Sure, but it feels like a silly distinction. The famous example is water, which fits those same criteria. Would we that that there's not "nothing" wrong with water?
If there's anything wrong with MSG that isn't simply due to sodium intake, I think it's unknown to science (at least in the sense that there's no theory about it with any wide uptake). MSG is also intensively studied and has a very similar mechanistic story to aspartame.
Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):
But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]
Indeed. It turns out that “MSG headaches” are just high sodium level headaches, either through dehydration, unbalanced electrolytes, elevated blood pressure or whatever else higher than normal sodium levels cause headaches. The same headache could be caused by salt. MSG actually makes recipes require less of other flavor ingredients, including salt. It’s also often found in dishes that still contain relatively massive amounts of salt.
So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just don’t eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.
I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespread danger to public health from these additives, but it doesn't mean there aren't still individuals whose health gets messed up (including legitimate headache or migraine symptoms) by these additives.
> discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG
This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this. MSG is nearly identical to the glutamic acid in other foods. If it were true they'd be unable to tolerate parmesan cheese, soy sauce, aged meats, tomatoes, mushrooms, and seaweed.
Glutamate is considered a migraine trigger, though. Many people do avoid or limit those foods for that reason. Thankfully it doesn’t appear to be a trigger for me, because I love all those things.
There is some controversy about dietary glutamate being directly responsible for migraine. It’s common in the brain already. It’s only allowed selectively through the blood-brain barrier. However it could trigger other types of headache, and those can trigger migraines. Also, apparently more of it is formed in the brain when there are high levels of lysine and ornithine in the body. Many of the foods with high levels of glutamate also have high levels of those aminos.
High levels or low levels of sodium in the body can also be a migraine trigger. MSG is lower in sodium than table salt, but it is additional sodium. Many of the issues blamed on it though are after eating foods that contain MSG and a high amount of salt as well. That’s also true of many of the glutamate-containing foods for that matter (gravies, miso, soy sauce, aged meats).
Doctors recommend eliminating one single ingredient at a time to find your triggers. However, I’m sure many people don’t control for salt when eliminating MSG or natural food glutamate.
Aspartame is also a trigger, but the fact that one person has multiple triggers doesn’t mean they are related at all.
Now you’re right that MSG is more than sodium. Sodium can be a headache trigger, including migraines. Glutamate is also a migraine trigger and a fairly common one. It doesn’t happen to be one for me. However, it is a neurotransmitter that is involved in pain signaling. It’s understandable how it could easily trigger a migraine or make the pain worse.
Some triggers for some people actually help other people with migraines, like caffeine. Migraines are such an incredibly complex topic that there are medical specialists for them. Mine can be fairly debilitating, but are rare enough I don’t qualify for most prescriptions. So I definitely understand how trigger management and symptom management are a big deal.
This effect is very obvious on me. I consistently get headaches when my sodium intake is too high. I don’t even use MSG in my own cooking but occasionally I add too much salt.
Might consider a mix of electrolytes instead of just salt. I usually keep a container mixed with "snake juice" ratios for electrolytes and use that to season with instead of salt alone. I'll also sometimes put a pinch in my water, not nearly snake juice amounts, when I get a bit off and start getting leg cramps.
> So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good.
Salt and MSG are sometimes said to strengthen existing flavors, but I'm pretty sure they mainly just contribute their own unique taste: salty and umami.
(There could of course theoretically be some interactions with other taste receptors, similar to how sweet things make things taste much less bitter, e.g. cocoa, but that is a relatively specific effect and not one that acts as a general flavor enhancer.)
If you lick plain MSG, it tastes bitter. Add it to something very sweet and it just tastes bizarre. Sprinkle it on fried chicken and it tastes like you just dumped chicken gravy on it and pumped up the taste. It really does mainly amplify flavors.
And while MSG tastes very wrong in sweets, sweets generally always taste better with a bit of salt. Salt is its own flavor and a flavor amplifier.
The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.
The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.
It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.
It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.
All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.
That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.
Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
The larger the impact of the information you are sharing, the more clicks and follows you will get.
People trying to become content creators quickly realize that pointing out a 30cm rock headed towards Earth gets no money, err, attention. So they drop the 30cm part, call it a massive chunk of rock that will rip through the atmosphere, and suddenly they are getting much more money, sorry, attention.
This is what makes social media so depraved, any idiot who makes a good word salad can profit from being an idiot.
You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).
Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?
Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.
Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.
Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
And as always, too much of anything isn't good for you either. A sugary soda on occasion won't do much harm, but some have several a day or it's the only thing they will drink.
Sugar please. I can't stand the taste of aspartame. They've started using Dextrin to replace sugars in confectionary (Mars Galaxy minstrels) and they taste awful.
I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.
Sounds like aspartame is a boon for your health if its addition means you eat fewer Mars bars and drink less sweetened bubbly water. Hooray for aspartame!
I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth.
It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.
And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.
Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.
You're conflating two different things. Unless you have some very weird genetic condition, it does taste sweet to you. That is, it activates the same sweet receptors on your tongue and in other parts of your mouth that sugar activates - and more or less to the same extent (relative to concentration).
However, sugar isn't simply a sweet taste. It also has some amount of flavor, and so do the artificial sweeteners, and it is these flavor differences that you (and many others) dislike. Flavor is something that happens in the air tract, and is far more complex than taste.
It absolutely does not. The places on my tongue that taste sweet and the places that taste aspartame are completely different (the latter strongly at back of my throat, sugar strongly on my tongue).
No, this is pretty common in folks who don't drown their taste buds and systems in tons of it every day. Then you feel it anytime its there, since its pretty rare and its disgusting chemical bleh, one feels it fully.
Its a bit like smoking cigarettes - to many non-smokers, its disgusting beyond description, smearing face with old feces wouldn't be worse. To many smokers its mild, pleasant, they enjoy it with lunch etc.
Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
I felt the same way, they used to taste awful to me, now I only notice a slight difference between Dr Pepper zero and regular. Maybe I just got older and my taste buds degraded?
A lot of the “zero” soft drinks are sweetened differently from the “diet” ones. There’s often a mix of different sweeteners so you don’t get too much of any one aftertaste.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
What I find weird is the assumption that everyone would like soda with artificial sweeteners, but I guess other don't taste it the same way. There are restaurants where I just give up and just get water. Strange because I assumed much of their profit came from drinks.
I know a few people like myself, that won't drink artificially sweetened soda, but we are the minority. Mostly people are confused when you tell them you don't like the taste, and that you drink so few sodas that the sugar doesn't make any difference in terms of health anyway.
I am convinced that something weird is going on with Pepsi Max though, the about of that stuff being consumed is absolutely insane. At events it not even close, it's Pepsi Max that people primarily consume.
I felt this same way all my life, until 6-months ago, when I found a flavored sugar free mix I actually liked.
I returned from vacation in Mexico, where I was drinking Coke with sugar. When I returned home, regular Coke, made with Corn Syrup in the U.S., tasted off. I decided to take the opportunity to stop drinking it.
I tried dozens of low calorie drink mixes and found one I could tolerate. I did some research and all things pointed to that being healthier than my Coke habit.
My tastes have changed again since starting this, but I don’t drink Coke anymore.
One thing that might have helped was drinking aspartame in my coffee, where its aftertaste is harder to detect.
I should mention the only good side effect I’ve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I haven’t lost any weight by the change. It’s also much easier to make a diet work when I’m not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.
Maybe, while I can relate to this feeling when it comes to some sweeteners commonly used in baked goods, I genuinely habe a hard tile distinguishing between sugar and sweetener containing beverages at this lokng.
I actually hate the taste of sugar in sodas after switching to diet for long enough. Taste is subjective and your preferences can change. That being said, saccharine is probably the better tasting of all of them, and the most maligned.
Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.
I've wondered this myself. The aftertaste on some of them is vile. The disappointing thing is that so many products use them when they reduce sugar, but sometimes I just want a reduced sugar product without any additional sweeteners. That seems hard to find these days.
I've been curious about the just-less-sugar idea myself. Like how would a Coca-Cola "dry" taste? Maybe the fact that nobody is offering this just means it doesn't taste good.
It's an acquired taste. I felt the same way, but when I started trying to get fitter a lot of protein supplements (protein drinks, protein bars, etc) contained artificial sweeteners. After eating these for a bit I got used to the flavour profile and even started to like some aspects of it.
The best comparison is beer. The first time I had it, I thought it was kind of gross. After trying it a few more times you get used to the bitter and fermented notes and the taste becomes more pleasant.
I'll impart my n=1 experience, since I've been using powdered Aspartame (in combination with Stevia) in drinks and baking for almost 20 years, and I've tried almost all available sugar substitutes over the years.
We already know from glycemic index charts that almost all sugar substitutes impact blood glucose to a certain degree, and there are only a few that have no impact. When sucralose became widely available, I bought some to try to bake with, but the carrier was maltodextrin - a starch, which prevented me from using it. Undeterred, I purchased pure sucralose drops in a neutral liquid. The sickly-sweet mouth feel after consuming sucralose is a bit tough to take [0], but that wasn't the worst of it. It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it ("Several studies have shown that sucralose is not physiologically innocuous").[1]
Then I read how sucralose is produced; literally thousands of pounds of sugar is used and converted to produce a few pounds of sucralose. It's being pushed hard by the industry, and I can only think of the 'vilification' of cheaper sweeteners such as Aspartame by industry, much in the same way that saccharin was vilified by flawed [2] studies in the 1970s - just as Aspartame was being developed as a commercial product.
Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, and sugar causes irreparable damage to millions of people around the world. I find it somewhat odd how people react to what appears to be a flawed and dubious Aspartame study, when there are much larger elephants in the room.
> It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it
Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.
Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.
As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.
From personal experience (sorry, n=1), I can eat pure Aspartame powder and have zero reaction - no increase in glucose, no "anticipatory" response - nothing.
When I have other sweeteners such as taking a swig of a stevia-laden diet iced tea, I have a reaction. I used to be able to drink the exact same iced tea when they used Aspartame with no effect. I don't think your body is "fooled" by sweet tastes - it only reacts when there is actually something to process.
The fact stevia is being added into all kinds of products has removed many choices for me, which is unfortunate as the selection was quite small to begin with.
This is an article of faith on the Internet, but I haven't seen a credible cite to back up a material, meaningful insulin response to the mere taste of sweetness. Worth remembering: insulin response to aspartame has always been a major research focus, like a day-one concern; it was tested fasted, unfasted, in great quantities and small, with food and in beverages.
I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.
Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.
My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.
What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc
Those are excellent choices; pure monk fruit drops are great, but they cost a small fortune compared to others, and the affordable version is usually mixed with erythitol, which increase blood glucose, so that's a non-starter. Amazon and local health food stores sell a "tub" of stevia for a decent price, and that's my main go-to, but the bitter aftertaste is off-putting, hence Aspartame.
Prepared food is pretty much a no-go; there's only a single energy bar I purchase that uses stevia only, but I make my bars from whey protein isolate, cocoa powder, and peanut butter powder, plus roasted flax, almond flour, almond milk, and sweeteners. I did skip sweeteners completely for some time, thinking that I'd "get used to it", but I really didn't - we're programmed for something sweet!
Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?
Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.
The sweetness in stevia is very different from sugar/hfcs... it has a flavor of its' own and is somewhat off-putting if you aren't used to it. Using a mix of sweeteners is often better overall flavor than any single sweetener (stevia, aspartame, ace-k, etc) on its' own.
I really wish Coke Life had better marketing and was more popular... It was a much smaller amount of real sugar combined with stevia for sweetness. It was lower calorie, but not zero, and probably a much better option than either full sugar or zero sugar.
An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
As the article mentions, this is a false dichotomy.
If you're an ordinary person driven to be healthy, drink water. Water is great. If you're already drinking water, you should absolutely not replace it with whatever bottled crap that Coke or Pepsi is peddling, be it "smart water" or otherwise.
But for people with sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population in the developed world, replacing sugary drinks with zero-calorie artificially-sweetened drinks can be a net health benefit. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are bad for your health, and consumption of sugar water is a significant driver of these. Yes, you could be even healthier by drinking water instead; see above. But sugar is an addictive chemical (sugar withdrawl is, in fact, a thing), and not everyone is going to quit cold turkey.
(And for the record, I fully agree that people should be more cognizant of their gut biome and how their diet affects it, including being skeptical of aspartame and other random synthetic ingredients.)
On the other hand, allowing people to feed their sweet addictions only re-enforces and desensitizates them further. So while you are probably safe drinking ungodly amounts of aspartame water, you won't find equivalent substitutes for sugar in other foods and you might suffer rebound consumption there, perhaps to a much higher total caloric intake versus just drinking sugary water in moderation.
Another thing to watch out for is caffeine input which is often associated with sweetened drinks. Caffeine is a diuretic and you will see yourself drinking can after can of diet coke while not quite quenching your thirst or properly hydrating yourself. This is documented to lead to intense muscle pain and unexplained migraines for people who do physical work and abuse these types of drinks, and can't be good for your kidneys long term, even under the assumption that sweeteners are 100% safe.
Overall, just drink plenty of water and use everything else in moderation seems like a solid advice.
Or... you know, there could be some little actual effort in shedding such addiction (sugar ain't that hard), build a bit of character and walk off better off in many regards. Winning against addiction won't kill you, break you or similar damage but makes you (much) stronger and healthier as a bonus. Why do people shy away from such things?
But no, lets do everything possible just to keep the comfortable crappy couch lifestyle, no sweat, no effort, miserable health, miserable life. Then there are articles how US population (which suffers the most these shit HFCS addictions and resulting obesity problems) is depressed... for many reasons of course, but this sort of helpless victim mindset is one of them.
Have you ever met someone with a true addiction to food? I'm not talking about someone with a habitual craving for sweets. I'm talking about someone who consumes food compulsively like a chain-smoker; someone who, in the absence of whatever their favorites are, will consume and consume with little regard for what the food is: an entire jar of pickles, multiple pounds of grapes, a whole rotisserie chicken, et al.
I used to be one. I once ate six baked white onions¹ in one sitting before vomiting everywhere and rethinking my life.
I broke through naturally, but I wish GLP-1s had been prevalent at the time. Want to know what made breaking it so challenging?
1. Unlike other addictions, you have to continue consuming this one or else you will die.
2. Nearly every social event in the USA is tied in some way to food which means that you have to exercise willpower __constantly__ if you have a social life.
3. People are more interested in shaming you than supporting you. Most want you to fail.
How would that work? It's hydrolized into its constituents, which are present in higher quantities in apples and chicken and other foods, in the upper GI. Do you have a cite for this?
Does aspartame cause intestinal inflammation, or do artificial sweeteners sans aspartame cause intestinal inflammation? Or which specific ones do?
Cause reading the blogpost, it explicitly calls out that most other artificial sweeteners do not get broken down "at all", suggesting their in-body lifecycles are quite different. I'd expect this not to apply to aspartame as a result, and thus it not being a missed angle at all:
> Incidentally, this same logic does not apply to other artificial sweeteners which mostly aren’t broken down at all.
I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.
Look up CDED (Crohn's disease exclusion diet) which is the first line of treatment for pediatric Crohn's and now it's increasingly being used for adults. So don't dismiss the diet link despite the facts and research.
I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.
There's no harm to doing that if you can do it. But advice like "just eat healthy, natural food" is not really something most people can stick to long term. I know I can't!
When I find myself in a stressful situation the craving for sweets is very strong and artificial sweetners at least mean I have options that won't dump a bunch of calories/refined sugar into my body.
>An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome.
Everything affects the gut microbiome. Every single type of food you eat alters it. Taking a walk alters it. Taking a flight alters it.
The whole "but it changes the microbiome" thing needs to be qualified by whether that change is meaningfully relevant in some direction, and evidence thus far, for most sweeteners, is unconvincing. 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016 is the only mildly legitimate research on this (a seemingly well executed RCT), but even it shows a rapidly fading effect, and no effect for aspartame given it's the subject of this submission.
But researchers who want a bit of attention (and a remarkable amount of research is plied not for useful results, but knowing that certain topics are easy mass media coverage) know it's gold to write a paper saying a sweetener changed the microbiome, because it plays into a fear people have (people are always susceptible to the "too good to be true" aha moment). Or worse still the garbage observational studies that conflate that people with metabolic issues are more likely to use sweeteners, so flip cause and effect and claim that sweeteners cause metabolic issues.
>What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
If people ate calorie-restricted, balanced diets, and limited simple carbs and sugars, most food problems fade away (presuming they aren't eating overtly poisonous things, which many of our ancestors did). But that isn't reality. In reality sugar is one of the greatest health crises of our times, and finding some mechanism of reducing that problem is beneficial. Better still people should tame the sweet tooth, but we live in reality.
And FWIW, you can do the reductionist thing that wellness grifters do with most any food. Loads of "balanced whole diets" are full of crazy, scary constituents, many of which are known carcinogens. Spices and herbs are full of deleterious ingredients. And so on.
n = 1 but I clearly feel the effect when I start drinking aspartam drinks a few times a week. So much so that I just stopped drinking them.
I didn't use to. But I stopped rafined sugar for a year and compensated with coca zero. After that, guts never been quite the same and it took some copious amount of probiotics with regular doctor checks to feel better.
Even then, it's still no back up to baseline, and now drinking aspartam more than once is upsetting.
People say this about MSG too, but when you blind-test them the effect vanishes, which is unsurprising because the constituents in MSG are, like aspartame, widely prevalent in traditional foodstuffs.
In Italy we have an "indipendent research lab" that become really famous for a study that demonstrates that aspartame may cause cancer.
The same institute published few years later a study about 5G emissions that may cause cancer.
I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.
I know this lab! Ramazi Institute or something right?
We covered it in this podcast I used to produce (not explicitly the subject, they came up re: artificial sweetener studies and we explored them a bit). They’re very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.
There is a waste area in the Italian society that is very prone to the conspiracy theory. Some famous journalists and some TV shows are very good in spreading this news.
In the past, a party (M5S, now pivoting to a left wing, populistic, pro Putin movement) took 34% at the election, just taking advantage of those crazy ideas.
“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding factor.”
Not a medical professional, but inflammation is something different from cancer that they mentioned in their website.
And we need to understand also the trial scenario: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
When I drink a single can of Diet Coke or anything with aspartame, I get crippling stomach aches and then sudden diarrhea, all within about 2 hrs and very predictable. It's definitely not harmless. This doesn't happen to me with stevia or sucralose, and I know sucralose isn't good for your either.
I can tell when a mixed drink uses a soda with Aspartame in it. My mouth instantly feels like it's covered in a thin film of plastic and the migraine is usually just around the corner.
Everyone in my family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, have the same reaction, too.
I'm still expecting the cause to be HPV and increase in anal sex. Some studies seem to point that way (and other studies that say it might not), but it hasn't been proven yet. However it would make sense, considering that it leads to cervical cancer, throat cancer, etc.
Not an expert on this by any means, just went down this rabbit hole when deciding if I should be asking about my son getting the HPV vaccine when it was first made available to males, and before it was broadly recommended for men.
A rise in meat (esp red & cured meats) consumption and a drop in vegetable consumption would also do it, particularly if it were disproportionately occurring in certain cohorts.
12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.
The increase is cancers in younger age groups was noticed earlier than that, and the cancers can't be expected to occur instantly upon exposure to a carcinogen.
Where does the confidence that it is due to sweeteners come from? This isn‘t about your comment in particular, more of a general observation.
Many people instinctively attribute this rise in colon cancer to diet products, almost pretending as if it is the only thing that has meaningfully changed over the past 40 years or so. Others like to point to changing consumption habits in people drinking more sugary beverages.
It is almost as if everyone is projecting their personal believes into this. But the truth seems frustratingly simple: we really just do not know yet
Fact 5 is a false fact. Taking facts 1-4 into consideration with the (0th?) fact that it is considered the most studied ingredient is enough evidence. This is how scientists come to a consensus. Going beyond that is obscene to science.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.
I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.
Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.
I don't drink things with Aspartame because it makes me feel queasy. I don't know of any mechanism that causes that effect. Occasionally I encounter something that I would not have expected to contain Aspartame that I notice the feeling before I have even considered the possibility that it might be present. I take that as a sign that it is not psychological.
Some people are super tasters and they'll always have that problem. But most people stop noticing the aftertaste after a week or two of regular consumption. But I agree, when I started sugar free that aftertaste was nasty.
Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.
There's also an ever-escalating sweetness issue. When fresh fruit was plenty sweet enough and you get used to this level of sweetness, everything else seems to taste pretty bland. If this becomes the normal (I suspect it kind of has), everything gets sweetened; yogurts, crackers, bread, etc. The method those things get sweetened could be aspartame, but many will not be.
Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.
Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.
> The history of aspartame and the FDA is contentious and sort of infuriating
Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.
So basically there's no scientific consensus either way, there's no tradition of using it and there are extreme commercial incentives for harm so it's a no from me
Not sure how you get to that conclusion from the article when it ends with the conclusion from 5 health agencies that it's safe (and then more references from the scientific community that it's safe).
> So basically there's no scientific consensus either way
"The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion."
"While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"
There is no such thing as "it's just a normal chemical". Sugar is "just a normal chemical" that doesn't mean refining it and injecting it into products with a commercial incentive to habit form hasn't helped create a health crisis
Assuming, of course, that one's body _does_ naturally produce insulin. I'm glad it and other artificial sweeteners exist and are as prevalent as they are.
> Half of the world’s aspartame is made by Ajinomoto of Tokyo—the same company that first brought us MSG back in 1909.
There is nothing wrong with MSG either
There's not "nothing" wrong with MSG. But msg is fine in moderation, just like salt, fat and sugar are all fine in moderation too
Sure, but it feels like a silly distinction. The famous example is water, which fits those same criteria. Would we that that there's not "nothing" wrong with water?
If there's anything wrong with MSG that isn't simply due to sodium intake, I think it's unknown to science (at least in the sense that there's no theory about it with any wide uptake). MSG is also intensively studied and has a very similar mechanistic story to aspartame.
Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):
But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]
[1] https://www.self.com/story/what-is-msg-and-is-it-bad-for-you
Indeed. It turns out that “MSG headaches” are just high sodium level headaches, either through dehydration, unbalanced electrolytes, elevated blood pressure or whatever else higher than normal sodium levels cause headaches. The same headache could be caused by salt. MSG actually makes recipes require less of other flavor ingredients, including salt. It’s also often found in dishes that still contain relatively massive amounts of salt.
So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just don’t eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.
I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespread danger to public health from these additives, but it doesn't mean there aren't still individuals whose health gets messed up (including legitimate headache or migraine symptoms) by these additives.
> discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG
This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this. MSG is nearly identical to the glutamic acid in other foods. If it were true they'd be unable to tolerate parmesan cheese, soy sauce, aged meats, tomatoes, mushrooms, and seaweed.
Glutamate is considered a migraine trigger, though. Many people do avoid or limit those foods for that reason. Thankfully it doesn’t appear to be a trigger for me, because I love all those things.
There is some controversy about dietary glutamate being directly responsible for migraine. It’s common in the brain already. It’s only allowed selectively through the blood-brain barrier. However it could trigger other types of headache, and those can trigger migraines. Also, apparently more of it is formed in the brain when there are high levels of lysine and ornithine in the body. Many of the foods with high levels of glutamate also have high levels of those aminos.
High levels or low levels of sodium in the body can also be a migraine trigger. MSG is lower in sodium than table salt, but it is additional sodium. Many of the issues blamed on it though are after eating foods that contain MSG and a high amount of salt as well. That’s also true of many of the glutamate-containing foods for that matter (gravies, miso, soy sauce, aged meats).
Doctors recommend eliminating one single ingredient at a time to find your triggers. However, I’m sure many people don’t control for salt when eliminating MSG or natural food glutamate.
Elevated brain glutamate levels are associated with migraines, but there’s no solid evidence that dietary glutamate is a trigger for migraines.
The number of people avoiding it is not evidence of anything other than public perception.
Elimination diets are also super impressive.
Migraines are complicated enough that I'd buy a psychosomatic trigger, maybe?
Aspartame is also a trigger, but the fact that one person has multiple triggers doesn’t mean they are related at all.
Now you’re right that MSG is more than sodium. Sodium can be a headache trigger, including migraines. Glutamate is also a migraine trigger and a fairly common one. It doesn’t happen to be one for me. However, it is a neurotransmitter that is involved in pain signaling. It’s understandable how it could easily trigger a migraine or make the pain worse.
Some triggers for some people actually help other people with migraines, like caffeine. Migraines are such an incredibly complex topic that there are medical specialists for them. Mine can be fairly debilitating, but are rare enough I don’t qualify for most prescriptions. So I definitely understand how trigger management and symptom management are a big deal.
Sounds like an allergy.
This effect is very obvious on me. I consistently get headaches when my sodium intake is too high. I don’t even use MSG in my own cooking but occasionally I add too much salt.
Might consider a mix of electrolytes instead of just salt. I usually keep a container mixed with "snake juice" ratios for electrolytes and use that to season with instead of salt alone. I'll also sometimes put a pinch in my water, not nearly snake juice amounts, when I get a bit off and start getting leg cramps.
> So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good.
Salt and MSG are sometimes said to strengthen existing flavors, but I'm pretty sure they mainly just contribute their own unique taste: salty and umami.
(There could of course theoretically be some interactions with other taste receptors, similar to how sweet things make things taste much less bitter, e.g. cocoa, but that is a relatively specific effect and not one that acts as a general flavor enhancer.)
If you lick plain MSG, it tastes bitter. Add it to something very sweet and it just tastes bizarre. Sprinkle it on fried chicken and it tastes like you just dumped chicken gravy on it and pumped up the taste. It really does mainly amplify flavors.
And while MSG tastes very wrong in sweets, sweets generally always taste better with a bit of salt. Salt is its own flavor and a flavor amplifier.
Plain MSG absolutely does not taste bitter. I just tried some (again) to confirm, it's not salty & not bitter. Just a strong flavor of its own.
Yeah it just tastes like straight up "savory."
Almost tastes like fat more than anything.
The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.
The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.
It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.
It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.
All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
I think most things aren't great if you have them in quantity. Variety in your diet is a good thing
Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.
That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.
Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
There is no meaningful insulin response to noncaloric sweeteners.
> dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day
In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be
I want to say a "well duh", but it seems it's not common sense that too much of anything is generally bad for someone.
(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)
Health outcomes of lottery winners suggest it's not great.
Why not?
The larger the impact of the information you are sharing, the more clicks and follows you will get.
People trying to become content creators quickly realize that pointing out a 30cm rock headed towards Earth gets no money, err, attention. So they drop the 30cm part, call it a massive chunk of rock that will rip through the atmosphere, and suddenly they are getting much more money, sorry, attention.
This is what makes social media so depraved, any idiot who makes a good word salad can profit from being an idiot.
Bias?
You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).
Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?
If people didn't make their decisions based on ads they wouldn't exist.
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Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.
Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.
Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
And as always, too much of anything isn't good for you either. A sugary soda on occasion won't do much harm, but some have several a day or it's the only thing they will drink.
I much prefer sucralose to aspartame
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Sugar please. I can't stand the taste of aspartame. They've started using Dextrin to replace sugars in confectionary (Mars Galaxy minstrels) and they taste awful.
I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.
Sounds like aspartame is a boon for your health if its addition means you eat fewer Mars bars and drink less sweetened bubbly water. Hooray for aspartame!
freedom is unhealthy
It certainly can be. You're free to jump off a cliff but you'll have to suffer the consequences.
maybe I like the consequences
I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth.
Is this a genetic thing?
It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.
And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.
Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
None of them do with the exception of Stevia, which sort-of kind-of tastes a bit like rum, if I could describe it.
I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.
You're conflating two different things. Unless you have some very weird genetic condition, it does taste sweet to you. That is, it activates the same sweet receptors on your tongue and in other parts of your mouth that sugar activates - and more or less to the same extent (relative to concentration).
However, sugar isn't simply a sweet taste. It also has some amount of flavor, and so do the artificial sweeteners, and it is these flavor differences that you (and many others) dislike. Flavor is something that happens in the air tract, and is far more complex than taste.
It absolutely does not. The places on my tongue that taste sweet and the places that taste aspartame are completely different (the latter strongly at back of my throat, sugar strongly on my tongue).
Fair enough. It's certainly not like that for most people though; which falls back to the _to you_ issue.
Maybe, as you questioned, there is a genetic component. Or just "something different about you" (not necessarily genetic).
No, this is pretty common in folks who don't drown their taste buds and systems in tons of it every day. Then you feel it anytime its there, since its pretty rare and its disgusting chemical bleh, one feels it fully.
Its a bit like smoking cigarettes - to many non-smokers, its disgusting beyond description, smearing face with old feces wouldn't be worse. To many smokers its mild, pleasant, they enjoy it with lunch etc.
I almost never drink artificial sweetened drinks.
But when I do, I barely notice a difference, and it doesn't really bother me.
Why is it so hard to believe that people's taste perception vary?
> It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
That's great, but it still means I can't have soft drinks any more.
Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
> Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
All soft drinks are contaminated with artificial sweeteners.
If you keep drinking them, you'll likely acquire a taste. I didn't used to like any artificial sugar flavors, but now I've grown accustomed to them.
I felt the same way, they used to taste awful to me, now I only notice a slight difference between Dr Pepper zero and regular. Maybe I just got older and my taste buds degraded?
A lot of the “zero” soft drinks are sweetened differently from the “diet” ones. There’s often a mix of different sweeteners so you don’t get too much of any one aftertaste.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
Dr pepper zero doesn't use as much aspartame as dr pepper diet. It uses more of a mix of different sweeteners
What I find weird is the assumption that everyone would like soda with artificial sweeteners, but I guess other don't taste it the same way. There are restaurants where I just give up and just get water. Strange because I assumed much of their profit came from drinks.
I know a few people like myself, that won't drink artificially sweetened soda, but we are the minority. Mostly people are confused when you tell them you don't like the taste, and that you drink so few sodas that the sugar doesn't make any difference in terms of health anyway.
I am convinced that something weird is going on with Pepsi Max though, the about of that stuff being consumed is absolutely insane. At events it not even close, it's Pepsi Max that people primarily consume.
It might be.
I felt this same way all my life, until 6-months ago, when I found a flavored sugar free mix I actually liked.
I returned from vacation in Mexico, where I was drinking Coke with sugar. When I returned home, regular Coke, made with Corn Syrup in the U.S., tasted off. I decided to take the opportunity to stop drinking it.
I tried dozens of low calorie drink mixes and found one I could tolerate. I did some research and all things pointed to that being healthier than my Coke habit.
My tastes have changed again since starting this, but I don’t drink Coke anymore.
One thing that might have helped was drinking aspartame in my coffee, where its aftertaste is harder to detect.
I should mention the only good side effect I’ve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I haven’t lost any weight by the change. It’s also much easier to make a diet work when I’m not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.
It's an acquired taste.
Maybe, while I can relate to this feeling when it comes to some sweeteners commonly used in baked goods, I genuinely habe a hard tile distinguishing between sugar and sweetener containing beverages at this lokng.
For root beer, I can't tell the difference. For colas, the difference is staggering to me.
I actually hate the taste of sugar in sodas after switching to diet for long enough. Taste is subjective and your preferences can change. That being said, saccharine is probably the better tasting of all of them, and the most maligned.
Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.
I've wondered this myself. The aftertaste on some of them is vile. The disappointing thing is that so many products use them when they reduce sugar, but sometimes I just want a reduced sugar product without any additional sweeteners. That seems hard to find these days.
I've been curious about the just-less-sugar idea myself. Like how would a Coca-Cola "dry" taste? Maybe the fact that nobody is offering this just means it doesn't taste good.
It's an acquired taste. I felt the same way, but when I started trying to get fitter a lot of protein supplements (protein drinks, protein bars, etc) contained artificial sweeteners. After eating these for a bit I got used to the flavour profile and even started to like some aspects of it.
The best comparison is beer. The first time I had it, I thought it was kind of gross. After trying it a few more times you get used to the bitter and fermented notes and the taste becomes more pleasant.
It tastes disgusting to me.
I'll impart my n=1 experience, since I've been using powdered Aspartame (in combination with Stevia) in drinks and baking for almost 20 years, and I've tried almost all available sugar substitutes over the years.
We already know from glycemic index charts that almost all sugar substitutes impact blood glucose to a certain degree, and there are only a few that have no impact. When sucralose became widely available, I bought some to try to bake with, but the carrier was maltodextrin - a starch, which prevented me from using it. Undeterred, I purchased pure sucralose drops in a neutral liquid. The sickly-sweet mouth feel after consuming sucralose is a bit tough to take [0], but that wasn't the worst of it. It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it ("Several studies have shown that sucralose is not physiologically innocuous").[1]
Then I read how sucralose is produced; literally thousands of pounds of sugar is used and converted to produce a few pounds of sucralose. It's being pushed hard by the industry, and I can only think of the 'vilification' of cheaper sweeteners such as Aspartame by industry, much in the same way that saccharin was vilified by flawed [2] studies in the 1970s - just as Aspartame was being developed as a commercial product.
Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, and sugar causes irreparable damage to millions of people around the world. I find it somewhat odd how people react to what appears to be a flawed and dubious Aspartame study, when there are much larger elephants in the room.
[0] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/after-sales-plummet-diet...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7155288/
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3185898/
> It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it
Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.
Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.
As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.
From personal experience (sorry, n=1), I can eat pure Aspartame powder and have zero reaction - no increase in glucose, no "anticipatory" response - nothing.
When I have other sweeteners such as taking a swig of a stevia-laden diet iced tea, I have a reaction. I used to be able to drink the exact same iced tea when they used Aspartame with no effect. I don't think your body is "fooled" by sweet tastes - it only reacts when there is actually something to process.
The fact stevia is being added into all kinds of products has removed many choices for me, which is unfortunate as the selection was quite small to begin with.
This is an article of faith on the Internet, but I haven't seen a credible cite to back up a material, meaningful insulin response to the mere taste of sweetness. Worth remembering: insulin response to aspartame has always been a major research focus, like a day-one concern; it was tested fasted, unfasted, in great quantities and small, with food and in beverages.
I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.
Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.
My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.
What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc
Those are excellent choices; pure monk fruit drops are great, but they cost a small fortune compared to others, and the affordable version is usually mixed with erythitol, which increase blood glucose, so that's a non-starter. Amazon and local health food stores sell a "tub" of stevia for a decent price, and that's my main go-to, but the bitter aftertaste is off-putting, hence Aspartame.
Prepared food is pretty much a no-go; there's only a single energy bar I purchase that uses stevia only, but I make my bars from whey protein isolate, cocoa powder, and peanut butter powder, plus roasted flax, almond flour, almond milk, and sweeteners. I did skip sweeteners completely for some time, thinking that I'd "get used to it", but I really didn't - we're programmed for something sweet!
Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?
Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.
The sweetness in stevia is very different from sugar/hfcs... it has a flavor of its' own and is somewhat off-putting if you aren't used to it. Using a mix of sweeteners is often better overall flavor than any single sweetener (stevia, aspartame, ace-k, etc) on its' own.
I really wish Coke Life had better marketing and was more popular... It was a much smaller amount of real sugar combined with stevia for sweetness. It was lower calorie, but not zero, and probably a much better option than either full sugar or zero sugar.
An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
As the article mentions, this is a false dichotomy.
If you're an ordinary person driven to be healthy, drink water. Water is great. If you're already drinking water, you should absolutely not replace it with whatever bottled crap that Coke or Pepsi is peddling, be it "smart water" or otherwise.
But for people with sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population in the developed world, replacing sugary drinks with zero-calorie artificially-sweetened drinks can be a net health benefit. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are bad for your health, and consumption of sugar water is a significant driver of these. Yes, you could be even healthier by drinking water instead; see above. But sugar is an addictive chemical (sugar withdrawl is, in fact, a thing), and not everyone is going to quit cold turkey.
(And for the record, I fully agree that people should be more cognizant of their gut biome and how their diet affects it, including being skeptical of aspartame and other random synthetic ingredients.)
On the other hand, allowing people to feed their sweet addictions only re-enforces and desensitizates them further. So while you are probably safe drinking ungodly amounts of aspartame water, you won't find equivalent substitutes for sugar in other foods and you might suffer rebound consumption there, perhaps to a much higher total caloric intake versus just drinking sugary water in moderation.
Another thing to watch out for is caffeine input which is often associated with sweetened drinks. Caffeine is a diuretic and you will see yourself drinking can after can of diet coke while not quite quenching your thirst or properly hydrating yourself. This is documented to lead to intense muscle pain and unexplained migraines for people who do physical work and abuse these types of drinks, and can't be good for your kidneys long term, even under the assumption that sweeteners are 100% safe.
Overall, just drink plenty of water and use everything else in moderation seems like a solid advice.
> sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population
It's almost like our bodies are designed to crave calories
Or... you know, there could be some little actual effort in shedding such addiction (sugar ain't that hard), build a bit of character and walk off better off in many regards. Winning against addiction won't kill you, break you or similar damage but makes you (much) stronger and healthier as a bonus. Why do people shy away from such things?
But no, lets do everything possible just to keep the comfortable crappy couch lifestyle, no sweat, no effort, miserable health, miserable life. Then there are articles how US population (which suffers the most these shit HFCS addictions and resulting obesity problems) is depressed... for many reasons of course, but this sort of helpless victim mindset is one of them.
> Why do people shy away from such things?
Have you ever met someone with a true addiction to food? I'm not talking about someone with a habitual craving for sweets. I'm talking about someone who consumes food compulsively like a chain-smoker; someone who, in the absence of whatever their favorites are, will consume and consume with little regard for what the food is: an entire jar of pickles, multiple pounds of grapes, a whole rotisserie chicken, et al.
I used to be one. I once ate six baked white onions¹ in one sitting before vomiting everywhere and rethinking my life.
I broke through naturally, but I wish GLP-1s had been prevalent at the time. Want to know what made breaking it so challenging?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV9spqCzSkQThere's nothing wrong with HFCS either, at least not that isn't also wrong with sugar. This is all just naturalist fallacy stuff.
How would that work? It's hydrolized into its constituents, which are present in higher quantities in apples and chicken and other foods, in the upper GI. Do you have a cite for this?
Does aspartame cause intestinal inflammation, or do artificial sweeteners sans aspartame cause intestinal inflammation? Or which specific ones do?
Cause reading the blogpost, it explicitly calls out that most other artificial sweeteners do not get broken down "at all", suggesting their in-body lifecycles are quite different. I'd expect this not to apply to aspartame as a result, and thus it not being a missed angle at all:
> Incidentally, this same logic does not apply to other artificial sweeteners which mostly aren’t broken down at all.
I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.
Look up CDED (Crohn's disease exclusion diet) which is the first line of treatment for pediatric Crohn's and now it's increasingly being used for adults. So don't dismiss the diet link despite the facts and research.
I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.
Most people don't suffer from IBD though. IBS is very common, IBD isn't
There's no harm to doing that if you can do it. But advice like "just eat healthy, natural food" is not really something most people can stick to long term. I know I can't!
When I find myself in a stressful situation the craving for sweets is very strong and artificial sweetners at least mean I have options that won't dump a bunch of calories/refined sugar into my body.
Also, what is a natural food? Wheat, maize, oranges, bananas, broccoli... those are human made.
And there's plenty of unnatural, ultraprocessed food that's good for us.
Try telling the body builder he can't have a protein shake.
I believe in you.
There’s also the cost element on top of the realities of sugar addiction
>An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome.
Everything affects the gut microbiome. Every single type of food you eat alters it. Taking a walk alters it. Taking a flight alters it.
The whole "but it changes the microbiome" thing needs to be qualified by whether that change is meaningfully relevant in some direction, and evidence thus far, for most sweeteners, is unconvincing. 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016 is the only mildly legitimate research on this (a seemingly well executed RCT), but even it shows a rapidly fading effect, and no effect for aspartame given it's the subject of this submission.
But researchers who want a bit of attention (and a remarkable amount of research is plied not for useful results, but knowing that certain topics are easy mass media coverage) know it's gold to write a paper saying a sweetener changed the microbiome, because it plays into a fear people have (people are always susceptible to the "too good to be true" aha moment). Or worse still the garbage observational studies that conflate that people with metabolic issues are more likely to use sweeteners, so flip cause and effect and claim that sweeteners cause metabolic issues.
>What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
If people ate calorie-restricted, balanced diets, and limited simple carbs and sugars, most food problems fade away (presuming they aren't eating overtly poisonous things, which many of our ancestors did). But that isn't reality. In reality sugar is one of the greatest health crises of our times, and finding some mechanism of reducing that problem is beneficial. Better still people should tame the sweet tooth, but we live in reality.
And FWIW, you can do the reductionist thing that wellness grifters do with most any food. Loads of "balanced whole diets" are full of crazy, scary constituents, many of which are known carcinogens. Spices and herbs are full of deleterious ingredients. And so on.
n = 1 but I clearly feel the effect when I start drinking aspartam drinks a few times a week. So much so that I just stopped drinking them.
I didn't use to. But I stopped rafined sugar for a year and compensated with coca zero. After that, guts never been quite the same and it took some copious amount of probiotics with regular doctor checks to feel better.
Even then, it's still no back up to baseline, and now drinking aspartam more than once is upsetting.
People say this about MSG too, but when you blind-test them the effect vanishes, which is unsurprising because the constituents in MSG are, like aspartame, widely prevalent in traditional foodstuffs.
In Italy we have an "indipendent research lab" that become really famous for a study that demonstrates that aspartame may cause cancer. The same institute published few years later a study about 5G emissions that may cause cancer.
I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.
I know this lab! Ramazi Institute or something right?
We covered it in this podcast I used to produce (not explicitly the subject, they came up re: artificial sweetener studies and we explored them a bit). They’re very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.
There is a waste area in the Italian society that is very prone to the conspiracy theory. Some famous journalists and some TV shows are very good in spreading this news. In the past, a party (M5S, now pivoting to a left wing, populistic, pro Putin movement) took 34% at the election, just taking advantage of those crazy ideas.
“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding factor.”
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/efsa-assesses-new-asparta...
Not a medical professional, but inflammation is something different from cancer that they mentioned in their website. And we need to understand also the trial scenario: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
When I drink a single can of Diet Coke or anything with aspartame, I get crippling stomach aches and then sudden diarrhea, all within about 2 hrs and very predictable. It's definitely not harmless. This doesn't happen to me with stevia or sucralose, and I know sucralose isn't good for your either.
I have a similar negative response to legumes... but billions of people eat them without issue every day.
But a lot of people don't have that effect. So maybe it's not harmful for everyone.
It's a reliable migraine trigger for meyself, and my nephew. That makes it bad for us.
Same here. People keep telling me it's not, but it is, even when I happen to ingest it while unaware I've done so.
I can tell when a mixed drink uses a soda with Aspartame in it. My mouth instantly feels like it's covered in a thin film of plastic and the migraine is usually just around the corner.
Everyone in my family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, have the same reaction, too.
Similarly, it makes me dizzy/sick a little like travel sickness
That’s probably because 10% of ingested aspartame breaks down into methanol.
Or, you might just be sensitive to phenylalanine.
A six-pack of aspartame-sweetened Diet Coke has about as much methanol as a single apple.
Sucralose-6-acetate, however, an impurity found in sucralose and produced in vivo from sucralose, is genotoxic.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37246822/
I would avoid sucralose. I have a suspicion it may be responsible for the observed increase in colon cancer in younger age groups.
I'm still expecting the cause to be HPV and increase in anal sex. Some studies seem to point that way (and other studies that say it might not), but it hasn't been proven yet. However it would make sense, considering that it leads to cervical cancer, throat cancer, etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/
Not an expert on this by any means, just went down this rabbit hole when deciding if I should be asking about my son getting the HPV vaccine when it was first made available to males, and before it was broadly recommended for men.
A rise in meat (esp red & cured meats) consumption and a drop in vegetable consumption would also do it, particularly if it were disproportionately occurring in certain cohorts.
12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.
Did we just start adding this chemical in the ast five years? I can think of any other widespread roll out of a new technology in the same period.
The increase is cancers in younger age groups was noticed earlier than that, and the cancers can't be expected to occur instantly upon exposure to a carcinogen.
Where does the confidence that it is due to sweeteners come from? This isn‘t about your comment in particular, more of a general observation.
Many people instinctively attribute this rise in colon cancer to diet products, almost pretending as if it is the only thing that has meaningfully changed over the past 40 years or so. Others like to point to changing consumption habits in people drinking more sugary beverages.
It is almost as if everyone is projecting their personal believes into this. But the truth seems frustratingly simple: we really just do not know yet
> Where does the confidence that it is due to sweeteners come from?
Probably from your inability to read what I actually wrote. The word "suspicion" does not connote confidence.
Fact 5 is a false fact. Taking facts 1-4 into consideration with the (0th?) fact that it is considered the most studied ingredient is enough evidence. This is how scientists come to a consensus. Going beyond that is obscene to science.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.
I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.
Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.
I don't drink things with Aspartame because it makes me feel queasy. I don't know of any mechanism that causes that effect. Occasionally I encounter something that I would not have expected to contain Aspartame that I notice the feeling before I have even considered the possibility that it might be present. I take that as a sign that it is not psychological.
Same here. Very little amounts already give me a weird tummy feel. A normal amount (ex. Half a can) gets my tummy turned around for a few hours.
Even so, it has a weird aftertaste that lingers on the palette. All sugar-free elixirs I have found to be subpar.
Some people are super tasters and they'll always have that problem. But most people stop noticing the aftertaste after a week or two of regular consumption. But I agree, when I started sugar free that aftertaste was nasty.
Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.
It might not be bad for you, but it tastes like crap
There's also an ever-escalating sweetness issue. When fresh fruit was plenty sweet enough and you get used to this level of sweetness, everything else seems to taste pretty bland. If this becomes the normal (I suspect it kind of has), everything gets sweetened; yogurts, crackers, bread, etc. The method those things get sweetened could be aspartame, but many will not be.
Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.
Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.
I have tried multiple times to find this article after reading it a year or so ago ! thanks for sharing again
I think it's just human nature. We assume anything good has to have a catch. Diet Coke feels like that to me
migraine trigger for me too
> The history of aspartame and the FDA is contentious and sort of infuriating
Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.
phenylalanine is DLPA which many people use to deal with chronic fatigue and mild pain management
there's a reason why the President guzzles gallons of it per month
I'm not convinced large amounts of Methanol is harmless but DLPA is harmless, maybe even beneficial
I don't like aspartame because it's sickeningly sweet. I could care less if it's healthy or not.
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So basically there's no scientific consensus either way, there's no tradition of using it and there are extreme commercial incentives for harm so it's a no from me
Not sure how you get to that conclusion from the article when it ends with the conclusion from 5 health agencies that it's safe (and then more references from the scientific community that it's safe).
What in your view is the single strongest scientific conclusion supporting your statement that "it's safe"?
> So basically there's no scientific consensus either way
"The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion."
Did you even read the article?
"While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"
There is no such thing as "it's just a normal chemical". Sugar is "just a normal chemical" that doesn't mean refining it and injecting it into products with a commercial incentive to habit form hasn't helped create a health crisis
It is bad. Don't belive the hype.
Just the simple fact that it has a sweet taste, but contains no sugar, disturbs the body's natural production of insulin.
Assuming, of course, that one's body _does_ naturally produce insulin. I'm glad it and other artificial sweeteners exist and are as prevalent as they are.