• ExtremeDullard@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    I was expecting yet another aspartame-bashing article, but it’s an erythritol-bashing one this time.

    Look, it’s really simple: all those sweeteners have been in widespread use for a long time. Wanna know if they’re harmful? Do some stats correlating release dates in several countries and occurrence of this-or-that disease and death records. If you can’t find a statistically-significant correlation, well… it doesn’t prove the stuff is harmless, but chances are it is.

    That’s assuming there aren’t already a kajillion inconclusive studies on the particular molecule you’re interested in, as with aspartame.

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
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      2 days ago

      Compare it to sugar while at it. It doesn’t need to be harmless, it needs to be less harmful than sugar.

      And that’s a fairly low bar to cross.

      • ExtremeDullard@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        Sugar is like water and air: it’s fine in reasonable quantities 🙂

        As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison.

        And the same goes for all sweeteners too. In fact, I know for a fact that consuming aspartame in large quantities is harmful, because I used to consume entirely too much of it every day by mistake, and I very much felt the effects when I quit.

    • Asidonhopo@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      I don’t need to do hours of graduate level health polling and statistics if I only eat what my great grandparents would have recognized as food. Rules of thumb aren’t perfect but they’re good enough.

      • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        I don’t mean to be argumentative but this is a logical fallacy called “appeal to tradition” where something is argued to be correct because it has been historically accepted.

        For example, your great grandparents could have had a diet heavy in saturated fats (bacon, etc) and died prematurely from cardiovascular disease, albeit not before they had children. So just because they recognized it as food doesn’t mean it’s a healthy choice for people seeking a healthy, long life.