this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Total nonsense. If you consume enough of any substance, it will eventually kill you. Aspartame is THE most heavily studied food additive in human history and every well-conducted study has found it to be harmless. You need to consume the equivalent of 125+ cans of Diet soda per day to see an even slightly elevated risk of cancer or any other serious disease. This is disgusting, misprepresentative fear-mongering that will steer people away from low-calorie alternatives to sugary soft drinks, thereby contributing to increasing rates of obesity and diabetes and playing right into the sugar lobby's interests.
Are you exaggerating or do you have actual sources? I did some searching around and can’t verify your claims.
The choice to reject new information just because something has been studied a lot is a very anti-science take.
People should understand aspartame, and understand sugar, as much as they can and make their own choices for their health.
The 125 can figure came from the methodology used in some of the low quality rat studies frequently cited to demonstrate the dangers of aspartame back in the day. I'll see if I can find the specific studies.
This page by the National Cancer Institute provides a pretty decent overview of research on a variety of artificial sweeteners. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/artificial-sweeteners-fact-sheet
One very recent study (Debras et al., 2022) suggested a link between aspartame consumption and cancer, which I suspect is behind the recent hysteria. Pretty much every other high quality study over the past 50 years found no correlation. If aspartame is indeed a dangerous carcinogen, that fact should be clear through epidemiological data alone, like the 2013 study by Marinovich et al. cited in the article. I lend that study and those like it much greater credibility than one-off cohort studies like Debras.