I’d make a strong argument that one Diet Coke a day is still healthier even if it’s carcinogenic vs one regular coke everyday. Sugar is that bad for you.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Also the concentration of aspartame in diet coke is way less than the amount of sugar in regular Coke
Neither Coke nor Diet Coke are nutritious. Whether one or the other is a risk is specific to a person, and aspartame as well as other sweeteners aren’t fully understood in terms of risk.
I think these kind of simplistic statements serve to stoke fears around food than actually help people understand them. Added / excess sugar is associated to health risks but ultimately people need to understand their own health as individuals.
Here’s a Healthline article (by no means an authority but still fairly informative) to help expand.
20 diet cokes a day is healthier* than 1 regular coke a day. Sugary drinks are that bad for you.
*ignoring the possible bad effects of drinking 20 cans of any carbonated water.
Bad in what respect?
Sugar is incredibly addictive, non-nutritious yet high in caloric content, unfilling, causes highs and crashes reminiscent of drugs, and overuse of sugar in modern food is a major promoter of obesity. As with all types of food, sugar is fine in moderation. I consume plenty of sugar. However, if you rely on it too much for your daily calories then you won't get enough of any other macronutrients such as fat, protein, and fiber, and you'll get almost no micronutrients like vitamins. Sugar is also converted to energy incredibly quickly by the body, which is a good thing in many cases (like when you need a quick burst of energy at breakfast time, provided you balance it out with things like protein), but also leads you to get hungry quickly after eating it and eat some more, causing you to get fat, and wasting your money. When your body gets used to large amounts of sugar it also starts to crave it like a drug user craves drugs.
Oh ya, it's also in just about everything these days, especially in America. It's not even the tasty kind that comes from sugarcane, they just use corn syrup. Thank you, corn lobby!
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It's in more food products than just coke
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"Look, it may give you cancer, but honestly at this point what won't. And at least the cancer has a chance to take you out before the catastrophic collapse"
With the amount of aspartame I drink, I'd like the process to hurry up already, please.
You're going to need to eat it by a spoonful to even have a chance of it causing cancer.
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Nine to fourteen cans of cola a day is the limit. Eek, I've probably done that when I was a young programmer! Hope it doesn't catch up to me. :(
The WHO said aspartame is safe to consume within a daily limit of 40 milligrams per kilogram of a person’s body weight.
An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks.
Holy shit you weren’t kidding. And here I was worried that my 2-3 cans a month might be catching up to me!
You'd basically die from water poisoning before the aspertame would get you.
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Read this article and decide if you think the risk is actually that serious. The WHO is almost certainly blowing this way out of proportion and overstating the risks.
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Of the basis WHO is using here, most if not all longterm studies (the kind you'd want for assessing things like cancer risk) are based on observational evidence. That is, a study where the participants typically aren't asked to do anything they don't already normally do. For this topic, that means generally speaking the participants are going to be people that already normally drink low calorie sweetened beverages.
It doesn't really seem like they're accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.
I can't really make sense of their recommendation. The data required to recommend for or against just isn't there. The totality of short term data is all very showing a very strong association between sweetened drinks and weight loss. Wish they'd just explain this stuff properly so we didn't have to rely on the dumbass media to interpret advice meant for medical professionals
To be fair the vast majority of scientists will take other factors into account. If you thought of "this could also be because of that" then you can be sure that the scientists and the ones reviewing the publication also thought about it and addressed it. There are exceptions, sure, but don't just assume everyone is bad at their job.
My assumption isn't completely absent of context. From the article: "The FDA reviewed the the same evidence as IARC in 2021 and identified significant flaws in the studies, the spokesperson said."
But that's not really what I meant. The issue I have is about language and presentation of info, not research methodology. Most people aren't going to read WHO's ~100 pages of recommendations on aspartame. We get CNBC's interpretation, and some clickbaity editor has left their stink on it.
"WHO says soda sweetener aspartame safe, but may cause cancer in extreme doses" is both a more pertinent headline for countries in the west and from what I can tell, closer to being in alignment with what the WHO are actually saying.
You're right on the spot with media reporting on this.
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It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.
You say this based on what exactly? Because that's a trivial thing to correct for in an observational study.
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Do you have data suggesting overweight people are more likely to drink sugar free sodas? You could just as easily intuit that health conscious folks drink less calories.
I didn't, but I just found a few papers showing a relationship between awareness/use of nutrition claims/labels and obesity.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7622-3
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214001328?via%3Dihub
That second one sums up my logic pretty well:
The analysis revealed that people with excess weight display a high level of interest in nutrition claims, namely, short and immediately recognised messages. Conversely, obese individuals assign less importance to marketing attributes (price, brand, and flavour) compared with normal weight consumers.
Generally people that engage with products marketed as "diet" options are more likely to be people that want to improve their diet. In turn those people are more likely to be overweight. And people that are not overweight are more likely to select based on other product attributes.
Edit: The use of low-calorie sweeteners is associated with self-reported prior intent to lose weight in a representative sample of US adults - https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20169
In cross-sectional analyses, the expected relation between higher BMI and LCS [low calorie sweetener] use was observed, after adjusting for smoking and sociodemographic variables. The relation was significant for the entire population and separately for men and women (see Table 1). The relation between obesity (BMI ⩾30 kg m−2) and LCS consumption was significant for LCS beverages, tabletop LCS and LCS foods (see Figure 1a). Individuals consuming two or more types of LCSs were more likely to be obese than individuals consuming none (42.7% vs 28.4%) and were more likely to have class III obesity (7.3% vs 4.2%).
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Don't worry you're only drinking the recommended amount of carcinogens.
Everything is a carcinogen pretty much though.
Eat meat? Better boil or steam everything because any bit of char on meat is a carcinogen. Especially avoid all red meat and sandwiches in general.
Don’t heat potatoes or a lot of other vegetables too high either. They can produce acrylamide, another carcinogen that’s also found in tobacco smoke.
Never drink alcohol either because it’s a carcinogen.
Don’t fry anything. Causes cancer.
Peanuts and peanut butter are laced with aflatoxins that are carcinogenic.
Literally everyone gets cancer several times in life. Most of the time your body kills it off. It’s only when that fails that we catch it. The longer we live and the more we minimize other factors, the bigger cancer will become as a cause of death.
Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.
Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.
Depends on what kind of processing it's being put through. I wouldn't drink unpasteurized milk, that's for sure.
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This has been a thing since forever. I remember there being a big doobadoo about the shit in Diet Coke back in the 90's. They showed it gave mice cancer.
It used to be called NutraSweet.
The thing is that the study with the mice was seriously flawed. There's been more research since then, which is why we're getting this announcement now (even though the announcement itself is little more than "oh hey there might be something to this? We definitely need more research before we can know for sure.")
Yeah, I thought this sounded pretty familiar. I thought it was like a known thing.
This thread is fucked with astroturfing. Welcome to Lemmy, everyone! It's easier to do this shit here... It's kind of a massive fucking problem.
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I drink a lot of Coke Zero and mainly went on it because sugar taxes were making regular Coca Cola far more expensive.
The notion that big soda corporations are giving us cancer is quite concerning.
Let's be clear, sugary sodas are causing health problems right now.
Exactly this. I hate to say it but candy and sodas need to be taxed like cigarettes. The obesity crisis is very real. Over 70% of adults in the United States are overweight or obese.
Taxes don't really make people quit. It just makes them more poor. The best it does is over time people stop trying things long enough to get addicted.
The almost certainly aren't. Typically the quantities used in these tests are absurd if scaled up to a human. It also very well may not have the same effect in a human.
As long as you aren't shoveling aspertame into your mouth, it's almost certainly less than the equivalent amount they tested on these mice.
Quote from the article: "An adult weighing 70 kilograms or 154 pounds would have to drink more than nine to 14 cans of aspartame-containing soda such as Diet Coke daily to exceed the limit and potentially face health risks"
Aka, you're fine.
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Just a little, light cancer.
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