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Here's the actual open-access study instead of clickbait tabloid trash. One of the study's conclusions is pretty chilling:
Until the neurological sequelae of aspartame are better understood, children and adolescents should probably avoid aspartame as far as possible,
I always tend to avoid stuff with the "Diet" or "sugar free" labels, just for this reason.
And it didn't require a study to convince me that random stuff that is not a part of nutrition, is better off being out of a regular diet.
But it definitely takes a study to validate my concerns.
The big problem with diet sodas is that the pancreas is activated by the taste of sweet, not just blood sugar levels. People drink gallons of this garbage a year and diabetes rates only go up.
My understanding is this is just with sucralose. You can easily validate this yourself with a continuous glucose monitor. Diet sodas have their problems and the one in this article is particularly concerning but they don't typically trigger insulin responses.
Exactly my reasoning as well. My body knows what sugar is and how to handle it.
Fiber also has no nutritional value.
Fun little technicality. It won’t provide energy, fat or protein, but it does serve an important function nonetheless. Does that count as “value”? Depends on who you ask.
Still a part of nutrition though, no?
I'll also take this opportunity to point out that taking just fibre is not particularly useful either.
It only really makes sense when in conjunction with other substances in forms that come with traditional foods.
Before you take this to mean anything about why you should do, you are not a mouse. This is a study in mice and the differences between what impacts it will have in mice and humans may be very large. Mice are not good human analogues, but they are very cheap and good model organisms.
The findings they report include weight loss and cardiac/neurological impacts. This appears to compound over time with worse impacts as the study continued. This would make sense if the impact of aspartame was a slow chronic toxin or inhibited some normal pathway. If it is the former then avoiding aspartame for mice is important at all times. If it is the latter then having a break every so often should ameliorate the damage, though how much and what time ratio is not tested here.
That said, this is in mice. In my experience human brains a fairly different from mouse brains and the metabolic context is also quite different. I doubt the applicability of this to humans will be replicated well any time soon. If they do find an issue it is likely to be different to what happened to the mice, and though it is possible this will carry over to humans it is unlikely.
Also to point out, this doesn't implicate any other artificial sweetemers. If you're in Australia, the sweetenersight be listed by code rather than name:
Also you will usually find 950 (aspartame) along with 951 (acesulfame K) because the two have slightly different profiles and work very well together. If we do a study on humans I would want it to include the common and also some uncommon combinations. A lot of people are switching over to erythritol and stevia but I don't know how safe they are. We make erythritol internally but the dose may be quite different, and coming in through the gut could be quite different to internal production, not to mention with the stevia as actually prepared not lab purified.
I agree, they're not good humans and I'd love to get some more eyes on aspartame in light of this study. I did the math (and posted a comment on this post) and found out that the dose is equivalent to a 2L coke zero bottle so the dosage is applicable to how much humans get.
It's a classic more study needed and until we get a proper study without conflict of interest assessing human cognitive performance with a memory test after 8 months of drinking a 2L bottle of coke zero 3 times per week I'd recommend reducing the amount of aspartame drinks to at 0.5L or less 3 times a week.
It's not conclusive that it's going to negatively affect humans and sugary alternatives are very likely still less healthy both cognitively and physically than the zero drinks.
We have an unfortunate monkey paw thing regarding this in the UK now then
We introduced a sugar tax a few years ago to try and reduce the amount of sugar in food, it has been quite successful in that regard. However in many, many places, aspartame is the substitute ingredient.
Most cases you can avoid given it's generally unhealthier food, but I'm not a monk, so I'm going to consume junk on occasion.
Dosage matters so I crunched the numbers to get the Coke Zero equivalent.
Calculation
So it's roughly same as drinking a 2L (half gallon) bottle. I expected it to be a lot bigger, not just something a regular soda lover would reach in 2 days.
Hmm… sounds like avoiding all sorts of sweet things might be worth considering.
The pancreas is activated to produce insulin by first the sense of taste and sweetness, then by blood sugar levels.
This is why since the large scale adoption of synthetic sweetners, diabetes rates of skyrocketed. People don't even drink water now in US.
It makes you dumb, unfit and fat
Well, I've been that way my entire life.
Phew, thank God I'm not a mouse. I'll keep drinking my diet sodas.
Useless study. Why would we care about mice drinking coke zero?
Finally.
My (long-since-ex) wife called it over twenty years ago, "That crap is worse than sugar." Our kids didn't get artificial sweeteners. (Nor did they get too much real sugar, we didn't have fat kids.)