Could Aspartame Be Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice? (sciencealert.com) 60
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Science Alert:
Could the sweetened drinks we're consuming be making us feel a little more anxious? A new study looking at the effects of the artificial sweetener aspartame on mice suggests that it's a possibility that's worth investigating further.
Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981, aspartame is widely used in low-calorie foods and drinks. Today, it's found in nearly 5,000 different products, consumed by adults and children. When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA's recommended maximum daily amount for humans, they generally displayed more anxious behavior in specially designed mood tests.
What's truly surprising is the effects could be seen in the animals' offspring, for up to two generations...
When the mice were given doses of diazepam — a drug once marketed as Valium, which is commonly used to treat anxiety in humans — anxiety-like behaviors stopped across all generations. The medication helps to regulate the same pathways in the brain that are altered by the effects of the aspartame.
Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981, aspartame is widely used in low-calorie foods and drinks. Today, it's found in nearly 5,000 different products, consumed by adults and children. When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA's recommended maximum daily amount for humans, they generally displayed more anxious behavior in specially designed mood tests.
What's truly surprising is the effects could be seen in the animals' offspring, for up to two generations...
When the mice were given doses of diazepam — a drug once marketed as Valium, which is commonly used to treat anxiety in humans — anxiety-like behaviors stopped across all generations. The medication helps to regulate the same pathways in the brain that are altered by the effects of the aspartame.
Mice lie (Score:2)
monkeys exaggerate
That's nothing (Score:3)
Re:Mice lie (Score:5, Informative)
Giraffes are insincere
And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb
Orangutans are skeptical
Of changes in their cages
And the zookeeper is very fond of rum
Zebras are reactionaries
Antelopes are missionaries
Pigeons plot in secrecy
And hamsters turn on frequently
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Had to look that up, but wow.
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Had to look that up, but wow.
Even as a kid I remember being bothered by the elephants are dumb line. \_()_/
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Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo
I do believe it
I do believe it's true
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Imagine how many titles can be improved by putting "in mice" back in the title:
Of Human Bondage In Mice
The Human Centipede In Mice
All Quiet On The Western Front In Mice
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Useful and interesting, but with caveats. (Score:3, Insightful)
When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA's recommended maximum daily amount for humans
But mice don't weight 15% of the average human's weight. I see where they are going with, akin to an extreme/limit test.
But I would see this as an "overdose" or "toxic exposure" test on mice. I would be interested in seeing the effects when the dose is scaled down to their average weight.
As someone who drinks a lot of zero-sugar drinks, it does give me pause to think, nevertheless. Very interesting study.
Re:Useful and interesting, but with caveats. (Score:5, Insightful)
When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA's recommended maximum daily amount for humans
But mice don't weight 15% of the average human's weight. I see where they are going with, akin to an extreme/limit test.
The word "equivalent" implies that they scaled the amount down proportionally.
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But that's *really* tricky. What the appropriate proportion for scaling depends on what you think the mechanism is....and this was something they weren't expecting.
So don't take that "equivalent" too seriously.
Re:Useful and interesting, but with caveats. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Since aspartame is consumed orally, via consumption of low-calorie foods or drinks, we administered aspartame to adult C57BL/6 male and female mice in drinking water. We used 0.03%, 0.015%, or 0.0075% aspartame [pnas.org] based on previous reports (13, 19, 38)."
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For context, if I successfully converted the stupid units, there's about 0.06% aspartame in a can of diet coke.
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Right, and no doubt they've find genotypical liver enzyme expression silos that greatly vary the reasonable clearing dose.
I do not doubt the people who say it gives them headaches - that would be a good place to start looking for enzyme patterns.
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But mice don't weight 15% of the average human's weight. I see where they are going with, akin to an extreme/limit test.
The maximum recommended daily amount of aspartame is 10,000mg/kg of body weight; assuming average human weight is 70kg, 15% of the maximum is 105g. The average mouse weighs 25g. If you tried to force 105g of aspartame into a 25g mouse it would literally burst.
I would be interested in seeing the effects when the dose is scaled down to their average weight.
That’s what the word “equivalent” means, and presumably that’s what they did since the report doesn’t mention bursting mice.
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Are you sure about your figures? I suspect that comma is a decimal separator, so it would be 10mg/kg, that seems more likely. That would be 700mg for a 70kg human, slightly under one gram, and still plenty of artificial sweetener. the main reason why artificial sweeteners are used in food is not because they are healthier. It's because while "sounding" healthier for the consumer they are also way more potent than sugar, so only a small fraction is needed and the overall cost is less.
Personally, I am not aga
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No, only mice.
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So, body mass is taken into account in the equivalency. But hey, Valium is apparently an effective treatment so no need for any anxiety over it!
Secondary effects (Score:2)
Saw this one on the Slashdot feed on the Fediverse [noagendasocial.com]. In my reading of things, artificial stuff tends to cause secondary effects as it interacts with our gut and blood, not to mention all the other weird chemicals floating around in us that we know are not found in nature. Add weird stuff to a system, get unpredictable results, generally.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So, I mean, if it's been tested and FDA approved, what's the problem?
Re:Secondary effects (Score:4, Informative)
Aspartame, according to the FDA, is "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety is "clear cut." The weight of existing scientific evidence indicates that aspartame is safe as a non-nutritive sweetener.
That's not how anything works. This country doesn't recognize any studies which aren't done to its exact specifications, so there are tons of perfectly valid studies on health including nutrition that we simply ignore. This is particularly notable when it comes to health benefits of cannabis, which directly conflict with its scheduling. We won't accept other nations' studies, and we won't do our own, so we can keep doing the frankly evil things we're doing.
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Why most published research findings are false (Score:2)
Time to link "Why most published research findings are false" by John P A Ioannidis [nih.gov] again, I suppose.
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Re: Secondary effects (Score:2)
health benefits of cannabis
I'm not denying that some might exist. But most are overshadowed by the canabis-seeking behavior of it's users.
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Like other drugs, that behavior is only a problem for other people because of the legal environment. Where drugs are decriminalized and drug abuse treated like an ailment instead of a crime, the problems tend to be sharply reduced.
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treated like an ailment instead of a crime
But there's the problem. Have a few employees who like to get high so they pick up their paychecks and then call in sick until the money is gone and they need more weed.
When people proclaim what a wonder drug marijuana is, that's their brain convincing them that they need more. A classic sign of addiction. Same for booze. But most people know that it fucks them up and they shouldn't do anything important while drunk. But hey! It's the weekend, so just get sober before Monday morning and it's nobody else's
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But there's the problem. Have a few employees who like to get high so they pick up their paychecks and then call in sick until the money is gone and they need more weed.
So solve that problem the same way you'd solve any other problem that manifested in the same way, don't blame weed for your lack of management.
When people proclaim what a wonder drug marijuana is, that's their brain convincing them that they need more.
Science isn't a thing for you, huh?
Re: Secondary effects (Score:2)
Science isn't a thing for you, huh?
Addiction treatment is an interest. I know a number of people who have effectively replaced the ultimate life goal [wikipedia.org] of self-actualization with one of "weed". That's fine in a society which places no value on the collective (pure capitalism driven only by self interest and greed). But it fails when one's contribution to the group is necessary for the benefit of all.
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Such as pain reduction [ctvnews.ca]?
Some people suffering pain from cancer and other chronic diseases turn to marijuana to ease their suffering, but much of that relief may come from simply believing weed will help, a new study found.
In research, the tendency to have positive expectations that a dummy pill, procedure or treatment will help is called the placebo effect.
"The placebo response amounted to 67% of the pain relief associated with genuine cannabinoids," said lead author Karin Jensen, an associate professor and research group leader in the pain neuroimaging lab at the Karolinska Institutet in the Stockholm area.
"Factors such as patients' expectations of relief are likely to play a role in the analgesic effects associated with cannabis-based treatments," Jensen said in an email.
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First, does it matter why it works? We pooh-pooh the placebo effect, but it seems to have a lot of efficacy for some people. Second, that's plenty effective! Only 52% of people treated with acetaminophen report relief of pain, compared to 32% on a placebo [nih.gov]. That's only a bit different from the cannabis results.
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That's not a failure of science, it's a failure of bureaucracy.
There *are* failures of science, but they are overshadowed by failures of regulation and by failures of "investigative"(?) reporting.
Safe! (Score:1)
We chant as one: it is SAFE and our society is not falling but rising.
I'm on my way to get my seventh booster just after I munch down this delicious BeyondMeat sandwich...
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And yet the persistent reports of seizures...
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The same department that approved rBST while many other countries banned [wikipedia.org] it? Perfectly trustworthy! /s
Aspartame has always been bad news (Score:4, Interesting)
Personal anecdote: When aspartame replaced saccharin in soda, it took me a couple of months to realize that my sudden onset of feeling crappy all the time was caused by that. That upset my strong belief that food allergies didn't exist, and over the years other non-anaphylactic food allergies/reactions have surfaced (i.e., peanuts, sesame oil, sulphur dioxide, et al.), sometimes after years of not catching on to the relationship between my mood and/or physical reactions and the foods I was consuming.
It's not too much of stretch to say that aspartame affected my physical and mental health adversely, more than any of the others. It seems highly likely lots of folks are being affected similarly without knowing why.
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Real brave of you to dish out this all important health advice ... anonymously. Inspires trust.
Re: Aspartame has always been bad news (Score:1)
You know who else consumes a lot of aspartame? Donald Trump. At 244 lbs (111 kg), his maximum daily dose would be 5.5 g (50 mg per kg body weight). He drinks 12 diet cokes a day, which gives roughly half that (200 mg per can). So he should be well into the study range, i.e. 3x the dose they gave mice.
On the other hand, 12 cans of Diet Coke also have as much caffeine as 6 cups of coffee, so that probably has a big effect too, on sleep if nothing else.
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Personal anecdote:
I used to drink water additives, flavors, that had aspartame in them. After I drank them, one a day, I started getting bad headaches. Laid off the water additives and the headaches disappeared.
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Personal anecdote:
I used to drink water additives, flavors, that had aspartame in them. After I drank them, one a day, I started getting bad headaches. Laid off the water additives and the headaches disappeared.
You can add me to the bad headaches crowd, switched from multiple cans of Pepsi max to water and one can of coke and no issues since.
Wacky (Score:1)
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Maybe I should rtfa
Maybe you should learn to internet [google.com]
In don't think so (Score:1)
Re:In don't think so (Score:5, Funny)
Mice don't usually eat Aspartame. Mice eat a lot healthier than humans do.
PVC wiring insulation and HDPE water lines, nutritious and delicious!
So... (Score:3)
Fake things in food is bad. (Score:1)
My current hate for the food industry though is in the over processed gums used as thickeners in everything from ice cream to cream cheese. Any product with gum in it comes out within an hour or two, and not in a nice way. Real ice cream doesn't do this to me so it isn't a milk or dairy problem. It is all th
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I have yet to see a sugar 'replacement' that doesn't eventually prove as harmful as sugar itself.
Stevia is the only one I know of. It's not a 1:1 replacement by any means, in fact it does approximately the same weird stuff to my tongue as aspartame does and has the same lack of volume and texture problem, but it appears to have actual health benefits [sciencedaily.com].
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I avoid all sugar substitutes when aware of it, and stopped drinking junk like soda after high school.
Same. Speaking for myself, by doing nothing else other than 100% cutting out caloric drinks (and drinks with artificial sweeteners), I managed to lose a lot of weight. Later, in combination with exercise, some other dietary changes, and for a time intermittent fasting, I managed to lose a lot more. I'm now in my 40s, I've maintained my same weight for ~10 years, and I'm lighter than I was in my 20s. For me, sodas were the start to it all.
Re: Xantham gum, that's interesting. I've used it at home occasionally
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Oh yeah and double reply, you can make ice cream at home that beats the hell out of anything you can get in a supermarket, without any special equipment. All you need is some way to make whipped cream, like a power hand mixer... though if you are really dedicated you can do it with just a whisk. You layer whipped cream and sweetened condensed milk in a container, fold it together, and freeze it, bada boom. About half a shot to a shot of booze per half gallon container prevents excessive crystallization of t
who cares (Score:1)
Why should I care if quality of life goes down for mice?
I'm no mouse, but... (Score:2)
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no (Score:2)
It's the caffeine in the seven coke zeros that you are using as a delivery mechanism for the aspartame, you insensitive clod!
Sweetness & evolution? (Score:2)
Could the sweetness sensation itself be the cause? Sugar and even the taste of sweetness sometimes acts as a stimulant. If you get a stimulus when you don't need or don't want it, it could be sensed as or cause anxiety.
Evolution may have made omnivore mammals work harder to obtain berries and fruits, being those have valuable vitamins. Thus, the sensation of sweetness may crank up our metabolism. This reaction may be beneficial for hunter-gatherers, but not necessarily cubicle workers.