Aspartame Is Possibly Linked To Cancer In Humans, the WHO Says 96
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A World Health Organization agency declared on Thursday that aspartame, an artificial sweetener widely used in diet drinks and low-sugar foods, could possibly cause cancer. A second W.H.O. committee, though, held steady on its assessment of a safe level of aspartame consumption. By some calculations using the panel's standard, a person weighing 150 pounds could avoid a risk of cancer but still drink about a dozen cans of diet soda a day. The declaration by a W.H.O. agency of a cancer risk associated with aspartame reflects the first time the prominent international body has weighed in publicly on the effects of the nearly ubiquitous artificial sweetener. Aspartame has been a contentious ingredient for decades.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, or I.A.R.C., said it based its conclusion that aspartame was a possible carcinogen on limited evidence from three observational studies of humans that the agency said linked consumption of artificially sweetened beverages to an increase in cases of liver cancer -- at levels far below a dozen cans a day. It cautioned that the results could potentially be skewed toward the profile of people who drink higher amounts of diet drinks and called for further study. Still, people who consume high amounts of aspartame should consider switching to water or other unsweetened drinks, said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the W.H.O. Department of Nutrition and Food Safety. But, he added: "Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most."
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, or I.A.R.C., said it based its conclusion that aspartame was a possible carcinogen on limited evidence from three observational studies of humans that the agency said linked consumption of artificially sweetened beverages to an increase in cases of liver cancer -- at levels far below a dozen cans a day. It cautioned that the results could potentially be skewed toward the profile of people who drink higher amounts of diet drinks and called for further study. Still, people who consume high amounts of aspartame should consider switching to water or other unsweetened drinks, said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the W.H.O. Department of Nutrition and Food Safety. But, he added: "Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most."
The Who? (Score:1)
Oh, those guys [who.int]. For a minute I thought you meant the band.
Re:The Who? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought you meant the first base player.
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gonna assume this was on a purpose and trolling for pedants. Nicely done
No, not "bass" like an instrument in the band; base, like "Who's on first?" in the old comedy sketch. Though whether you should call that the first base player versus the player on first base... well, anyway...
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Re:The Who? (Score:4, Informative)
It's an old Abbott & Costello routine.
Abbott & Costello Who's on First [youtube.com]
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like "Who's on first?" in the old comedy sketch.
Is that the Base-o-Matic one?
Re:The Who? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, those guys [who.int]. For a minute I thought you meant the band.
I thought you meant the first base player.
No, Saccharin is on first, Aspartame is what's on second, and Cyclamate's on third. Splenda is at bat, but I don't know WHO is pitching.
Ever since I was a young boy
I've drinked the silver ball
From Sugar down to Diet
I must have downed 'em all
WHERE (Score:5, Funny)
What I find more amusing than pretending it's the band, is that in Greek the initials are completely different : Pi Omicron Upsilon (pagkosmios organismos ygeias) and they form the Greek word for WHERE. So WHO is WHERE in Greek.
Class action suit for drinking Diet Coke? (Score:1)
CocaCola has been poisoning me willingly!
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Re: next california could possibly cause cancer! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: next california could possibly cause cancer! (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not the Fructose that is a problem, it is the ratio between Glucose and Fructose in High Fructose Corn Syrup that is the issue.
Usually the Glucose/Fructose ratio is near 50/50 for most foods, with the foods with wider ranges being the exception rather than the norm. In a normal varied diet the foods high in Fructose would be balanced by the foods high in Glucose.
Then in the late 1960's High Fructose Corn Syrup, which is different than plain Corn Syrup used in many recipes, was developed and began to be used widely in foods in the USA as a cheap sweetener (Fructose tastes sweeter then Sucrose or Glucose). While correlation does not always mean causation the obesity issues in the USA started around the same time HFCS became common in sodas and other sweetened foods.
You might find this interesting
https://www.princeton.edu/news... [princeton.edu]
tl:dr
three groups of rats, one with just food, one with food + HFCS laced water, final group with food + Sucrose laced water for caloric equivalence to HFCS group. Only the Food+HFCS group gained weight and had obesity related health issues.
And a final word of caution about artificial sweeteners in general if your trying to avoid them. Manufactures will reduce the amount of Sugar in a food so the Calories per serving looks lower and add an artificial sweetener like Sucralose (aka Splenda) [wikipedia.org] to bring the perceived sweetness back to what the item had originally. So the food will still list Sugar as main ingredient but contain an artificial sweetener further down the ingredients list.
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Re: next california could possibly cause cancer! (Score:2)
Unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
Quoting the summary: By some calculations using the panel's standard, a person weighing 150 pounds could avoid a risk of cancer but still drink about a dozen cans of diet soda a day.
Now, assuming I remember my grade school math correctly...a dozen equals 12. The typical can of diet soda in the stores where I shop is 12 fluid ounces (US measurement), or 354.9 mL (milliLiters).
Doing the math I get a total of 144 fluid ounces (US) or 4258.8 mL (4.2 Liters !!). A soldier humping a heavily loaded pack for 12 hours a day MIGHT need that much fluid intake.
I seem to remember the medical world saying 8 servings of 8 fluid ounces (US) of water per day is a good guideline for adequate hydration of the human body. 64 fluid ounces (US) is 1892.7 mL.
So drinking some 2.25 times the recommended daily volume of fluid will not harm you? It might be rough on your kidneys and bladder.
Sounds like this WHO report lacks some serious common & medical sense...and that's before we even get to discussing any risks posed by Aspartame itself.
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Although such a habit may have longer term consequences, only the aspartame itself was the focus of this study, considering other effects is beyond the scope.
They even say: "the results could potentially be skewed toward the profile of people who drink higher amounts of diet drinks and called for further study."
Me? I find it plausible that the lifestyles of people who drink endless big gulps of diet soda could skew the data towards "cancer".
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When I heard that news, my first thought was "Who's paying them to say that?"
Re:Unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
Drinking 12 cans of sugar water can't be any better for you
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Doing the math I get a total of 144 fluid ounces (US) or 4258.8 mL (4.2 Liters !!). A soldier humping a heavily loaded pack for 12 hours a day MIGHT need that much fluid intake.
Errr what? The recommended daily fluid intake for a sedentary man is 3.7L. No need for exclamation marks, it's not a big number. If you do any amount of actual exercise you will be drinking more than 4.2L. A 30min tennis game on a warm day will easily have you consuming a litre. If you spend all day doing heavy work you'll be drinking far more than this.
I seem to remember the medical world saying 8 servings of 8 fluid ounces (US) of water per day is a good guideline
You remember wrong. 64oz is 1.89L. In fact even among the websites which confuse "glasses" with "cups" (among which the NHS can include itself) precisely no
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Recommended normal consumption is 1-1,5 liters liquid per day.
I guess in places where clean drinking water doesn't exist you may recommend limiting to that. But no, not even the OP's ridiculously low 8x8oz is that low. That was a long outdated recommendation universally identified as "not enough".
NHS recommends 3.7L/day for men.
CDC recommends 3.7L/day for men (and pointed out that young-middle age males typically average around this intake with the majority coming from drinking fluids, not from eating).
The Australian government was recently criticised by scientists fo
Which fluid ounce? (Score:2)
You remember wrong. 64oz is 1.89L. In fact even among the websites which confuse "glasses" with "cups" (among which the NHS can include itself)
Actually, since you mentioned the NHS, you are looking it up wrong because 64 fl oz is 1.81 litres in the UK and everywhere other than the US. The US has completely different definitions when it comes to volume units compared to the old standards that the rest of the planet used to use and it's only 1.89 litres for US fluid ounces. The lack of a common standard is one of the many reasons why nobody should ever use these units!
Re: Which fluid ounce? (Score:2)
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I don't know about cancer but when I drink something containing aspartame, it gives me a headache.
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Doing the math I get a total of 144 fluid ounces (US) or 4258.8 mL (4.2 Liters !!). A soldier humping a heavily loaded pack for 12 hours a day MIGHT need that much fluid intake.
Not a soldier, but in my youth I worked as a restaurant dishwasher. During the hot summer months the kitchen was easily 40c+, often closer to 50c, and I used to drink two to three pitchers of water daily - about 1.8 litres (60fl oz) each. The most amazing part was over an 8 hour shift I typically didn't have to use the bathroom despite the amount of fluid I was drinking, between the physical exertion and heat I ended up sweating most of it back out.
If you live a moderately sedate lifestyle then yeah, 2 li
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Quoting the summary: By some calculations using the panel's standard, a person weighing 150 pounds could avoid a risk of cancer but still drink about a dozen cans of diet soda a day.
Quoting the other part of the summary:
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, or I.A.R.C., said it based its conclusion that aspartame was a possible carcinogen on limited evidence from three observational studies of humans that the agency said linked consumption of artificially sweetened beverages to an increase in cases of liver cancer -- at levels far below a dozen cans a day.
It sounds like there's competing evidence and different groups in WHO have different interpretations.
Either way, the "pos
a dozen cans (Score:3)
of anything will give you cancer, or at the very least fuck up your pancreas or some shit.
This has been known for decades (Score:3)
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I distinctly remember a bubblegum having the cancer warnings on its label in the 90s
No you're thinking of bubblegum in the 60s when it had radium on it. And cocaine.
You'll have to forgive me if I recall some of that not quite right. Things sometimes get a little blurry after I drink an entire 12-pack case of Diet Coke in one sitting.
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They stopped putting radium in bubble gum in the 40s and switched to plutonium. Cocaine was phased out by the late 60s, and is no longer used. But that white powder you find on bubble gum in baseball cards and Wacky Packages? That's anthrax.
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No there's not been any cancer warning label put on anything because of aspartame ever. If you saw a cancer warning on bubblegum it was because of something else.
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Maybe it was for saccharine. I remember getting a can of soda in my lunch as a kid often and it was diet. It had large text at the bottom of the can saying something like saccharine has been shown to cause animals to get cancer or something. Not sure at that time if saccharine was a popular artificial sweeter for other things.
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The LD50 for saccharin was at least an order of magnitude higher than what they're saying for aspartame. If you pump some creature full of enough of anything, it will get cancer.
Poison != Cancer (Score:2)
If you pump some creature full of enough of anything, it will get cancer.
No, it will die first because you poisoned it. Cancer requires repeated dosing well below the level of acute toxicity because if you are dead you can't get cancer. However, everything, even water [wikipedia.org], will kill you if you ingest enough of it.
a person weighing 150 pounds (Score:2)
Where are you going to find someone like that?
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The 'W' in 'WHO' stands for "World".
The world average adult body weights is just under 150 lbs.
About half of the adult human population everywhere consists of women, who tend to be lighter than men.
About two thirds of the human world population is not overweight, and the portion is larger in Africa and Asia that have the biggest populations.
"possibly" (Score:5, Insightful)
This study doesn't pass the sniff test on many levels.
Firstly; I'm sure that almost anything will cause cancer in large doses, you just have to study it hard enough and gather the data in the right way.
Secondly; There's a metric fuckton of people out there who are convinced that any "modern" food is poison and should be banned. Aspartame in particular is something they'd give their left kidney to be able to point to and say "See, I told you!!".
eg. Have they tested granola with the same fervor as they tested aspartame? Of course not.
TLDR; After decades of rabid aspartame-hate (I remember people trying to blame AIDS on aspartame back in the 90s) the best they can come up with is "possibly"? To me this makes aspartame one of the safest things out there. Possibly.
PS: Maybe it's the plastic bottles that Soda come in, or the burnt sugar they use to flavor the cola, not the aspartame.
Re:"possibly" (Score:5, Informative)
Soda cans, while mostly metal, actually have a plastic liner in them which is probably leaching forever chemicals in the soda. Only glass bottle are plastic free (if you ignore the plastic liner of the metal cap, but store your bottles upright).
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BPS is the main problem. Why companies keep using this substance god knows but it reminds me of leaded fuel. The oil and car companies endlessly complaining that it was absolutely vital and there was no way not to use it in petrol. Then various authorities around the world gave them the finger and said remove it and lo and behold! Suddenly they found a way of running engines un unleaded fuel.
The food and plastics industry seems remarkable similar to this to me.
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Yup, typo, S right next to A on kb.
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Why don't you learn the basic science before posting?
ALL of the metabolites of aspartame are found in other foods. If any of them were a problem they'd be a problem in other foods as well.
Aspartame consumption is measured in milligrams. You'd have to consume vast quantities of soda for it to have a measurable effect compared to other foods which contain those metabolites. Even dihydrogen monoxide in those quantities would be harmful.
We've been consuming and studying and hating on it since the 1970s and th
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Why don't you learn the basic science before posting?
ALL of the metabolites of aspartame are found in other foods. If any of them were a problem they'd be a problem in other foods as well.
Aspartame consumption is measured in milligrams.
Yet, aspartame is one of the few compounds used in food that contain aspartate and phenylalanine in substantial quantities and under conditions where they can readily react with one another, creating 4-benzyl-2,5-diketo-1-piperazineacetate, a chemical from the group of the so called 2,5-diketopiperazines, which have been proven so far to exhibit a wide range of biological activity, including carcinogenicity and other toxicities.
I knew it! I knew it! (Score:3)
Aspartame causes dupes! [slashdot.org]
Aspartame causes dupes! [slashdot.org]
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Deja vu (Score:2)
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There is a big push right now for this new panic. Whatever interests are pushing it haven't yet achieved the outcome they want, so it will keep appearing.
This is like arguing that seatbelts kill (Score:4, Insightful)
Dietary fads based on elimination of items rarely work in people and people can't keep track of liquid calories since they aren't filling. Substitutions work great. Instead of going from soda to water, people drink soda. If you tell people that diet soda causes cancer, diet soda goes off the menu and regular soda goes back.
A can of soda has 100-150 calories. If you drink 25 or so you gain a pound from the excess calories. We know that obesity causes cancer and is one of the highest risk factors outside of exposure to other common carcinogens like smoking. About 5% of cancers today in the US are from obesity and the biggest thing keeping it low is other causes of death are so much higher that the odds of living long enough to get cancer drop.
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It's not just that - cancer cells undergo fermentation-type respiration.
Without high glucose they die off. Something like 60% of cancers can be fought off with a hardcore ketogenic diet (epileptic type) which even works in many 'untreatable' metastatic cases. The Nobel Prize c. 1929 wemt over this.
Look, I wouldn't drink Diet Coke when fighting for my life against Stage IV cancers but in the nascent case the endogenous mechanisms just needs a leg up.
The average American ate 5lbs of sugar a year in 1900. B
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You know what else "possibly" causes cancer? (Score:5, Informative)
Aspartame is a class 2b substance, along with aloe vera, ginkgo biloba plants, acetaldehyde (found in bread, coffee and ripe fruits), pickled vegetables, magenta dyes, bitumens (aka paved roads), photocopier and (some?) laser printer inks, and "radio frequency electromagnetic fields" eg celphones and wifi, among many other substances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
But don't let me stop you from freaking out and declaring you were "right all along."
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Along with benzofuran (yum!), Lead (gimme more, Mom!), Perfluorooctanoic acid (yay!), etc.
But don't let me stop you from freaking out. Enjoy your "stop telling me what I can and can't eat" breakfast of champions!
Re:You know what else "possibly" causes cancer? (Score:4, Funny)
So what you're saying is I need an Amazon Faraday cage for my wifi router *AND* my diet coke!
Fake News (Score:1)
Aspartame is good for you!
--
Paid for by the Monsanto Corporation
The Onion, 2013: (Score:3)
https://www.theonion.com/man-w... [theonion.com]
*tap* *tap* (Score:2)
Donald Rumsfeld, is that you?
But, but... (Score:1)
So what is the causitive effect exactly? (Score:2)
Methanol? Lots of food components produce methanol during digestion, pectin for instance.
Sugar substitutes are sneaking in everywhere. (Score:2)
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Aspertame (Score:2)
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It's the most studied food additive in history. That means anybody can support any conclusion by cherry-picking. It's like climate science. Honest and sincere reporting of tests and results gives ammo to everybody.
I should have liver cancer. (Score:2)
Mind you, the aspartame would be in a race with the alcohol... my money's on the booze.
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Reading the NYT does not cause cancer, it causes brain rot.
Just Stop Drinking The Colas (Score:2)
Problem solved.
How many times I see some fatty in a wheelchair cluyching their two gallon-sized platic bottles of Coke.
Just. Stop. The. Consumption.
Study (Score:2)
who cares about WHO? (Score:2)
WHO lost all credibility with their handling of covid. WHO is a highly political outfit. Ignore what they say and look at the actual research papers and commentary by people who have integrity.
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The entire UN is a joke and really serves no purpose but the self-serving interests of those who are a part of it. When you have a member country commit acts of war but that country is still on security counsels and has enough voting power to vote-down resolutions against them...then what kind of fucking joke is that. That's like letting a criminal be part of his own jury.
The whole damn organization is a joke wasting valuable real estate in our country. I have no idea why we're a part of this nonsense.
Every artificial sweeter (Score:2)
will eventually be found to cause cancer.
EVERYTHING IS BAD FOR YOU! (Score:1)
Everything wants to kill you. Some more slowly than others.
Get used to it.
100 packets a day (Score:2)
The WHO guideline says that for a 150-lb person should stay under 2400 mg of aspartame per day.
That's equivalent to about 60-100 packets of Equal, or 12 diet sodas, per day.
https://www.uab.edu/shp/nutrit... [uab.edu].
Yeah, OK, I think I can do that.
WHO Cares (Score:2)
I mean...they do. But they also spent a lot of the pandemic blindly pushing China's propaganda. Everything at the UN is about the most useless form of beaucracy you can get. Nothing they do has any authority. They continue to allow countries as part of panels that clearly shouldn't be part of it. You have a country attack another country and that same country votes down any resolutions as opposed to removing that countrys right to vote.
The WHO is a bunch of self-serving morons. Who gives a fuck what they sa