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Also causes memory lose.
For those that downvote because you didn’t want to do so basic research. Here https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/can-diet-soda-increase-the-chances-of-dementia/#:~:text=Aspartame overstimulates neurotransmitters.,as learning and pain perception.
But again this is one source. There are others first heard about it from Reddit. But I also have first hand knowledge of the effects because my brother and father were heavy drinkers of the stuff and definitely effected their memories.
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Can Diet Soda Increase the Chances of Dementia? June 12, 2019
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Can Diet Soda Increase the Chances of Dementia The artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas—and thousands of other processed foods—are anything but sweet. In fact, they can be toxic to the brain. Consuming these sugar substitutes on a regular basis is not a recipe for a healthy memory.
Sherry, who weighed over 200 pounds on her 5’5” frame, guzzled diet soda thinking it would help her lose weight. It didn’t. Even worse, she started experiencing a host of symptoms—digestive issues, arthritis, forgetfulness, and confusion. In fact, Sherry’s diet soda habit was hurting her brain and putting her memory at risk.
That’s what a growing body of evidence shows. For example, a study in the journal Stroke found that drinking diet soda was linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
4 Ways Artificial Sweeteners Steal Your Mind
- Aspartame overstimulates neurotransmitters. One of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners in diet sodas, aspartame is particularly damaging to the brain. Consider how it impacts aspartate, an excitatory neurotransmitter associated with memory as well as learning and pain perception. Aspartame stimulates this neurotransmitter. This may sound like a good thing, but in excessive amounts it overstimulates it, turning it into a potent neurotoxin that damages neurons, causes cell death, and is associated with a host of issues including memory problems and dementia.
Also my brother and dad were heavy drinkers of diet Coke I saw first hand experience of ut affecting their memory. With my dad we literally thought he had dementia. Then we cut it off and over time he got better.
The 2nd point in the blog post you present as a source is factually incorrect:
- Artificial sweeteners contribute to chronically high insulin.
The link (bolded by me) in the following text
One of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners in diet sodas, aspartame is particularly damaging to the brain.
Goes to a page titled “Can Sugar Affect Your Cognitive Ability?”. They didn’t even link to the thing their text is claiming.
How can you take this trash seriously?
And personal anecdotes are absolutely worthless in discussions like this. Artificial sweeteners are consumed by a massive portion of the population. Any person who falls ill is likely to have consumed artifical sweeteners, so they will have incredible correlation with every disease on the planet.
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Then do you research because its out there and it’s a fact. Scientists are just discovering it.
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Source: just trust me bro
Well I had the source right here, but then I drank a diet coke so…
I forgor 💀
What does
Ah yes the noted scientific journal amenclinics.com/blog
Unassailable source there, bud.
But he knows 2 people who drank some diet soda and later had memory issues! You can’t dispute those numbers!
Fat people in shambles
Stuff that has been sweetened by it kind of taste like there is something wrong. Yet still it tastes decent enough and much better than stevia. I would rather have option to drink stuff that just outright hasnt been sweetened at all.
Embrace water. Become a hydro homie.
Are the hydro homies already on lemmy?
Yep! Not sure what instance but if you search “hydro” it’ll pop up.
For anyone who likes diet soda, check out Zevia. It’s sweetened with Stevia instead of aspartame. Doesn’t taste too bad either. Makes a great vodka mixer since it’s 0 calories.
Unfortunately I’ve never tasted anything with Stevia that I like. Weird, weird aftertaste.
Aspartame has an aftertaste but I got used to it after maybe three tries. I’ve never gotten used to Stevia.
Too bad, because in other ways Stevia is superior.
I like fizzy drinks, so lately I’ve been mostly drinking unsweetened, like La Croix or Spindrift.
Hopefully there’s more research done. It doesn’t sound like it’s “absolutely carcinogenic”.
The “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields” associated with using mobile phones are “possibly cancer-causing”. Like aspartame, this means there is either limited evidence they can cause cancer in humans, sufficient evidence in animals, or strong evidence about the characteristics.
Am glad they publish this, though. “Possible” still tells me to be careful.
If I consider “possible” as no harm until it’s 100% proven, I might cause serious harm to myself in the process when and if it’s 100% clear.
Better on the side of caution, IMO.
Red meat and alcohol have much higher links to cancer than aspertame. Hope you’re a vegetarian teetotaler.
Do you drink hot coffee or tea or soup? Cause hot beverages are considered more likely to cause cancer than this designation for aspartame.
Do you eat meat? Cause that’s two levels higher than this designation for aspartame.
Also the studies this ruling is based on indicates you would have to drink ~30 aspartame sweetened sodas a day to be at any risk.
Do you drink hot coffee or tea or soup? Cause hot beverages are considered more likely to cause cancer than this designation for aspartame. Do you eat meat? Cause that’s two levels higher than this designation for aspartame.
Sure, these things on their own, at the amount they’re generally consumed, may not cause issues. But when you are combining these things, the sum total can be worrisome. Maybe red meat alone isn’t much; maybe hot coffee alone isn’t much; maybe aspartame alone isn’t much; maybe alcohol alone isn’t much. But when you have hot coffee for breakfast, red meat for 2 meals, aspartame drinks all day, and alcohol at night, you are at a completely different level of risk. Knowing which small things contribute to this sum is important. Or, from another angle: maybe someone really likes alcohol, even acknowledging the potential cancer-causing aspect. So to somewhat offset that known risk, they’re wanting to minimize other sources of potential-cancer.
If you’re drinking 30 cans a day, I’m going to guess that switching to water won’t be the easiest of the things to change from that list. And it would be the least significant impact.
That’s not the point I was trying to raise.
My point was that people love to pile on anything artificial because they see it as unnatural and they claim it’s cause they just want to be aware of the risks, but those same people usually don’t know and don’t care that things they partake of everyday are also cancer risks and much higher ones than the artificial stuff.
My point in asking OP was because id wager (and wanted to see) they didn’t know those were cancer risks and won’t change their habits or they did know but hadn’t changed their habits.
Yeah, they came out and branded it as a “possible cause for cancer”. They’ve been studying aspartame for decades now and most they could label it with was a mere “possible”. I’m not saying it’s great to drink it when surely nowadays you can find alternative sodas sweetened with stevia or other “natural” sweeteners but I wouldn’t worry too much about this news.
Is there a reason the natural sweeteners should be trusted over aspartame? From what I’ve read, you would need to drink a case of diet soda every day before it maybe even starts to be cancerous.
What makes you think that stevia or “natural” sweeteners are better?
At the very least, they have to go thought an industrial process of extraction that can leave unwanted chemical agents in the final product. And anything naturally grown is a subject to be contaminated with pesticides and other unwanted substances.
THAT’s why Diet Coke was on sale again.
I could be wrong, and I’m too lazy to Google at the moment, but I swore this was made public information long ago. When I was young, aspartame was being phased out in favor of sucralose. I recall hearing stories about aspartame being banned in other countries as a child.
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Misleading title. They’re about to declare it as possibly cancerous. Not fully cancerous. And if anything this is just to get even more research into it.
Aspartame is in a lot of things, mainly sodas and gum, but you’d have to consume a lot of the stuff beyond a human limit really.
I do think this may put a dent in sugar free products assuming it gets declared as such.
Probably just enough for California to give it that label, and that’s about it.
I hate the chemical aftertaste of artificial sweeteners anyway.
Every paragraph of that article got less and less certain about the results. Someday I’d love to be able to trust the headline.
They’re about to declare it as possibly cancerous. Not fully cancerous.
What do you mean by this? Everything that can cause cancer is declared “possibly cancerous”; it depends on dose and exposure. Nothing is “fully cancerous” for whatever that might even mean. You can be exposed to radiation and either get cancer or not; it depends on the dose. Would you call radiation “possibly cancerous”, or “fully cancerous”?
Analagously, most bacteria can cause infections but they don’t always in everyone. So to label a bacteria as purely benign or purely dangerous is just as silly as trying to make a distinction between “possibly cancerous” and “fully cancerous”.
Aspartame is in a lot of things, mainly sodas and gum, but you’d have to consume a lot of the stuff beyond a human limit really.
And if someone wants to minimize their risk of cancer, they should be able to make informed decisions. Knowing that at particular food-additive has higher-than-baseline chances of causing cancer allows someone with a different risk-aversion profile to make decisions wisely. If you don’t mind the incidence rate at the dose you consume it at, that’s fine as well. But it is useful to have it be public knowledge if something is potentially cancer-causing.
There’s a scale. I wouldn’t put aspartame on the same level as smoking for it’s chances of causing cancer. That’s what i mean. I guess “fully Cancerous” isnt really a good way of putting it into words.
It doesn’t outright cause cancer like the title implies. By saying it causes cancer in the title is misleading. There’s very little evidence that supports that, and I see them only doing this considering the concerns around it and more research.
I’m absolutely for people knowing this information and making informed decisions if they want to stay away from it or keep using it. That’s all on them.
Should’ve titled it something more like “WHO is about to rule aspartame as ‘possibly cancerous.’ Here’s what that tells you”
It means that Aspartame is going to be added to the “Group 2B” classification list. It’s worth noting that “Red Meat” and “Alcohol” are in the much more severe “Group 1” list, so you should probably give up steak and beer before you ditch your favorite diet soda.
The difference between “possibly cancerous” and “fully cancerous” is that the former is not confirmed to have the property of causing cancer.
Radiation on the other hand is known to be carcinogenic.
To use your analogy, we know that there are bacteria that cause infections and bacteria that are harmless to humans. Let’s say we have bacteria A that is known to cause infection but not always in everyone. Then we have a bacteria B, which is potentially able to cause infection. We don’t know for certain that it can, but we also don’t know that it can’t.
And yes, it’s a pretty fucking useless designation, and WHO is wasting everyone’s time and causing undue panic. Let’s not forget how they completely fucked the world with their atrocious handing of Covid in the early stages of the outbreak.
There’s different classes of cancer-causing compounds. Alcohol, for example, has the highest classification, meaning there is indisputable evidence exposure increases the risk of certain cancers. Then you have decreasing strength of evidence from there.
There’s still other zero calorie sweeteners though. Sucralose, stevia, saccharine, Monk fruit extract, etc.
To be clear, saying this can cause cancer is similar to saying that water will be classified as toxic.
Cancer is a genetic/cellular lottery we play every day. Consuming certain substances can change those odds. We’re talking 1 in a Trillion (a number I pulled out of my ass, to be clear), and perhaps consuming aspartame changes that to 100 in a Trillion. 100x more likely to get cancer? Not really.
Just like how water is classified as toxic if you drink too much (cellular over-hydration) consuming too much aspartame can cause cancer.
Though I suppose it remains to be seen. I’m making broad assumptions and I’ll wait for the professionals and studies and scientific journals to tell me what’s what.
No they aren’t. There’s no substantial proof for it, and the body of people who are behind this label (IARC) aren’t even a food safety body. They once tried to say eating red meat is “possibly” cancer-causing as well.
They once tried to say eating red meat is “possibly” cancer-causing as well.
Because it is. Whether the effect size is significant to you or not is one thing, but there is good evidence that it has a nonzero effect. Which is similarly the case here: there is evidence of effect of aspartame, but whether the effect size is significant is up to you to decide (or legislators).
I knew it was dodgy, aspartame always gives me a headache
oh that’s why some soda drinks give me headache 😐 i just realised all the ones that used to make my head hurt, were all zero/diet versions. i switched back to full sugar ones a while back, now i see why i did.
i guess it’s a choice between teeth rot or cancer. i’ll take the teeth rot lol
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No, aspartame does not give you a headache. It’s probably the caffeine that’s present in many sodas, such as coke. There is no known biological mechanism for aspartame to give you a headache. It’s just confirmation bias.
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The main harm of sugary drinks are the incredibly harmful effects from huge insulin spikes and damaging your liver. Teeth is pretty low on the list.
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Diet soda drinks are still harmful to your teeth because of their high acidity. Not as harmful as sugary drinks, but still. It’s the only proven major health concern of diet sodas.
ah okay, i’m way out of my depth then. thanks for the advice
my specific problems are with fanta zero and coke cherry zero. if not the aspartame, then is there a possible cause that isn’t confirmation bias, or caffeine? i don’t have problems with other drinks with caffeine, and i should stress that i drink 2L of water a day regardless of whether i have a can of soda (in addition). i.e, it’s not headaches from dehydration either.
i’m willing to accept the possibility that i am an idiot and it’s just confirmation bias, but if anyone knows any other possible causes, i’d be happy to learn 🙂
another question i have regarding point #2, how much sugar is too much to cause the effects you mention (i.e in one can?). for context, i live in the UK, and most cans of soda are restricted to 16.5g of sugar for the whole can, because of a sugar tax. is 16.5g in one go enough to cause liver damage?
thank you for reading
I can’t really think of a reason those specific drinks would give you a headache.
I compared the ingredients of coke cherry zero with regular coke zero, and the ingredient lists are almost literally identical. The only difference would be in the flavoring they use, both of which are just listed as “Natural Flavors”.
The only other difference is coke cherry zero has marginally more Acesulfate Potasium or less Potassium Citrate. We can tell because their position on the ingredient list is swapped. It’s not well known, but ingredient lists are sorted from highest to lowest content.
Potasium Citrate is found in many foods, in particular in lemons, grapefruit and pomegranates. It’s added for preservation and flavor.
Acesulfate Potasium is another artificial sweetener, with sweetness on par with Aspartame. Like aspartame, it’s a very well studied food additive and is deemed completely safe by regulators.
But again, both drinks contain them, so even if we disregard that they are safe, the small difference in content is very very unlikely to cause any effect.
And you don’t have to be an idiot to be susceptible to confirmation bias. Our brains are built to look for patterns, but sometimes they see them where they don’t exist.
As for #2, really any amount of sugary drinks is bad for you. This includes fruit juices (including “no sugar added” and freshly pressed). The problem comes from how fast your body absorbs the sugar. Sugar dissolved in water is very quickly absorbed and causes a rapid spike in blood glucose. These spikes put you at risk of developing a range of nasty conditions - in particular Type 2 Diabetes and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Of course drinking one can won’t immidiately give you those conditions, not unlike how smoking one cigarette won’t immidiately give you lung cancer. But like there is no “healthy” number of cigarettes you can smoke, there is no healthy amount of sugary drinks you can consume.
It’s best to avoid, but of course nobody is expected to live perfectly healthy lives, so drinking a can now and then will probably not harm you.
If you want to have a sugary drink, make sure you do not drink it on an empty stomach. Drinking it with a meal will slow down how quickly sugar is absorbed. For the same reason, eating sweet fruits like apples is perfectly healthy despite relatively high sugar content. The sugar is locked inside the solids of the fruit and is absorbed slowly.
Artificial sweeteners are usually 200-1000 times sweeter than sugar, so their content is tiny compared to sugar. A can of coke zero contains 87mg of aspartame. Aspartame has no effect on blood glucose or insulin levels. Even if it did, such a tiny amount could not cause a spike.
This is why I get agitated with headlines like these. WHO announces some study that they haven’t even published that says aspartame “might be carcinogenic” which flies in the face of decades of research and widespread usage. And thousands of fear mongering articles will push the already misinformed public to drinking sugary drinks that in contrast are practically poison.
thank you so much for this 🙂 i shall make sure to have soda with food from now on. and also, i can give fanta zero and coke cherry zero a go again (with full stomach) and see what happens lol. appreciate the work 💪
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It sure tastes like cancer so I’m not surprised by this move.
You’re probably just dehydrated from drinking a small amount of soda instead of a larger amount of water.
I don’t think it’s this, only some fizzy drinks do it and it happens even if I drink a lot of water as well
Probably because many of them have a non-negligible amount of caffeine.
Aspartame does not cause headaches.
Like how cancerous is it? Considering the amount of diet pop my family consumes…I’m kinda worried
It doesn’t take much for the WHO to classify something as a possible carcinogen.
Aspartame is now in the same risk category as cell phones, kimchee, and carpentry. And still considered less carcinogenic than meat, fried foods, hot beverages, and working a night shift.
Aspartame has been in common usage as a sugar alternative for literally decades.
If it was harmful or potent enough to be dangerous on a public or individual health risk then we would have certainly known about it by now. At this stage, even WHO, are saying it’s needed in HUGE concentrations.
Diet sodas aren’t the only things that we consume that contains aspartame. And aspartame isn’t the only thing we’re exposed to that has been linked to cancer and other deseases.
Just get on with life, enjoy what you enjoy in moderation. Don’t put too much thought into it otherwise you’ll just end up living in fear and avoiding everything.
That was my gut reaction, but that logic also perpetuated leaded fuel.
Lead’s affects were well known, just ignored.
Aspartame is no different to any other food or substance we’re exposed to. You can’t buy anything in California that’s doesn’t have the ‘Known to cause cancer’ label on it.
Honestly, the rise in the diagnosis of cancer in industrial humans is a result of living longer and not being killed by something else.
Basically, what I’m saying is that as long as you live in moderation and overall healthy, a couple of pints of Diet Cola a day or a bottle of wine on a weekend isn’t going to kill you.
From annectdotal experience, the people who get the most knotted up about this stuff probably sit down all day and eat absolute crap. The aspartame is not the thing to worry about in that equation.
Same here. My wife and I only really drink water but her stepdad got bladder cancer after decades of drinking nothing but Budweiser and diet dew. He’s cancer free now but lost his bladder and prostate.
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I’ve been downwind of Canada on and off the last few weeks, it hurts to be outdoors
Just hold your breath or breathe through your fingernails.
At most 1.15 x risk. Bigger effects are on risk for diabetes, heart disease and metabolic syndrome. By itself aspartame doesn’t appear to be too bad. But it causes sugar craving which can lead to excessive and poor eating habits.
Me too. I drink a lot of it daily.
Faaar less than red meat, alcohol and spending time in the Sun.
Don’t panic until the report officially locked out. We are very certain that smoking and pork cause cancer, but smoking has a huge possibility of lung cancer while pork only increases your chances of cancer by something like 20%. This could be one of those “We are 99.999% certain that it increases your risk by 10%” sort of things.
That will be the most important factor: the quantity needed to be harmful.
If it’s the equivalent of 30 cans of diet cola a day, this is a non-issue. They will give those details when they release the report.
Not cancerous whatsoever. It’s approved for use worldwide and it’s one of the most studied additives on the planet.
It has been massively consumed worldwide for many decades, without causing any statistically noticeable increase in cancer rates.
Considering the incredibly negative health impact of sugary drinks, artificial sweeteners probably prevented millions of deaths over the decades they have been used.
Like the other “scary” “it causes cancer” studies, they probably stuffed a rat with its body weight of aspartame and when it developed cancer they figured it’s carcinogenic.
Completely disregarding that a can of artificially sweetened coke will have less than 1g of aspartame, which is 0.0002% of average human’s bodyweight.
I’m pretty sure the last I read about this it was an absurd concentration that showed to potentially cause cancer. Nothing a human could drink in such concentrations.
That being said maybe that’s changed very very recently, I’ll be interested to see what their actual findings are.
A lot of things potentially cause cancer in huge concentrations.
Edit - From what I’ve read aspartame would be considered a possible carcinogen in the same class of Coffee. That doesn’t make quite the same headline though hah!
Like the sun.
It doesn’t even take that much sunlight really.
I figured if it was really all that bad it would have been banned a long time ago.
Lead was used way past discovering it was dangerous, and is still used enough to cause problems in specific populations. Just like cigarettes. If there is a large moneymaking industry and it suddenly comes to light that what it is producing is dangerous, they have a lot of motivation to put money behind keeping that knowledge from getting out or, when it does, keep it from affecting law. They lobby/bribe, they abuse the legal system, whatever they can to avoid going under. As such, it’s not safe to assume that something is not dangerous simply because it hasn’t been banned.
Was there a denialism effort about lead? As far as I know there just were no regulators to crack down on it back in the day. It’s still used in things where it’s impractical to replace and in theory is disposed of carefully.
With cigarettes, I seem to remember that a branch of the US government declared them unsafe in the 70’s. Academics usually will raise the alarm in a big way if they find something really dangerous and it’s not dealt with swiftly. Legislators can be a different matter (see cigarettes, climate change and so on), but when it comes to food don’t tend to get involved.
The Roman’s used to add lead acetate to their wines to make them sweet. There’s records of people at the time noting that drinking to much of this lead sweented wine seems to cause issues. So humanity has known that lead isn’t necessarily a good thing for the human body for a very long time.
Yep. They also used mercury to refine gold, and just accepted that gold mine slaves died a lot for some reason. There was no Roman labs doing actual toxicity testing, though, and definitely no Roman FDA.
Not gonna preach or anything but that stuff is trash. You guys should quit honestly. I “reset” my tastes to less sweet stuff over time and it’s incredible how different things taste after you lose the expectations they should be sweet to be delicious.
I eat my morning oats with unsweetened soy milk and cow’s milk now tastes like candy to me.
Yeah seriously it’s nuts how used to sugar we get
Dammit… I’ve been drinking that shit every day for years. I actually crave the flavor of it.
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Well, I didn’t much before reading the article, but after reading it I don’t trust the FDA at all.
You don’t trust the FDA after you’ve read that they conclude that aspartame is safe, which is in line with over 100 other countries’ regulatory agencies?
Wait until you read what the FDA has to say about water.
I don’t trust them because they rejected aspartame in the 70s and it was only approved by Reagan in the early 80s because he had an executive from the manufacturer in his entourage. That’s shady crony-capitalist bullshit. Downvote me all you want.
Hey! One other person that also read the article! Nice to meet you!
You too! lol Apparently we’re the only two! XD
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I’ve read some of the studies and talked about them with some nurses who’ve done the same. The harm is due to the quantity you consume. The study’s found it cancerous after giving it to mice in high doses, like dozens of 2 liters of diet soda each day. Most people who drink a few cans are going to be fine.
We’ll have to see what the new report says and some people might have to adjust the amount they drink it but I doubt it will say any amount is cancerous.
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Didn’t they suggest that aspartame could cause cancer way back in the late 80s or early 90s?
I remember growing up hearing about something like that when sweet and low was the go to sugar.
It seemed to kind of just fall of the face of the earth and is resurfacing now?
Saccharine (Sweet 'n Low) was the big scare back then.
It turned out it did cause cancer… in rats… if you force fed them some crazy amount like 400x normal.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/artificial-sweeteners-fact-sheet
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3185898/
“humans would need to drink the equivalent of 800 twelve-ounce diet sodas with saccharin daily to reach the carcinogenic doses that induced rat bladder cancer.”
So… The typical American amount.
I seem to remember reading a cancer warning on diet soda cans in the late 80’s. Thought it was in reference to aspartame.
Now do caffeine !
According to the article, yes, comprehensive studies showed it was strongly correlated to brain tumors back in the 90s. However big companies lobbied and did their own “research” to bury the studies that quite conclusively showed aspartame caused cancer.
Fancy seeing you here
2009scape gang
Well, I guess it’s time to throw those lawsuits at the big companies that buried it with their conflicting studies, similar to big tobacco.
The shit we seem to put up with by corporations so their shareholders can gain some more on their millions. Humans suck.
