When the researchers conducted spatial learning and memory tests using the Barnes maze, the aspartame mice at four months consistently moved more slowly and covered less distance during training than animals in the control group. They also took nearly twice as long on average to locate the target escape hole, showing impaired memory recall (however, this was inconsistent and not seen as statistically meaningful). By eight months, performance gaps widened even further, with two out of six aspartame-treated mice failing to complete the task at all.
It makes you dumb, unfit and fat (around the organs).
Dosage matters so I crunched the numbers to get the Coke Zero equivalent.
- Coke Zero has 85mg/355ml
- Mice were dosed with 7mg/kg, 3 times per week
- We assume humans are 75kg.
Calculation
- Human dose is 7mg/kg * 75kg = 525mg
- 525mg / (85mg / 355ml) = 2193ml
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.
Wow that is just shockingly low.
Useless study. Why would we care about mice drinking coke zero?
Back in the day, a soda was a special treat, but then it became something people drink like water. Then companies started putting ass-partame and other garbage in it so people could continue drinking dessert for hydration and supposedly not put on weight.
Aspartame? The most studied of the artificial sweeteners? The one that breaks down completely?
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.)
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.
Costco ONLY offers aspartame soda in their fountains, luckily you can buy a bottle of water for 60p more than a large soda!
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.
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.
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.
Erythritol in particular actually had a study recently that was also concerning
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,
Lead poisoning for a new generation!
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.Exactly my reasoning as well. My body knows what sugar is and how to handle it.
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.
The continuous glucose monitor shows only glucose; I’d love a continuous insulin monitor.
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.
The important function of artificial sweeteners is to make food taste good.
And the important function of fiber is to provide satiation, as well as playing an important role in digestion.
Artificial sweeteners are valuable for those who are unable to resist sweetness but need to reduce sugar intake, but fiber is actually an important nutritional component. People take fiber supplements for good reason.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a good idea to test your willpower all the time. If your healthy lifestyle mostly depends on sheer willpower, you’re playing this game on hard mode.
If you want to reduce your sugar intake, simply don’t fill the pantry with cookies, candy and cake. Buy healthy stuff instead. When sugar cravings strike, you don’t really have any unhealthy options available, so you’ll end up eating something better. Think of it like a framework that supports your desire to live a healthier life. Sooner or later, your willpower will fail you, but you won’t end up violating your long term goals too severely.
The important part of taste is to tell if food is good.
Similarly for smell.
Thanks to capitalistic food engineering, that doesn’t work very well.
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.Eh fiber supplements can be massively beneficial. Yeah it’s better to get it naturally, but for those whose bodies need higher fiber than normal and those who aren’t willing to eat a naturally high fiber diet it’s a good option. There’s a reason some people swear by pscylium husk.
How so?
Natural fiber foods have other critical nutrients that benefit the host, as well as positive effects on the microbiome.
I wasn’t asking about what else might be in foods that contain fiber though. Artificial sweeteners can also be in foods that also contain nutrients.
keeps taking a liter of coke on a daily basis. You are missing the point entirely. Sweeteners are here not for the people that can live without Sugar but for those we can’t.
I have a few kilograms of sugar right now and I use it when I feel like.
Sugar maybe a sweetener, but not all sweeteners are sugar. Also, I don’t shy away from eating it when I feel like it.
Over the course of the year-long experiment, the most significant changes were seen in how the brain processed energy. Using FDG-PET imaging, the researchers tracked glucose uptake across the whole brain as well as specific regions, and found that after only two months of intermittent aspartame intake, the mice had sharp rises here – roughly double that seen in the control group. And this effect was across the entire brain, suggesting it was burning more fuel in the early stages of the experiment. However, at around six months, this spike actually reversed, and at the 10-month mark, the brains of the aspartame-dosed mice were burning around 50% less glucose than the control group. Because the brain runs almost entirely on glucose – to fuel processes like the firing of neurons and maintaining circuits linked to memory and learning – aspartame appeared to be robbing the organ of what it needs to function smoothly.
Were they getting enough glucose in addition to the aspartame? The article didn’t make it clear whether we’re seeing the effects of aspartame or just hypoglycemia.
Were they getting enough glucose in addition to the aspartame? The article didn’t make it clear whether we’re seeing the effects of aspartame or just hypoglycemia.
The liver will happily make enough glucose for the human brain from fat and protein, let alone the mouse brain (gluconeogenesis). It’s not true that the human brain requires glucose, just a couple of cell lines (obligate glucovores), like red blood cells and some parts of the eye. The rest of the body, including the brain, can use ketones derived from fat, muscles can use triglycerides directly, in fact as we age the brain preferentially uses ketones. Here mouse models fail because they’re evolved as primarily carbovores (grains etc, although they do eat (low fat) insects for extra protein) and really, really hard to get into ketosis, while humans drop into it with 12 hours fasting. Which makes this study an interesting datum, but inconclusive (and likely false in detail) in humans. That said, seems like a no brainer to drop artificial sweeteners and limit sugar to me, evolutionarily we got a big burst at the end of summer (fruit) which we used to fatten up for winter and little the rest of the year.
TLDR: “Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate.”
Fruit is bad, apple is like sand with splenda, you need to buy the expensive kind of grapes and oranges, or else tastes like so fckn acid. Bananas are ok as long as you eat with bread and are on point, the same as watermelon, but a lot of em needs more sugar.
Mouse metabolism is nothing like human metabolism. Over reliance on mouse models has wasted billions and decades in science, and generated bullshit artifacts.
Still think rabbit studies win the bullshit artifact prize since they are the basis of the diet heart hypothesis.
Throughout the experiment, the mice were fed standard chow (SAFE® A03 rodent chow from SAFE), and the control group was provided with normal, unadulterated drinking water, while the aspartame treated group received 0.4 % (w/v) aspartame (Tokyo Chemical Industry, CAS 22839–47–0, purity ≥) three days every two weeks, which equated to an average daily human equivalent dose of approximately 7 mg/kg/day [20]
average daily human equivalent dose of approximately 7 mg/kg/day [20]
That’s quite a bit. A can of Coke Zero has 85mg of aspartame. So for someone who weighs 68kg, they would need to drink a six pack a day to get to this dose.
Diet Dr Pepper has 180mg per can, so that’s a bit more alarming.
Yeah, I have only known a few people who drink that much soda, it is a lot. But AceK is in tons of foods now, like kirkland whey protein and low carb stuff.
open access article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332225010856?via=ihub
Hmm… sounds like avoiding all sorts of sweet things might be worth considering.
Also avoid potatoes. They have the same ingredients as aspartame.
As in, a carbon backbone with plenty of hydrogen everywhere, maybe a few functional groups here and there.
Phenylalanine and aspartic acid. They’re just proteins.
Just took Look at the formula of aspartic acid (the amino acid) and aspartame (the artificial sweetener) and they are vastly different. What’s your point?
Your stomach breaks down aspartame directly into phenylalanine and aspartic acid. It’s just the two glued together.
Unless the claim is that you’re absorbing aspartame through your esophagus lining?
Just use natural sugars in moderation and you will be fine.
Bullshit. There is no moderation on sugar intake and that’s when aspartame could enter. Not totally but partially cutting sugar. You have to be realistic in life no one is willing to resign coke life or cakes.
Uhhh what?
I quit drinking soda years ago and switched to flavored seltzer water. I was drinking 4-6 sodas a day for years before that.
For me quitting sugar was only difficult for the first few days, until whatever was in my gut crying for it died off I guess.
Just have to want to do it, like anything else that requires willpower.
Just because you maybe do it, it doesn’t mean that everyone is willing, or can, or will, or will be the same experience. Your personal case doesn’t extrapolate to the big number.
You said “nobody is willing”.
I am saying YOUR experience can’t be extrapolated to all people, and second, we are missing the point that is the cost/benefit of sugar vs sweeteners.
You have to be realistic in life no one is willing to resign coke life or cakes.
That’s not what you’re saying.
Edit: Also, nobody’s experience can be extrapolated to all people. What a ridiculous idea. But there are plenty of people who are able to give up consuming excess sugar. Just because you can’t, doesn’t mean that extrapolates to all people.
As and to whom are you communicating this?
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.
that’s debatable based on the literature: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28148491/
People with diabetes survive into adulthood now too.
Wow, so why are you alive to start with to have such sad life, imagine cutting all sweet. I prefer to be dead.
We eat so we may live. Not the other way around.
Sad, there isn’t in life more worth than food.
Well, I was mainly thinking of that in terms of cutting back, not forbidding them entirely. Eating sugary things all the time will obviously cause obesity, but eating artificially sweetened things seem to come with some serious caveats too. Not too long ago, I stumbled upon a similar post about erythritol, then another one about xylitol and so on. The list of sweeteners is getting shorter…
This is not a realistic stand, people will never take healthy sugar intakes. Sorry.
Other people can do whatever they want. I’m not here to tell them what to do or how to live. It’s your body, your responsibility. You’re the one who benefits from good decisions and suffers the consequences of bad ones.
“Other people can do whatever they want”. This is not a valid standpoint. We were talking about possible cost/benefit options to sugar, and yet your solution is just take less.
Are we crafting public health policy or making personal life choices here? What’s at stake determines the course of action. What’s reasonable for me to recommend myself may not apply to broader audiences, let alone special groups.
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.
Water is an option.
Water… Like from the toilet?
(obligatory /s)
Water tastes like shit
There is something genuinely wrong with your country’s water delivery system.
No, really, water tastes like shit after you eat your lunch. Can’t be comparable to take ANY soft drink after that. Facts.
Try not drinking from the toilet bowl.
Seriously though is there something wrong with your water supply?
Have you tried clean, distilled water? Water should be pretty much flavorless. You’re tasting what’s in the water.
This is the problem. It is not sweet.
Yeah, water loaded with fluoride, estrogens and heavy metals. I’ll stick to my diet coke
The diet coke that’s made by mixing the same water “loaded with fluoride, estrogens and heavy metals” with a syrup concentrate 😆
At least it makes it taste good. Brown sweet fluoride water is tastier than plain stinky fluoride water from the toilet.
I think part of your problem is that you’re drinking from the toilet.
Fluoride has no known negative effects on adults in the amounts found in most drinking water.
Heavy metals and estrogens (if your area is particularly polluted? You can usually find reports of exactly how clean your local water is) are easily filtered out with a cheap undersink carbon block filter (it will also remove chlorine, as a nice side-effect).
If fluoride has no negative effects then explain why I am so stupid?
Fluoride actually can potentially, maybe have a negative effect on cognition/IQ in infants or developing children, but the research claiming that is pretty sketch. Reactions did a solid video on it, if you’re interested.
Joking aside. I go to town meetings and without fail during public comment there is always at least one anti fluoride activist.
For mice?
I thought we’ve had enough studies on humans?
Problem with humans is that due to the pesky human rights laws, it becomes exceedingly difficult to fully control their food intake and normalise any other variables that may cause similar effects.
But as long as those laws don’t prevent us from normalising the usage of our products in the society, that’s all well. Even better, if someone does such a study on humans, we can simply state “other variables” to invalidate those studies and it shouldn’t affect our revenue streams too much.
