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by hankchinaski 1606 days ago
slightly unrelated, but i read mixed opinions on the safety of aspartame. Is there anyone knowledgeable in the field who has research proving one way or the other? I rarely consume sodas, I just don't know whether it's safer to consume artificially sweetened ones or standard ones. The literature on the topic seems conflicting and incomplete
1 comments
iamricks 1606 days ago
It is propaganda, read through this wiki[1] and see how far people have gone to create propaganda against it. It's one of the most researched ingredients by the FDA.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

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chihuahua 1606 days ago
It seems there are a lot of studies where the author starts with the conviction that Aspartame is "bad", and designs a study to "prove" it. For example, "what if we give these lab rats a massively excessive dose of Aspartame every day for a year, and then check if that harmed them"
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alphager 1606 days ago
Isn't that just normal study design? Formulate a hypothesis (in this case "Aspartame bad"), design a test, find out if hypothesis was correct.
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chihuahua 1600 days ago
You are right that my comment as written did not do a good job of explaining what it is about these studies that seems fishy to me. So I thank you for responding to it and making me examine my opinion in more detail.

Someone else already responded to you and provided a much better explanation.

There is always something that rubs me the wrong way about these studies that set out to prove that artificial sweeteners are bad. It's intuitively appealing: it seems too easy that we can just replace sugar with these harmless chemicals and then it tastes mostly the same but without the calories or bad metabolic effects of sugar. But artificial sweeteners have been studied for decades, especially Aspartame, and as far as I know they appear to be harmless, outside of the Gwyneth Paltrow universe. So it seems to me that some people still have an axe to grind with these artificial sweeteners, and try to bend science to their will.

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lupire 1606 days ago
No, a good hypthosesis is "X dose of aspartame is bad", where X is in the realm of plausibility.
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