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Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Literally every fucking health org has studied the chemical and found no evidence of health issues connected to it. It's only this one study that the IARC cites. And IARC doesn't take dosage into account either.
Regardless of people's taste for aspartame, it is literally not dangerous. It does taste dry. It doesn't taste like sugar. You do not have to enjoy it. But it is not bad for you.
edit: my badly worded comment got some discussion going which is great. I just want to say that I was being as hyperbolic as the worried people and I'm sorry. Of course it's not black or white. There are factors to consider, but what I was trying to express was that aspartame leans to the safe side rather than dangerous.
Obviously do not drink 25 cans of soda a day, obviously do not compensate for the fact that you're drinking a "light" product by consuming more of it. But a can a day isn't gonna ruin your health.
Except for the fact that a decade ago aspartame was shown to create pre-diabetic conditions in the gut, like sugar, except worse. And that studies proved that because psychologically people think it's "light" they drink more soda and actually gain weight. Yeah if you ignore those pesky little facts it's totally is 100% harmless. So definitely go around telling people it's 100% harmless.
Do you have stock in diet Coke or what?
You can almost never say that something is not dangerous, unless it's practically mathematically proven...
This applies especially for food etc.
I think we have to be much more conservative with food and substances we put into it. A lot of (Meta-)meta-studies suggest, that processed food is a health risk.
And this may sound a little bit far-fetched, but I think a good amount of the idiocracy in (especially) the USA may be related to the food (as also a lot of studies have found connections to brain/psychological health).
Yeah, actually.
And, like, literally EVERYTHING has an LD50 value.
For some things, the value is astronomically gargantuan, though.
Like, if you have to consume more than your body weight of a substance within thirty minutes in order for it to have a lethal effect, it's very improbable to ever happen by accident, and very difficult to make happen on purpose.
Allegedly, the LD50 for aspartame is 10,000 mg per kg of body weight
(I fucked up the math on the line that used to be here and got justly called out for it; 10,000 mg is only 10 grams. If someone weighs 60kg it would only be 600 grams which is still A LOT but not nearly what I thought it said at first) (And that's how much to get to a fifty percent chance of dying - I don't know what the shape of the curve was leading up to this point, it could be nonlinear.) HOWEVER, I can't recall if LD50 only accounts for acute mortality, or if it also accounts for chronic mortality; like, if it gives you a type of cancer that takes 20 years to kill you somehow, is that even known? no idea.
10g/kg is actually 1/100th your weight, not 10 times it
Shit, yeah, I fucked up that math good and hard
Additionally to what the others already said:
LD50 and "bad for your health" are quite separate things.
Vitamin D for example has an LD50 of ~30mg per kg. So according to your logic, it's way unhealthier than aspartame (factor ~100). Though in reality you would die without vitamin D intake.
10,000 mg equals 10 g, not 10 kg, so you would only need 1/100 of your body weight. Still an unrealistic amount, but far away from 10x.
One thing I always like to remind people of: The fact that these effects are, if at all existent, so small that they can barely be observed also means that if they do turn out to be harmful, it's not too bad, as the harm is also small. It's not like e.g. lead in the water where you can very clearly prove a significant harm.