No more aspartame in Diet Pepsi

Artificial sweeteners may promote diabetes, claim scientists | Science | The Guardian

Eran Elinav, a senior author on the study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, said that while the evidence against the sweeteners was too weak to change health policies, he had decided to give them up.

But the study has left many experts unconvinced. The findings draw largely on tests of just one sweetener in mice, raising doubts about their relevance for people, and to other sweeteners. Large studies in humans have found that sugar substitutes can help people maintain a healthy weight and protect against diabetes.
“This new report must be viewed very cautiously,” said Stephen O’Rahilly, director of the Metabolic Diseases Unit at Cambridge University, “as it mostly reports findings in mice, accompanied by human studies so small as to be difficult to interpret.”
Brian Ratcliffe, professor of nutrition at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, said: “Most of the effects that they report relate to saccharin with little or no effect of aspartame. Their paper ought to be limited to ‘saccharin’ in the title rather than attributing the effects to all artificial sweeteners.”

 

I know that when I want some rock-solid information on nutrition, I go to my local gold bug.

Thirty-four years.

Ninety-plus countries have studied it and approved it, as well as the European Union.

Safe, safe, safe. Perfectly safe. Way safer than sugar.

 

Ragu, it'd be a lot easier to take you seriously on this and everything else if you ever demanded or even considered evidence contrary to the positions you have already staked out. This is Jack Morris Redux. You've pitched your tent somewhere, and that's that. You completely dismiss anything that doesn't jibe with the gut feeling you have already developed. Mark Buehrle's numbers are better than Jack Morris's? OK. Sure. But you know that hitters were intimidated by Jack Morris. You can ask them! Thirty-four years of studies indicate that aspartame is perfectly safe? (Fifty years, actually. It was approved for use in 1965.) OK. But what about 35 years? We need at least 35 years!

 

Jack Morris is like, da-FUQ you draggin' my old ass into this argument for?

This place is funny-ass shit some days.

 

The, "You just 'Googled'!11!!!'" argument is so played out.

No, I'm a smart, well-read, well-informed, educated person who knows where to find information and keeps up with it.

 

We do fucking know.

 

Sweet. The appeal to authority. (Well, its inverse.)

 

Rags, the idea that people have been eating the same way for hundreds/thousands of years is foolish. People, especially here in the U.S., have really never eaten this way. Sugar, for example, has been a large part of humans' diet for only a few decades.

So you really can't credibly play that card vis-a-vis the aspartame-sugar comparison.

 

Actually DW, we don't know. We can't know. We've only not inferred an effect. That's not the same as saying that we've inferred no effect.