Pepsi To Stop Using Aspartame 630
An anonymous reader writes: Pepsi believes sales of diet soda are falling because of aspartame and how the general public thinks it's a dangerous substance to consume. Even though the FDA describes aspartame as “one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved,” Pepsi has decided to stop using it. Aspartame removal is being turned into a marketing campaign of sorts, with "Now Aspartame Free" printed on cans.
danger vs taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Dangerous smangerous. I don't drink diet because it tastes terrible.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Funny)
and i see fat people drinking it all the time so it doesn't seem to be working
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Insightful)
and i see fat people drinking it all the time so it doesn't seem to be working
That's because they're usually ordering it with a Double Big Mac combo ;)
I've always found it funny when people order like that. As if the diet pop is gonna counter the 2234872184732 calories of a double big mac you're about to wolf down. Not to mention the fries (which of course has been super sized!)
When I go to McDonalds, there's no pretense of nutrition or calorie reduction. I order a regular combo with a regular coke :) Diet drinks taste awful anyways.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Informative)
That's because they're usually ordering it with a Double Big Mac combo ;)
Nope, it is because diet soda makes you fat [nbcnews.com]. It promotes the wrong kind of gut bacteria. The sweet taste also triggers insulin production, when causes hunger when the sugar that the tongue predicted doesn't show up in the stomach. So people end up eating even more to compensate. Sales of Diet Pepsi are falling because people are becoming more educated about just how unhealthy that crap is. If you are thirsty, try tap water.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Insightful)
The shitty test you're talking about didn't even *test* aspartame, it tested saccharine, which hasn't been in a diet drink for several decades. More shitty "science" that shitty newspapers can't bother to actually do 2.5 seconds of research on. The last major saccharine based diet drink was Tab. Try ordering one today. You'll look like Marty McFly in 1955.
Considering the ridiculous research that's been done in the past with sweeteners, I still won't trust it, because the research has all too often been shit. Did you know that the thouroughly debunked cancer study on Aspartame fed the mice the equivalent of 14 *cases* of pop every single day? Yeah, the same amount that is in over 300 cans of pop a day. And it still didn't actually give the mice cancer. If you drank that much today, guess what you'd die of: Water poisoning.
I have no idea why the research on artificial sweeteners is so bad all the time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that HFCS producers are behind it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Last I heard, the saccharin mess was a combination of two things:
1) They used insanely high doses for that study too, if you replaced the saccharin with sugar you would've killed the rats rather quickly.
2) The findings that DID occur were later proven to be specific to rat metabolism that did NOT apply to monkeys including the "human" subvariant.
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I forgot to mention though that saccharin is still dead in the market because it has a really strong aftertaste.
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Personally, I preferred the saccharin taste to aspertame. I'd drink saccharin products today if they were available on the market.
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Re:danger vs taste (Score:4, Interesting)
Aspartame does break down into poison. One of the components it breaks down into is methanol. Wood alcohol. The stuff that makes you blind. Drinking the amount of aspartame found in 14 cases of pop every day would fill your system with a large amount of methanol. No question that's going to have negative effects.
The amount of methanol actually found in *normal* consumption of diet sodas, however, is similar to the amount found in things like fruit juice. If your body can deal with fruit juice, it can deal with aspartame-sweetened drinks. As always, it's the dose that makes the poison.
Yes, there is a positive correlation between drinking diet sodas and being overweight. But that's an expected correlation, not a causation. Seriously, what sort of person who's not prone (for whatever reasons) to weight gain is suddenly going to decide, "You know, I want to switch from normal pepsi to diet."? The people who start drinking diet are the ones having trouble with weight gain already. The problem is, a can of pepsi is 150 calories. That's the amount of calories in 1/3 cup of raisins. Yeah, it helps somewhat with your calorie consumption, but it's not the big picture on its own.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there is a positive correlation between drinking diet sodas and being overweight.
And part of that correlation is due to the fact that there's a correlation between being overweight and having type 2 diabetes, and switching to diet sodas is an easy first step to help control T2D.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:4)
No, you leave out important thing found in fruit juice not found in diet soda. The fruit and other foods which make a tiny amount of methanol also make ethanol, which protects the body from the methanol which by the way turns into formaldehyde. So diet soda consumed with similar protection food should be fine, however it is open question if drinking alone would be fine.
As aside, nutrasweet makes my joints ache
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Interesting)
Tomato juice breaks down into more methanol than your soda.
Aspartame doesn't cause methanol poisoning.
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14 cases of pop every day...going to have negative effects
Drinking 119+ litres of _water_ every day is going to have negative effects. (14 cases, 24 cans of pop per case, 355 mL per can, 119.28 L) Healthy kidneys can process about 0.8 - 1 L per hour... so 119 L in, 24 L out, where's the other 95 L going?
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that if you actually go and find sources other than a sensationalist news article, you'll find several scientific studies that show that this is bullshit. Insulin production is triggered by the presence of glucose, and does not occur with the presence of aspartame even in high concentrations.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:4, Informative)
oh really?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
just the taste of a sweetner can trigger insulin production, and therefore is triggered with aspartame.
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Wrong, you link to study that used saccarine, not relevant to this discussion, and your logic is faulty claiming it applies to any other sweetener used in diet soda.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Interesting)
The study shows that just the taste of a sweetener can cause on insulin boost, it has nothing to do with the type. The insulin response was BEFORE ingestion, so why would the type of sweetener matter?
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You make no sense what so ever. THE SUBSTANCE WAS NOT INGESTED, it was solely based on the TASTE BUDS, and the brain response to it. Taste buds do not know what a substance is, it only knows where it falls on a scale. Your argument is illogical. If it was INGESTED then I would agree with you, but it was not.
From these results, we conclude that sweetness information conducted by thistaste nerve provides essential information for eliciting CPIR.
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More fat people drink the diet version ... well, seeing as it tastes awful, I would not expect thin people to drink it, would you?
Sales of diet Pepsi are falling because half of them are buying Pepsi Max instead. Not sure how it differs from the diet option. They both taste equally bad to me.
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I saw an interesting program on Netflix the other day called Fed Up, and I didn't realize till now, that for sugar it is pretty much the only ingredient that does NOT have a daily % listed. It is due to the sugar lobby fighting reports from years bac
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Informative)
That would be because sugar is a portion of the carbohydrate total. Therefore, it already has a % daily value.
My Pure Leaf Extra Sweet tea I am having with lunch shows:
Total Carb. 28g 9%
Sugars 28g
Those 28g of Carbs is 28g of sugar (as it is sweetened with sugar, not HFCS)
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One of the problems is that realistically, the amount of processed sugar be sucrose or HFCS is 0. So the daily % would be NaN.
While refined sugar isn't necessarily bad for you it servers no real dietary purpose other than bulk calories which you either don't need because you are not working in the fields all day, building stone walls by hand, walking everywhere you go etc... or could obtain just easily from some other source along with other nutrients your body does require.
You really DO need 11 (I think p
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Sure, if you like taking laxatives with your drinks
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"also triggers insulin production"
If you're a Type I diabetic like myself, this is not an issue.
Diet soda is a miracle for Type I diabetics.
I am disappointed at how Pepsi is giving in to the perception that aspartame is dangerous in any way. A good question is - sales of "Diet Pepsi" were falling - was this ALL variants of "Diet Pepsi" (such as Pepsi MAX and... I forget the other variant. Last I checked there were three variants of "Diet" Pepsi, there was "original diet", Max, and something else.) "Orig
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Boy you're a really clever one aren't you, catching onto [xkcd.com] secret calories in stevia that nobody else did?
First off, stevia is available in many different forms. Stevia is many times more potent than sugar in terms of sweetness, it's extremely hard to use pure (I have pure stevia - to use it pure you have to make very large batches and
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Neither of them are healthy and I haven't seen the inside of a McDonalds in years.
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The article you referenced mentions:
It’s another example of how the microbiome — the population of microbes living in and on our bodies — can have huge effects on health.
Better the microbiome be out of whack than the macrobiome [xkcd.com].
(see the Alt-Text for the less pleasant gut fauna transfer method)
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Except weight is determined by how many calories you intake, vs. how many calories you expend. Gut bacteria may be an important issue, diet soda may hurt these gut bacteria, but that's an unrelated issue. However, clearly your logic is faulty, as insulin is well-known to suppress appetite. If you knew the first thing of what you were talking about, you wouldn't have said that...or claimed that weight is caused by the actions of magical gut bacteria...
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Except weight is determined by how many calories you intake, vs. how many calories you expend. Gut bacteria may be an important issue,
Gut bacteria have an effect on how many calories you take in, so they help determine weight.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a quite a bit of contrary evidence to that hypothesis. For one thing, the onset of Type II Diabetes, the most glaring result of disturbed insulin response, is associated with decreased rather than increased first-phase insulin response [diabetesjournals.org], so if artificial sweeteners are increasing first-phase insulin response it is not clear why that would be a problem.
And if artificial sweeteners cause an overproduction of insulin in the face of no actual glucose, then consuming them in the absence of no accompanying carbohydrate should be expected to trigger hypoglycemia as insulin triggers body tissues to absorb blood glucose. Yet there is no evidence that this actually happens.
That said, if the choice is between artificial sweeteners and no artificial sweeteners, then the safer bet is not to consume them as they have no precedent in our food supply for most of human evolution. However, if the choice is between artificial sweeteners and the equivalent quantity of sugar (which also has no precedent in our food supply in the quantities consumed in modern diets and has far more well-established deleterious effects on metabolism), the risk of artificial sweeteners seems pretty low in comparison based on currently available evidence.
Re:danger vs taste (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood this type of reaction. Yes, they are eating a boatload of calories through everything else, but at least they are cutting out a few hundred with the diet coke. Yes, it won't make them thin, but at least they are doing something to try and get healthier and possible lose a little weight, which they should be applauded for. You are probably the same type of person that goes to gym and tells people they should just quit because they aren't lifting enough weight or only doing cardio. The fact is, they are doing something, which is more than some people do and should be encouraged.
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but at least they are doing something to try and get healthier and possible lose a little weight
I am overweight myself, but that there is a load of horseshit. "Diet anything" is the exact opposite of doing something to get healthier and lose weight. It's an expression of a want or need, but it's also as clear a sign as you can possibly give that you're not going to do anything to achieve it. Going from fatty to healthy takes some serious changes in one's lifestyle, and ordering diet proves that you're not willing to make those changes but instead want to keep on eating and drinking like you're used to
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Except they aren't losing weight, they're just gaining weight at a slightly reduced rate.
But ... the administration says that slightly reducing the rate at which we add on trillions more in debt is a proud accomplishment. So, this has to be similar.
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Overweight person here, but not from McD.
When I go to mac donalds, I get a hamburger and a diet soda (I don't really care for the fries).
Makes sense for me, a 500-600 calorie meal. I't a nice lunch, tastes good (all beef, even MCD, is awesome this side of the world), and even has lettuce and tomato.
In your example, that double big mac has 700 calories. Not a diet meal, but not that excessive. It even has a lot of lettuce, which is good against blood sugar spikes, esp. a good thing for most fat people. A die
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As Wilford Brimely would put it "diabeetus" not because they are on a diet.
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I am not one to go chowing down on the cheap fast food but I do like diet soda even with a meal that is otherwise an overly caloric and generally nutritionally questionable mess. I find the consistency regular soda to be unpleasantly syrupy.
So there are some people who really just like diet cola better.
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I don't drink non-diet soda because it tastes terrible in 10 minutes once the bacteria get to working on it.
I like diet pepsi how it is, but I think if they change the formula I'll avoid it. Anyway, I perfer Diet Moxie when I can find it.
Still Acesulfame K (yuk!) (Score:2)
Aspartame doesn't taste as bad to me as saccharin did, but it's still bad, and the soda companies usually use acesulfame K as well, which tastes far worse (but doesn't break down as quickly as aspartame.) Unfortunately, Pepsi's keeping the acesulfame K in their recipe, so it'll still taste bad.
When I want diet soda, I drink iced tea. Tastes better, and restaurants give you refills. (And if it's bad iced tea, you can add lemon and sugar.)
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yeah, and it's probably carcinogenic [cspinet.org].
I've got a nasty Diet Cola habit, but switched from Pepsi to Sam's after Pepsi started adding ace-K. It's not hard to calculate a dose of aspartame that your liver enyzmes can handle but there's no safe-ish dose of ace-K.
Oh, and the whole "aspartame makes you fat" meme is bullshit - I've dropped 45 lbs in the past year by getting rid of nearly all the carbs in my diet, all while drinking the stuff. An over-abundance of carbs is what horks your insulin system.
A sweetene
Since when (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Since when (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Since when (Score:5, Funny)
And furthermore, it causes Courier font.
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If you think that's bad, sugar causes a WingDing font.
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Better that than Comic Sans MS.
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Beets cause me to vomit and have dry heaves for about half an hour. My individual evidence clearly shows that beets are horribly toxic and should be removed from the market.
Anecdote is a synonym for conclusive evidence, after all.
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Have you seen a doctor about that?
Aspartame is known to cause health problems in a small subset of the population - those with PKU.
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Re:Since when (Score:5, Informative)
Since when is Sucralose better than Aspartame?
Ask someone with phenylketonuria [wikipedia.org]. I once went to a restaurant with a group, one of whom has this disorder. When he ordered a drink, he specifically said "NOT diet, I can't have phenylalanine". They brought him Diet Coke. He drank enough that some time (maybe twenty minutes) later, he had a freak-out and would have gotten all of us tossed out if he hadn't had enough sense to explain to us what he thought was about to happen. The restaurant quickly reversed tack to make sure they weren't going to get sued, while one of the people in the group had to drive him to a hospital to make sure he'd be OK.
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He couldn't tell the difference between Coke and Diet Coke with the first sip?
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When he ordered a drink, he specifically said "NOT diet, I can't have phenylalanine". They brought him Diet Coke. He drank enough that some time (maybe twenty minutes) later, ...
Not to throw soda on your story or that person, but, if true, he's obviously an idiot. I don't know *anyone* that cannot tell the difference between regular and diet soda with one sip. In addition, according to the Wikipedia page you referenced, people with that affliction, at least if severe enough to cause the kind of reaction that guy mentioned, would be on a severely restricted diet and restaurant dining would be problematic:
The diet requires severely restricting or eliminating foods high in Phe, such as meat, chicken, fish, eggs, nuts, legumes, cheese, milk and other dairy products. Starchy foods, such as potatoes and corn are generally acceptable in controlled amounts,
Lastly, there's nothing to indicate that a trip to the hospital would be war
Re:Since when (Score:5, Funny)
Pepsi should also advertise "Contains No Radioactive Nuclear Waste".
No... they shouldn't
I'm afraid that I'm bound by too many non-disclosure agreements to explain why, but legally speaking that wouldn't be a good idea for them.
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How about "Does not exceed FDA Recommended Dietary Allowance for Radioactive Nuclear Waste"?
artificial sweeteners spike insulin (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that artificial sweeteners create an insulin response even though they are calorie free.
The insulin causes two things: 1) it tells cells to uptake sugar from your blood, which leaves you slightly hypoglycemic, since the insulin response is out of proportion to the actual sugar load consumed (particularly on an empty stomach). 2) chronically elevated insulin leads to insulin resistance (the precursor to metabolic syndrome which makes you fat, diabetic, hypertensive, etc).
This is the real reason we need to stop using most artificial sweeteners. Stevia and Erythritol have not been shown to cause this insulin response. It doesn't mean they aren't also bad. Only that for now, the jury is still out and they appear to be safe. Stevia in particular has been associated with something of an opposite effect, where it seems to improve insulin response in people who consume it.
Now for the popular reason they're getting rid of it:
Aspartame itself appears to have neurological effects as well, which in sufficient quantities causes problems. I personally know that any more than 20 oz of Diet Coke starts making me feel "odd" for lack of a better way to put it. It's not the caffeine. I don't get the effect from non-aspartame caffeinated drinks.
This seems like a relatively minor reason to stop using aspartame unless you're consuming vast quantities. Regardless, people think it's a neurotoxin and can't have that. (Forget about all the other benzene additives, colorants... even caffeine itself is a toxin).
Anyway, glad to see they are doing away with it. Here's hoping they don't use use Sucralose, which is even worse than Aspartame at producing a phantom insulin spike. (And people get upset at the chlorine... but say nothing about drinking chlorinated water or soaking in hot tubs).
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I forgot to point out above: when the insulin tells your cells to uptake the free blood sugar, unless you've been exercising a lot, it's your fat cells doing so.
So even though a diet soda has zero calories, you just got a tiny bit fatter.
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I'm a type 1 diabetic you insensitive clod! I have no insulin to respond with! ;-)
Re:artificial sweeteners spike insulin (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
From the abstract "The indicated increased clearance rate of plasma Phe after albumin may be caused by the significant increase of insulin, on which aspartame had no effect."
Could you cite your source where Aspartame does induce an insulin response?
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Here's hoping they don't use use Sucralose, which is even worse than Aspartame
That's about as likely as slashdot posters starting to read the articles that are posted.
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I assume you are referring to the study conducted on 7 people. Granted they did do a survey that consisted of 400 people, but the direct research sample was very small. This was also a single paper. The results are interesting and should prompt more studies, but it should not be used as a basis to determine if artificial sweeteners are bad for you without a more comprehensive study.
The worst case scenario is that something that has been studied for decades on thousands of people is replaced with somethin
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What's the biochemistry of this? (Score:2)
What's the biochemistry associated with aspartame or sucralose and an insulin response?
AFAIK, artificial sweeteners trick the tongue into tasting sweet but don't contain the chemistry (namely sugar) to induce an insulin response.
Now, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen (insert complex biochemistry here) and I wonder if there is possibly some kind of adaptive learned response associated with the taste of something sweet triggering it, sort of like a Pavlovian response. Or maybe there is some indirect conne
Re:artificial sweeteners spike insulin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re insulin response in sucralose: http://www.medicalnewstoday.co... [medicalnewstoday.com]
Also, protein itself elicits an insulin response.
Admittedly the case for Aspartame is weaker, and I can't find the citation right now, but despite early studies showing no insulin response for Aspartame, a more recent study DID make make a correlation.
Either way, artificial sweeteners being associated with insulin resistance regardless of BMI has been well-established. It stands to reason, given the evidence that Sucralose has been confirmed to result in an Insulin response, and that Insulin management in general is a tricky thing, that one should treat all artificial sweeteners with the same level of suspicion in this regard.
The only thing that excuses Stevia for now is that studies have shown a beneficial effect as opposed to any negative effect. Feel free to be a lab rat, just be an informed lab rat.
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You didn't do anything invalid with that factoid, but it's worth noting that it stands to reason that people feeling the need to watch their weight for whatever reason would be more likely to consume artificial sweeteners, and that feeling the need to take measures such as drinking diet soft drinks is likely due to the perception that without those measures BMI ( and liklihood of Diabetes ) would be w
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You are incorrect:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
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The problem with diabetes is that either you're T1 and you don't produce insulin (therefore no response) or T2 and your cells are insulin resistant and the temporary extra insulin you get from a diet soda has no effect because the cells just ignore it.
I posted a citation above. But do your own research. Nothing is conclusive in nutrition. Far from it (just look at the cholesterol debacle). But the evidence is damning.
Like I said, go ahead and be a lab rat, but be informed.
Aspartame got an unfair bad reputation (Score:5, Informative)
There are two major reasons why people incorrectly think aspartame causes cancer:
Due to the 1975 study, studies were launched and FDA officials describing aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut" (http://web.archive.org/web/20071214170430/www.fda.gov/fdac/features/1999/699_sugar.html [archive.org])
There are many more scientific studies on it by national governments showing it’s safe as well:
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Certainly no study is perfect, and you are right that there are studies that show it is unsafe too. But what I've linked are federal studies by various governments, the national cancer institute, the FDA and the EFSA. These are pretty big, well funded institutes who would actually benefit by finding it not safe and banning it - for example, Canada has government funded health care, and does not want to have to pay for all sorts of people getting sick from something, which is why they tax so much on 'bad' th
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Many of the studies calling aspartame "safe" used MSG in the "placebo". MSG is well-known to cause the same migraines as aspartame in the same class of people. Because of this, all of the effects were classified as "false positives" because nearly the same percentage had problems with the placebo.
Who puts MSG (a substance well-known for causing migraines in many people) in a placebo? That's shady as hell.
taste... (Score:2)
...I just think it taste bad. I rather have a cola with _no_ sweeteners.
Then again, the point of cola for me is sugar + caffeine. If I don't want that, I drink something else.
Xylitol to the rescue? (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought this one [amazon.co.uk] from the UK, but for the US, this one [amazon.com] looks good.
Only a small percentage of people find trouble with it (it can have a laxative affect if you take too much for the first few days). Still 4.8/5 from 106 reviews (no 1 or 2 star) is mightily impressive if you ask me.
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Re:Xylitol to the rescue? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Xylitol to the rescue? (Score:5, Funny)
1g of Xylitol is enough to kill 3 dogs in half an hour.
That is the oddest mortality unit I've heard in a long time.
Re:Xylitol to the rescue? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are right in that xylitol is extremely toxic to dogs, but the dosage you mention is way off. In this study [tmc.edu], for example, they gave 1 or 4 grams of xylitol per kg of weight to 12 adult Pekingese dogs. Since adult Pekingeses weight around 4.5 kg [wikipedia.org], that means that six of the dogs in the study received around 18 grams of xylitol. (Six other dogs received the lower dose, and six more were controls who received distilled water; the abstract is misleading as it suggests that all 18 dogs received xylitol).
All of the dogs who got xylitol showed significant effects, in several cases very severe. But... none of them died.
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I've watched a dog eat a half a bag of chocolate peanut butter cups, vomit, then be miserable for days. A dog eating a chocolate bar isn't nearly as fatal as you'd think.
Chocolate is like if you inhaled gasoline fumes. Xylitol for a dog is like if you inhaled Sarin nerve gas.
High Frutose are (Score:2)
a lot more dangerous or health than anything else. It's the first cause of diabetic-2
Taste (Score:2)
I find that drinks sweetened with Sucralose just taste better than drinks sweetened with Aspartame, so I think this is a good move.
Why do all diet drinks taste vile (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems like no matter what they use in diet drinks, all of them have a pretty horrific aftertaste that I get after just one sip.
Instead of diet drinks, I mostly drink water or just less soda. I used to drink a ton of soda but now half a can is enough for me - do be afraid to just throw out half a cup or can. It's just soda.
Facts behind the aspartame controversy (Score:2)
Sucrose question (Score:3)
I think I'm proably like a lot of (non-diabetic) Europeans in that I mentally lump aspartame, sucralose, splenda, corn syrup, saccharin, MSG and all other man-made sweeteners into the same "big money is covering these up as a direct cause of serious health issues" category, and sucrose into a "not great, but way better than anything artificial" category.
My question is: Is my paranoia scientifically justified?
FTFY (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes, aspartame is extremely harmful for a small minority of people.
There are many substances that are extremely harmful to a small number of people either through allergies or sensitivities.
Re:Aspartame not harmful? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll chime in on the aspartame==migrane bandwagon. I don't use caffeine, but consuming things like crystal lite can trigger migraines for me. I don't have the same problem with sucralose or sugar.
I have also had the same reaction from accidentally consuming a diet coke (handed to me by my wife to hold and drank absent-mindedly).
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Unless it costs 3x as much to make.
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Some people are deathly allergic to peanuts and peanut products, should we ban them all?
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Oh wow.
I REALLY feel sorry for you man. That is really one of the great things in life to enjoy...chiles!!
And with a diet filled with plenty of chiles and beer, you never have to worry about regularity!!
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Precisely... but seriously... if it were a problem... there would noticeable effects in the medical literature and population. From the sweetener there is nothing but supposition. From the caffeine... quite a bit of medical data.
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For thousands of years having a country full of well fed people was considered something to brag about.
Look at the world and you'll find lots of places where they're struggling to so much as feed themselves. And a fair number of the ones that can feed themselves only do so with food aid from countries like my own.
What is more, most of the countries that like to call the US fat, are statistically right behind us. The English and the Germans for example are right there with us.
So whatever. The obesity issue i
Re:Won't be drinking it (Score:4, Interesting)
I still drink regular soda as part of my diet, but instead of once a day it's more like once a month. I can't stand diet soda, and will only occasionally have it.
But diet soda is certainly better from a nutrition standpoint. The sheer volume of sugar in regular soda I think is the reason I developed Non-Alchoholic Fatty Liver Disease, and is probably why my cholesterol/triglyceride count is so high without statin drugs. I'll be able to test that theory after another 6 months or so because I've been off of high sugar foods for about 6 months so far, and the cholesterol/triglyceride figures have already dropped even on a low dose of lovastatin.
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I actually started drinking Diet Coke years ago because of the aspartame. I had one too many cans of Coca-Cola that just tasted awful (this was in the Coke Classic era after the New Coke fiasco), and found that the aspartame in Diet Coke not only tasted better, but consistently better.
I think one of the reasons that regular Coca-Cola tasted bad may have been because I don't care much for drinking them really cold, and the HFCS was probably tasting bad when it wasn't chilled. Aspartame has its own problems
Re:Won't be drinking it (Score:5, Insightful)
This message brought to you by the Aspartame industry and FOX News.
This message brought to you by the Organic Food Lobby, and the Church of Homeopathic Medicine.
Seriously, Aspartame is very safe. All of the anecdotes about it killing ants and whatnot are really just shitty science (somebody was able to repeat the same result using just a puddle of water, which also kills ants.) It's a non-nutrative sweetener, which means as far as your body is concerned, it is inert. There have already been decades of investigation into aspartame, and none have linked any kind of illness to it (except of course the bunk materials spread by the Church of Homeopathic Medicine.)
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At least for me, Aspartame gives me really bad migraines. Actually, it does it to my wife and daughters as well. And there are studies that show that it may be related to the rise in Alzheimer's.
The company paying for all those studies saying that it's safe is Monsanto, who doesn't have the best track record for being honest about what all their chemicals are doing (see honeybee hive death, different proteins in GMO wheat, pesticides, etc.)
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Great. Now we get a dozen unknown chemicals to replace it.
There's nothing "unknown" about crisp, refreshing Strontium-90.
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You're probably right that very few would bother to check what sweetner was used in a diet drink. But I've heard lots of people say they won't drink diet drinks because "Aspertame causes cancer" or just "Diet Pepsi is bad for you." With the implicit assumption that sugar is a natural product and therefore does you no harm. Despite the fact that sugar is actually one of the primary causes of sickness these days though complications of obesity and other effects.
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Tagatose is a low carbohydrate functional sweetener, very similar to fructose in structure. It is naturally occurring and can be found in some dairy products. Tagatose has a physical bulk similar to sucrose or table sugar and is almost as sweet. However, it is metabolized differently, has a minimal effect on blood glucose and insulin levels and furthermore provides a prebiotic effect. Tagatose is especially suitable as a flavor enhancer or as a low carbohydrate sweetener.
I wonder why it's not more popular.