What I don’t get is why it took them decades to figure this out. Why have they been giving us sugar substitutes without understanding what they have been doing to us? Why were these approved for use in the first place?

    • gustofwind@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      It is if you don’t eat too much

      But aspartame will literally damage the DNA in your colon because it’s inherently genotoxic to our cells

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        18 hours ago

        The DNA damage comes from the formaldehyde that the body produces when metabolizing aspartame, but guess what? The body makes formaldehyde anyway, just from its natural metabolic processes. As long as you don’t consume too much it’s fine.

        The problem is over-consumption, which is the basis of having a consumer economy. If everyone ate less the food industry would collapse. They need us to overeat and if we ever stopped they’d have to reconcile with the fact that they can’t just keep growing their profits infinitely. Plus, when we overeat, they can make even more money by treating the sicknesses it causes. Win/Win!

      • xep@discuss.online
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        18 hours ago

        Don’t consume either. Artificial sweeteners are UPFs and sugar in all its forms have no place in the human diet.

        • TheWeirdestCunt@lemmy.today
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          18 hours ago

          If you remove sugar in all its forms from your diet then you’d better forget about eating any plants whatsoever. Cellulose is sugar, carbs are sugar. Where do you think we get our energy from?

          • xep@discuss.online
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            15 hours ago

            Amino acids and fat. Why do we need sugar? It’s not an essential nutrient.

            • TheWeirdestCunt@lemmy.today
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              9 hours ago

              Lipids (fat) also gets converted into glucose before your body can use it. If we’re cutting out sugar in all forms then that counts too.

              • xep@discuss.online
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                9 hours ago

                That is also my understanding. We needn’t consume any exogenous sugars in any form, since the body is able to make all it needs.

                If we’re cutting out sugar in all forms then that counts too.

                That’s nothing near to what I said. To reiterate my statement, there is no requirement for sugar in the human diet.

        • gustofwind@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          Indeed, we should all be trying to reduce even sugar to 0

          If there is a food Overton window it’s a solar system away from a normal diet