Bet there's microplastics even in water. Did read there is teflon in water too a few years back. Seems a good fit for here.
there's no provable causal link between aspartame and cancer. yet again the WHO/IARC releases another confusing recommendation which the press picks up as some sort of dire danger, which is disencouraging because this may undermine their previous recommendations against stuff like glyphosate (an actual fucking carcinogen). that being said aspartame tastes bitter wtf do you seriously like diet coke?
do you seriously like diet coke?
Regular coke (or any non-diet soda for that matter) has a consistency that's just too gross for me to drink. It's like drinking syrup.
Yes! I have a sugar soda like once every couple months and it's so syrupy. I can feel it on my mouth and teeth. Way worse than diet soda in every way
My SO has to go under anesthesia every few years for some medical diagnostics, and theres a clear liquid diet. The previous time we stupidly got our normal gatorade zero for it. Felt horrible, bad migraines, etc.
The most recent time, we realized how dumb that was and got frickin sugar gatorade, sugar jello, and some of those Nitro Pepsis. Pretty fucking good. Felt waaaaaaay better not missing all those calories.
I had no idea what Nitro Pepsi was, looks interesting. Might try to get one before work.
I compare it to drinking skim milk. Once you make the switch whole milk starts tasting worse - same thing with regular soda once you start drinking diet.
I have made the switch to 1% ages ago and whenever I steal some of my roommates whole it still tastes better. Not feeling this one.
i can relate to this
i have nothing else to add i just didnt want u to feel alone
Some UK food bodies once classed it as a syrup iirc. (But I might be remembering it wrong. Was to do with the volume of sugar to water ratio)
God I completly disagree with this. Diet flavoring tastes fucking disgusting to me and always has. Meanwhile I like nondiet sodas a lot, even though I know they are terrible for me.
Juice is my vice; for some blessed reason I find soda in general simply unappealing.
My sister is like that, the only soda she's willing to drink is Ramune, and she only does it out of committment to weebdom
glyphosate (an actual fucking carcinogen)
's general "I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE" population spent years shitting on people for being wary of glyphosate by pulling the "it's made of science therefore it can't be bad" and "if you don't like science product you must live in a mud hut and believe in ghosts" and even "actually this feeds the third world so if you're opposed to it you want the global poor to starve" cards. 
Diet Pepsi for me. Every time I try a regular Pepsi it tastes like stale unsalted popcorn.
The only soda my parents really bought growing up was diet Pepsi, most of them taste fine to me.
I mean, almost everything is listed as a 'possible' carcinogen. Coffee and some herbs like thyme and sage fall under this grouping.
yep, people should go to the actual source because the IARC has a tiered system. alcohol and processed meat is listed as tier 1 carcinogen, this stuff is probably going to be on 2A or 2B or some shit
alcohol ... is listed as tier 1 carcinogen
Honestly shocked that alcohol a literal poison is only tier 1. Doesn't matter though I'd still keep drinking that garbage either way
I mean, it's the same tier as HPV, Hep B & C, X-rays and gamma radiation lol
Where do you see thyme as being a possible carcinogen? I have never heard that and a quick search shows its not listed at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2B
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeic_acid
Free caffeic acid can be found in a variety of beverages, including brewed coffee at 0.13 mg per 100 ml[7] and red wine at 2 mg per 100 ml.[8] It is found at relatively high levels in herbs of the mint family, especially thyme, sage and spearmint (at about 20 mg per 100 g), and in spices, such as Ceylon cinnamon and star anise (at about 22 mg per 100 g). Caffeic acid occurs at moderate levels in sunflower seeds (8 mg per 100 g), apple sauce, apricots and prunes (at about 1 mg per 100 g).[9] It occurs at remarkably high levels in black chokeberry (141 mg per 100 g).[10] It is also quite high in the South American herb yerba mate (150 mg per 100 g based on thin-layer chromatography densitometry[11] and HPLC [12]). It is also found at lower levels in barley and rye.[13]
Thanks, the IARC site shows caffeic acid but doesn't mention any of the sources.
Media and deliberately misrepresenting WHO classification schemes for clicks, name a more iconic duo.
Me, liberal, reading accounts from Victorian era life where children eat sawdust cereal and asbestos soup at the job factory:
“Wow. That’s harrowing. Imagine if that was happening today.”
Perhaps most sinister of all, though, was the way that arsenic insinuated itself into the very fabric of the Victorian home. The poison was used in the production of green dyes, which were incorporated into everything from ribbons to playing cards. The scene was set for a neo-Websterian tragedy in which beautiful maidens and society bucks crumpled to their deaths following a gift of haberdashery or quick game of whist. Even more fateful was the craze for deep green wallpaper, which led to thousands of families meeting their deaths as a result of their taste in home furnishings. Not that they actually licked their walls: the dye was very unstable, so the slightest breeze could dislodge a puff of toxic dust. Queen Victoria herself was so appalled by the homicidal tendencies of green wallpaper that she ordered every room in Buckingham Palace to be stripped of the stuff.
Did people not know that about artificial sweetener. People were talking about artificial sweetener being carcinogenic as common knowledge for at least 10 years
that was based on mice or rat studies and completely unreasonable doses so most of us rightly ignored it
As I'll probably ignore this one. Lots of things are in the "possibly carcinogenic" category. It's only slightly less meaningless than rat studies with absurd doses.
Hell, Weird Al Yankovic even mentions it in his song Dog Eat Dog, and that was in 1986.
Well, do I smell jelly donuts? This is my lucky day / I'll have some coffee with a carcinogenic sweetener
It was probably a reference to saccharine, which was derived from coal tar.
"A leading global health body"
Why not just say the name?
I have no doubt that sugar free alternatives aren't that much healthier than regular sugar-filled slop, but the vagueness makes my crank-alarm go off.
It's the WHO, but Reuters doesn't like them because they're China or something.
Apparently the US FDA have just done the dog-what-look https://twitter.com/TomChivers/status/1674428694906146816
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My favorite prop 65 warnings are on the windows of restaurants and hospitals. Like you didn't need to tell me Arby's is going to give people cancer.
IMO they ruined prop 65 on purpose. If they had only labeled things that were strongly linked to causing cancer, there would only be a few Prop 65 warnings and people would actually read them - but they made it absolutely ubiquitous and as a result everyone ignores them.
First time I came across a Prop 65 warning label was on a box of Christmas lights, and that was like in 2005 or so. I was freaking out until I read up on it and it turned out it's because of the solder (which has some lead) that's used to join the wires together inside the light sockets. I suppose as long as you're not chewing on the lights you should be good.
I wouldnt know about that. I live in the UK where we still dump all our sewerage and chemicals in the rivers.
Lots of things can potentially cause cancer. The question is how much risk actually comes from a normal consumption level of aspartame.
you gotta define normal consumption though because lots of people chug diet coke all day long thinking it's okay when it's obviously not.
Some studies suggest sweeteners are more likely to cause diabetes than the equivalent level of sugar. So, plausibly it was a bad choice of alternative for sweet things at least.
That's no hard proof, there's a correlation between people who consume lots of non-sugar sweeteners and diabetes. This could very well mean that people who are prone to eating lots of non-sweetener sugars are also prone to eating just plain sugary foods. A few causal mechanisms have been proposed, like non-sugar sweeteners making your glucose spike but there's really no evidence to support this. The new advice from the WHO makes sense in this aspect, switching to non-sugar sweeteners is not enough to lose weight or avoid diabetes, people need to consume things that are less sweet in general. It also explains why the new recommendations don't extend to patients who already have diabetes. It just strikes me that switching from normal coke to diet coke is a poor way to avoid diabetes.
I think the main difference is that I don't believe non-sugar sweeteners directly cause diabetes and are, by themselves, harmless, but we agree more than we disagree it seems.
I like my stevia sweetened drinks and it's gotten me off of caffeine addiction and helped me in avoiding the high fructose cornsyrup minefields. I'm too much of a baby to just drink water.
We're kind if lucky here. We dont have corn syrup. We just use standard sugar/glucose in drinks. But we do have lots of bad food like transfats.
I mean all of us knew it caused cancer right? No such thing as a free lunch
all of us knew it caused cancer right?
Not me. The only people I've ever heard say it with any seriousness were crazy 'fluoride closes your third eye' and 'essential oils will cure my child's autism' types. I'm genuinely surprised.
ETA after reading this thread I'm not sure what to think. Guess I'll keep drinking that trash
The US has a lot of places that off gas concerning levels of radon from the ground
It does lol. If you hit over 350 in a vape (most go higher) you get benzene, which is just car exhaust basically and yes is a carcinogen (and in all our air if you live anywhere near a mildly busy road or city)
Air does give you cancer if you were in Canada or the Northeast US this past month
jfc I expected the science literacy here to be at least better than
but this is some facebook boomer shit you guys are parrotingAspartame had been very well studied for decades. It's highly unlikely that it's going to suddenly be found to be dangerous or toxic to consume as it is used currently.
As others have pointed out, the WHO does some weird shit with classifying substances as carcinogenic, and the media is happy to run headlines based on it for clicks. Others itt have pointed out that red meat and alcohol are classified as "top carcinogens" in the same scale, but you won't see those discussed in the same way.
"Actually aspartame is carcinogenic" is in the "man gets slight rush from telling people John Lennon beat his wife" sort of territory.
Does it actually cause cancer or is this one of those experiments where they gave a mouse its body weight in aspartame?
things that taste sweet like sugar also cause the body to respond as if it was sugar
God damnit
big sugar, a provably addictive and harmful substance, has a vendetta against sugar substitutes. i feel like a crank saying 'do your own research' but it's perilous to blindly follow a secondary news article and not read the studys themselves
Fortunately, I can't stand the insipid taste of artificial sweeteners, it hurts my stomach at the very thought. Bleh.
It's all about exposure. Most artificial sweeteners will taste like medicine to people who are used to refined sugar. But it's something that changes overtime. Convince a diabetic that asparthame at least might help them lose weight, and they'll re-wire their brain to enjoy it just by drinking it over time.
Does it really work for diabetics to control their blood sugar? Or it's just a placebo effect?
Though it isn't sugar, asparthame rewires the same reward mechanism. But it doesn't come with the other endocrinal feedbacks. Artificial sweeteners end up generating further craving for actual sources of sugar. Furthermore, people who drink diet coke just end up eating more calories as they overestimate their room for maneuver. At the end of the day artificial sweeteners will not help with leptin resistance, as the body craves more sugar. And it doesn't help with insulin resistance, most likely because you aren't losing weight and probably still has fatty liver disease.
