakily changed from pure sugar to sugar/artificial in their non-max lineup. Took me a while to actually read the label and see WTF happened.
I'm looking at Pepsi's website right now and the ingredients in Pepsi are given as "carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, sugar, phosphoric acid, caffeine, citric acid, natural flavor".
I guess it's theoretically possible that they're including artificial sweeteners under "natural flavor", but somehow I doubt it.
The reason I don't switch is because a 0.5L coke has around 210 calories. You're only supposed to consume around ~2000 calories per day, so even with 4 cokes in a day that's almost half of calorie intake. So not an option for me.
to counter your anecdote with another one, my grandpa drank 10 diet cokes/diet dr. peppers a day for maybe the last 15 years of his life and suffered no illness until a sudden heart attack in his late 70s
Not everyone's gut flora is the same. People are _very_ different.
I'm pretty sure your grandpa could also eat endless amounts of wheat products. If my grandpa tried that, he'd literally shit out his intestines because of the gluten (celiac's disease).
Not really, I can't drink that much of sugary colas. I start feeling icky from the sweetness after 0,5l or so.
The artificial ones I could literally drink like water, there are no satiation signals going to my brain so I could easily down 3 litres of Pepsi MAX a day.
The increased diabetes risk is at least somewhat expected from all sweeteners, regardless of origin or caloric load.
As an intuition, the fact that you taste something as sweet indicates that your brain has received a strong signal, and your hormonal responses are mostly regulated by signals sent from the brain to specialized organs.
In practice, the data strongly supports any well-studied sweetener increasing the risk of diabetes and also increasing hunger sufficiently to at least partially mitigate any caloric benefits.
The rest of the data I've seen on artificial sweeteners is a dogmatic quagmire with respect to cancers, neural issues, and whatnot, so I wouldn't personally want to draw many conclusions based on it, especially given the conflicts of interest in how most of it was generated. However, on both sides of the debate I think it's worth honestly considering at least those two dangers, especially considering the aggressive marketing of "natural" sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit with a strong implication that being natural means it's safe, and especially with detractors on the other side pointing to a bunch of shitty science over the years as evidence that sugar substitutes are probably safe.
It’s very compelling - some sweeteners have adverse metabolic effects and it is mediated by the microbiome [1]. Aspartame and stevia seem better than sucralose and saccharin. In theory, thaumatin should also be fine.
I’m still ignorant of it because it’s sadly not on Sci-Hub :/ That was the first thing I looked at because it sounded like an actually interesting study (pretty much the opposite of the article).
Whenever I see the gleeful declaration "NO SUGAR ADDED!" on the front of a product I'm considering, usually an inspection of the ingredients list reveals plenty of artificial sweeteners added instead. Seems like the label designers are hoping that shoppers will conflate "no sugar added" with "unsweetened".
I will never understand how people would think artificial sweeteners even taste like sugar. Particularly as it relates to soda, it always tastes distinctly ... chalky or at least an under-taste of bitterness. Can't people taste that? I associate that taste also with the feeling I get, like drinking tea on an empty stomach, a touch nauseated. When younger in the 80s-90s, my sister and mother would gulp down Diet sodas, but I would never touch it - they were nasty tasting. My wife experiences the same sort of feelings also.
Here in Norway (I grew up in the US), Pepsi Max or Coca-Cola "uten sukker" (without sugar) is heavily marketed. Regular Pepsi and Coca-Cola or local/generic brands are much better (and much more moderate tasting than the American counterparts, with hyper-sweet corn syrup), but cost a few kroner more because of the sugar tax. The sugar-frees are equally terrible tasting, like as if there was no real progress in actually making "sugar-free" satisfying. I don't drink much soda anyway, and if it is, it will just be the store brand - it's a treat more than diet staple. Even too much sugared soda will catch up to me.
Like alcohol, I have never deliberately moderated myself, but just have. It's not a point of pride, just something that happened. Because of this, I am not as tolerant to either alcohol or any type of sodas. I get buzzed too fast and I start feeling the soda after a little too much that I get a bit scared of both. Just like alcohol, I feel like people will rationalize sugar-free soda consumption based on some values that they have. The article mentioned that "diet" soda is a "guilt-free" treat - whether that's an value alignment to sell more or this is a genuine response from the consuming public, it is something I will not understand.
I mean, in the end, TANSTAAFL ... despite my sweet tooth, knowing I can get carried away (and my body lets me know!), I'd rather just eat sugar than chemical concoctions.
You're implying that Diet Coke is not meant to have a distinct (aspartame) taste. Coke Zero is the one meant to be an imitation, and it is much closer.
I vaguely remember in the past there was suggestions in advertising that Diet Coke was like regular Coke. By naming it the same thing, it does suggest an affinity, particularly on the dimension of taste. I am probably wrong, but this can be my own "consumer" expectation, giving the naming.
Coke Zero or the local variant still doesn't taste like Coke, but bitter fizzy water, to me :)
In terms of sweeteners which has the biggest effect on taste, Tab mainly used saccharin, while Diet Coke is mainly aspartame.
And then it's more accurate to reverse it and say Tab was a derivative of Coca-Cola. Tab was simply Coca-Cola's diet version back when they didn't want to "dilute" the trademark.
So no, Diet Coke isn't a "completely different drink". I mean, you can taste them side-by-side -- do you genuinely think there's some crazy different flavor profile in terms of the the citrus oils, cinnamon, and vanilla used?
Well you can't have it both ways my dude, because Coke and Diet Coke taste awfully similar in terms of flavorings. So you've got your history wrong somewhere then.
"Diet Coke is not based on the Coca-Cola formula, but instead on Tab. The controversial New Coke, introduced in 1985, used a version of the Diet Coke recipe that contained high-fructose corn syrup and had a slightly different balance of ingredients."
Why would New Coke have been developed from Diet Coke if it tasted the same as Coca-Cola? Anyway you're wrong, but I admire the confidence.
That reference is from Wikipedia but without a citation. It's as good as garbage.
But the main point here is that Diet Coke is not a "completely different drink" from Coke. You can go refer to your taste buds on that one. Especially since you seem to find Tab so wretched.
Isn't marketing amazing? Diet Coke was perceived as a women's beverage, so then they came out with Coke Zero in a "masculine" black can specifically in order to appeal to men without any "feminine" connotations. And it worked!
I developed a taste for Diet Coke some years ago when I tried to cut back a bit on sugar. Being based on a different drink would certainly make sense given the large flavor difference! Funnily enough it was just a few weeks ago that I justified getting a Diet Coke to a friend by saying that I get Coke Zero when I'm in the mood for Coke and I get Diet Coke when I'm in the mood for Diet Coke.
In the end, I should tell that to teenage-me, who was confounded as to why Diet Coke (and Diet Pepsi for that matter) would use the same name when they were actually different. Tab was truly nasty too :)
Well yes they leveraged the enormous brand recognition of Coca-Cola, tho it took them 20 years to figure out they were not diluting it as the product line was previously branded as Tab [1].
The first ever ad, AFAICT, for Diet Coke introduces it as "you're gonna drink it just for the taste of it", implying it's different than Coca-Cola [2].
Also, notice how it's branded as "Diet Coke" (initially "diet Coke"), not "Diet Coca-Cola", and has a distinct packaging. Whereas the zero variant is branded as "Coca-Cola Zero", with the same packaging but inverted colors or black font.
But they all taste like delicious over-sweetened fizzy drinks to me :)
I’m curious if we have the same Coke Zero here in the US as where you are, they play kind of fast and loose with the branding on their sugar free drinks.
I question it because the Coke Zero we have here, very much unlike Diet Coke, is VERY sweet.
It’s genuinely pretty close to the real thing here, it’s sweetened with Sucralose which in my firm opinion does by far the best job at tasting like real sugar of the fake sweaters. I personally find it a very close approximation of regular Coke. It was actually closer and better though before the reformulation a couple years ago.
I'm very confident I could easily call out normal coke, coke zero, and diet coke on a blind taste test, including whether is was from a bottle, can or fountain.
I might just do that, because I've seen too many people just repeat the Coca Cola marketing that they taste the same.
I make no claims that they taste the same, you can absolutely tell them apart. Honestly, I think you could tell them apart texturally if not from flavor. Sugar-free sodas are just thinner.
You can definitely tell them apart. Diet Coke though tastes nothing like Coke. Coke Zero tastes like a close approximation of Coke.
The last time that I tried, (a few years ago) I thought that Coke Zero as well tastes like ... just a a better Diet Coke :) The same type of bitter under-taste, just a bit less of it.
I used to hate diet colas, but then I became diabetic and had no choice but to drink them if I wanted a soda (I don't drink much pop in general). After a few years I just stopped being able to taste the weird diet aftertaste it used it have. In fact sometime I worry I wouldn't be able to taste if I were drinking a sugar cola by mistake.
So now I think people who prefer diet beverages may just not be tasting the same thing.
I mean, I don't think anybody thinks artificial sweeteners taste exactly like sugar. In fact they can't since they generally have an entirely different mouthfeel, on top of whatever residiual bitterness there might be.
But guzzling sugar water is exceedingly unhealthy. And so if you want a beverage that's cold, fizzy and flavorful, you reach for the Diet Coke. Not because you think it tastes identical to Coke, but because the last thing your body needs is an injection of sugar.
Sure, sometimes you'll just refill your water bottle at the water fountain. But sometimes drinking just water gets boring, you know?
It's fine you'd rather have sugar than "chemical concoctions". But hopefully you can understand why plenty of other people prefer a chemical concoction to a sugar rush followed by a sugar crash?
And of course this also explains the newfound popularity of fruit-flavored unsweetened carbonated water like LaCroix, which has flavor but no sweetener whatsoever. But in a lot of situations, that product category is simply not available.
I know people who drank a lot. [In the end], I never really cared to point out that diet decision and they should manage their own health (though was always interested in some co-workers with a conspicuously large amount of empty Pepsi Max bottles near their desk ... :D ). I am just talking about personal experience. The colorful language is just my own personal reaction to something that I have come to not like. But I am not going to think too much with other people's rationalizations. (Even though I made some reference to that. I am not going to overthink that one.)
You probably have a very sensitive/better developed sense of taste. I knew a girl like that: every artificial sweetener got bitter aftertaste according to her. Glycerin didn't but that kinda defeats the point.
I think most people can't taste what to do though. For me for example coke zero has a very pleasant sweet taste and I prefer it to the original one.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I also don't like spicy foods, if that's something to note. It feels like torture if it is overly spicy and takes away from the experience.
Nutriscore is a proposed system to mark products as 'healthy' on a scale of 5 colour-coded values. It takes into account fat and salt and sugar (high amounts are 'unhealthy'), but not artificial sweeteners or other additives like preservatives or MSG.
I hate this. It will push sugar out of products, but, of course, artificial sweeteners will be put in instead. I've already seen artificially sweetened sweet-n-sour hering without any normal sugary alternative, because companies will of course try to produce few variants for efficiency. This is awful. I find the whole idea of condensing 'healthy' into a single small integer rather absurd as no amount of sugar or fat or salt or MSG is simply 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' on a scale of 1..5.
Regardless of chemistry, toxicity, or biology, I consider it morally wrong to lie to myself. Sweeteners are lies. They are lies to yourself about what you are eating. Scary effective lab-synthesized coctails or refined natural extracts, it's all LIES. If I want sweet, I eat sugar. If sugar is bad, then by applying a bit of self-discipline I just don't buy it.
People are always looking for the easy way out. Cheap, industrially manufactured lies so you don't have to face the truth: Your self-discipline sucks. Put some effort into it and you'll not only stop lying to yourself and improve your diet, you'll also become a better human being.
That’s not going to work. Sugar is highly addictive and, as you can see by this obese world, just shouting at people to have better discipline doesn’t do much.
Sugar is a valid source of nutrition at the very least. It does both stimulate the sweet taste buds, prompting body to expect additional energy and it provides the energy.
When the HN community "breaks down" articles/topics like this, are those arguments, facts, data repurposed somewhere into an organized fashion so that they can be referenced? *Instead of regurgitating similar arguments over-and-over as similar articles are posted? Is this an opportunity for A.I.? Could the AI solution that is created could be repurposed for other communities/forums/Discord Channel/Slack/Mastodon/youtube/etc?
Sucralose actually having an effect might explain why modern diet soda is so bloody good, to the point that every single time I get a Fanta Zero I double check after my first sip that I didn't get the sugary version instead.
You could taste the aspartame in Diet Coke, but Coke Zero, Sprite Zero and Fanta Zero are, in my opinion, better tasting than the original thing. But perhaps as unhealthy, if not worse. I'm in UK, in case there are regional differences.
Not for me unfortunately, I've yet to try a sugar free drink or sweet that doesn't taste bitter and chemically (if that's a word!). I don't get any sweet flavour at all, so can't drink any of them.
I think there are regional differences. I noticed in Greece that Fanta has pulp or something cloudy in it. That’s not the case in the US. It also tastes more sour.
When I was a child in the late fifties and early sixties sweet fizzy drinks were a once a week treat. If we wanted a drink in between times we drank water.
We brought up out children (late '80s to late '90s) the same way, in fact that was not particularly unusual at the time here in Norway. When we visited friends in the US they were taken aback when my children asked for a drink of water instead of fizzy sweet stuff.
It seems to me that a lot of the problems associated with sugar and other sweeteners would be solved simply by ingesting less of them. But I don't know how to convince anyone else to try bringing their children up that way.
This reads a bit like someone looking critical at the dieting advice for pre diabetics if “eat more vegetables” and coming out with the conclusion that as one would assume if you eat too many vegetables you will still end up obese and still be in the high risk group for getting diabetes.
The posting a headline of “Are vegetables actually healthy!?”
I'm getting slight addiction/depression symptoms from Diet Coke, and I'm getting severe gut problems from drinking Coke Zero. The former is probably caused by the caffeine, and the latter is probably the sweetener.
I guess I can't drink any cola anymore, certainly not on a regular basis.
Cola is highly acidic, which causes gut problems, especially when drinking it on an empty stomach. It caused GERD for me and I had to take omeprazole to fix the damage. And, of course, I mostly stopped drinking cola, especially on an empty stomach.
I have no idea whether the research this article is based on is sound.
What seems interesting is that the non-caloric sweeteners they tested are completely different chemicals, and yet they all were correlated with weight gain or diabetes. It's as if just being a sweetener is enough.
That makes some sense to me. If a jolt of sweetness primes the metabolism for a glucose rush that never comes, perhaps the subject starts (unconsciously) hunting for another food that will provide the rush - starch might fit the bill, I guess. Or alcohol.
Someone noted that the article title is clickbaity. Of course it is - this is The Guardian, which is now effectively a tabloid. It's not really a newspaper of record any more.
In the past, they've found that the causation is actually the other way. People with diabetes etc terms to switch to sweeteners as a way of reducing their sugar intake.
I'm not going to bother reading this because it's obviously click-bait, but I just want to relate that when I was in high school in the 90s, I remember being in a class where a guest speaker gave a talk and tried to convince us all that artificial sweeteners would "rot our brains" and give us alzheimers. For years, I avoided them because of that – until it became clear that real sugar was destroying my health and putting me on the path for diabetes. Since then, I've not only tried to minimize sugar in my diet, but also tried to sparingly use artificial sweeteners (specifically Stevia, whenever i can) to offset when possible.
Point being: Don't listen to this shrill health BS that purports to have new revelations about what's good for you or not, since this health advice comes in cycles. We saw the same thing with butter/margarine. First butter was good, then it was the devil and margarine was the only way to go. Then margarine was the devil and butter was the only way to go.
The engineer's fallacy: thinking you can outsmart complex systems with simple "improvements".
Even worse, not habting respect for complex systems! For some reason this type of thinking and "just fix" attitude seems to be particularly prevalent among the US, in particular Silicon Valley types.
("Too much sugar is bad, so replacing it with a sweetner solves the problem").
I'm sure to have stepped on a few toes, so let's hear who says "ouch".
