To use an analogy their argument is: Vaping is bad for you, don't do it. While ignoring that a ton of people quit smoking using vapes and that they're letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
Same thing with NSS. While NSS are a useful tool for sugar reduction, studies have shown that over the medium-long term, you'll want to reduce artificially sweat foods and even sweat food substitutes, to create a "new normal" or new baseline where an e.g. strawberry is sweat again. Which has been shown to be more sustainable.
The WHO aren't wrong, but everyone jumps on this with their own agenda. They are claiming that switching to NSS isn't a sustainable way to reduce BMI (and associated negative health outcomes) over the long term, hard to find data that disagrees with that. That's all they're claiming.
> to create a "new normal" or new baseline where an e.g. strawberry is sweat again.
Just an interesting story.
About 5 years ago, I tried to cut out all processed carbs from my diet.
After several months, I was away from home and I had to eat something---the only thing open was a Dunkin Donuts. I ordered an egg-white sandwich on a plain English muffin, and for kicks I took a bite out of the English muffin.
Holy shit. It tasted super sweet!!
I can't be sure, but I assume it had refined sugar added to it to improve its palatability. Made me think about everything that goes into fast foods...
I've been in America only once while overnighting in a hotel near LAX en-route to New Zealand from the UK.
Everything I ate at that hotel tasted sweet from the pizza I ordered that night to the toast I had in the morning. What should have been delicious and savoury was instead sickening and unpleasant - it was so weird.
I had the same experience when I went from peanut butter that is just ground peanuts to some peanut butter from some of the big brands. The big brand PB tastes like cake icing.
I’m sure it did have added sugar. Basically all American supermarket bread products (including most bread!) do, and are are super sweet to Europeans.
It extends shelf life though. European supermarket bread will mould in usually less than a week, but it’s really unusual for an American bread to go mouldy.
American bread certainly does go moldy, but the sugar absorbs moisture and keeps the bread softer longer.
That being said, I'd much rather they used less. At this point it's pretty hard to buy a hamburger bun around here [SF] that doesn't taste like a brioche to me.
I started making baking at home when pandemic lockdowns started and with only flour, yeast, salt, oil and sugar my bread grows mold within one to two days (2 cups of flour with 1 teaspoon of sugar) I speculate my home humidity might be high without air conditioning or heat but it seems a lot of something is necessary to prevent commercial bread products from molding for a long time.
Home baked bread freezes really well so take advantage of that! I also bake a lot of bread at home and usually make a batch of 1kg of flour at a time, that results in two good sized loaves - one goes in the freezer until the other is finished.
I freeze it in an air tight bag, and I take it out of the freezer a day before we want to start using it and let it thaw at room temperature.
Sourdough was the only sliced bread I could find at my supermarket that didn't contain any added sugar and also wasn't ridiculously overpriced. That's been the only bread I've used for over a year now, and regular American sandwich bread tastes so weird to me now when I have the chance to try any
I'm currently on keto and am curious what sweet food will taste like if I ever try it. I hear that if you don't eat such foods for a long time, they tend to come across as really really sweet.
I fully agree.
The main argument is that if you use sweeteners you will eat more sugar, so it is worse than sugar.
So basically don't eat the non-poison because it will cause you to eat poison, so instead eat the poison itself.
Also, there is no concrete evidence that sweeteners are bad for one's health, it's more the feeling of 'chemicals' are always bad.
Sugar is clearly bad and causes obesity and diabetes. The choice seems pretty clear between the two.
It is not bad if one has self-control and eats a small amount of it, but that is really the case for most bad substances like alcohol, weed, etc.
If one is out of control eating sugar it is clearly going to have bad consequences. The immediate consequences will be obesity and bad teeth. The long-term would be diabetes, and there are definitely others as well.
On the positive side, while researching my comment, apparently that old boogieman of artificial sweeteners, saccharine, may be fine for humans (as the cancer-causing in rats is because of a unique rat feature that humans don't share).
I heard it was because the species of rat they used tend to get cancers anyway when they got older, and shouldn't be used in any long-term study.
I love scientists, loved working with them, best clients i ever had (if you're a devops or automate dev/scientists tools, and have to regularly explain stuff to scientists and to other devs, we don't compare advantageously at all), but sometimes there is too much noise.
If you read the guideline[0] it is way more circumspect. There are a lot of "probably" all over it. There is a need for way more research for a definitive guideline as it is stated in this guideline.
Thanks for your comment. Having read the conclusion, it is more of the authors saying "NSS could be responsible for hypertension/T2 Diabetes etc but it's not really conclusive".
I'll likely still consume some NSS'es though that is more due to my preexisting condition.
They are following the science where it's going. The guideline will change when new science arise. But still we have ways to go in popularization of science.
I'm super dubious about their conclusions here. Fat people drink diet soda because they are trying to avoid sugar. Diet soda actually tastes damn good these days, there isn't really a reason to drink regular soda.
They are trying to replicate the assault on your taste buds that is sugar soda. They've gotten pretty good at it.
The problem is that the levels of sweetness, acidity, salinity, carbonation etc. in diet soda have become normalized. People give these dessert drinks to children, and drink it like it's water.
You know how overpoweringly strong some chocolate mousse can be? The kind where you can't finish a tiny slice of cake because more than a tiny sliver on your fork is too rich? Or how some foreign cuisines can be so potently dosed with curry or pepper that you can't taste any other flavors in the dish? Imagine replacing white bread throughout your diet with that chocolate cake. Or the punch of salt and pepper on an egg with that level of curry.
Ask someone from 100 years ago to sweeten a glass of lemonade "to taste" and you'd get something so weak that a consumer of diet soda would mock it like the meme "hint of hint of lime" or "transported on a truck near strawberries" flavors of LaCroix.
Yes it's better that they drink diet than regular soda. No, it's not good to normalize that flavor. I think human appetites are just not set up to handle some stimuli that previous levels of foraging or farming, chemistry, and distribution systems could not create.
> Ask someone from 100 years ago to sweeten a glass of lemonade "to taste" and you'd get something so weak that a consumer of diet soda would mock it like the meme "hint of hint of lime" or "transported on a truck near strawberries" flavors of LaCroix.
This is quiet a suspicious claim if you've studied food or beverage history. We have cocktail recipes dating back 150 years, and punch recipes dating back almost 500. They are almost universally sweeter than today. Similarly food recipes also used a good deal more sugar. Some of this was no doubt to cover off flavors, less sweet varieties, and for the preservative power of sugar. You're going to need some citations that the normalization is the problem behavior.
> The most common style today is Brut [(6 to 12 grams of sugar per litre)]. However, throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century Champagne was generally much sweeter than it is today. Moreover, except in Britain, Champagne was drunk as dessert wines (after the meal), rather than as table wines (with the meal).[55] At this time, Champagne sweetness was instead referred to by destination country, roughly as:[56]
> - Goût anglais ("English taste", between 22 and 66 grams); note that today goût anglais refers to aged vintage Champagne
> - Goût américain ("American taste", between 110 and 165 grams)
> - Goût français ("French taste", between 165 and 200 grams)
> - Goût russe ("Russian taste", between 200 and 300 grams)
By way of comparison, my favourite Orange Muscat dessert wine has 110 g/l sugar [2], a bog-standard ruby port has 102 g/l [3], my favourite sweet-ish sherry has a svelte 50 g/l [4], and a decent PX has an excruciating 417 g/l [5]. So Americans and the French alike used to drink champagne that was considerably sweeter than today's fortified and dessert wines!
I think this might have to do with sugar being more expensive.
Today sugary drinks are associated with poverty, lack of self-control, lack of education. Champagne is a status signaling drink, you don't want to signal that.
I think normalization is the problem but not because people didn't drink sweet things; my suspicion is that previously they were drunk rarely and in smaller quantities (due to cost, if nothing else).
We've gone from "Twelve full ounces, that's a lot" to a 12oz can being the smallest commonly available size, and a 20oz bottle being common in vending machines.
Over my lifetime, the "medium" size soda at a fast-food restaurant has roughly doubled.
Nope. Both Coke Zero and Pepsi Max(I guess that's what you mean by Black) are just awful, different to Diet but still bad - but I feel the same about literally any drink sweetened with aspartame/acesulfam/sucralose though. I can't imagine drinking a can of any of these - but I'll happily have a regular coke.
Some caveats for others who don't want to read the study.
1. This is a study done on rats and is only a single study, so caveat emptor.
2. They administer 250mg/kg/d Aspartame (human recommended max dose is 50mg/kg/d) based on the claim that "Species correction required a five to six times higher dose in rats than humans, as rats metabolize aspartame faster than humans"
3. Even if you assume effects correlate perfectly to humans, a dosage of 50mg/kg/d in the average American 90kg male corresponds to 22.5 12-oz cans of Diet Coke (200 mg Aspartame) per day for 30 days straight (length of the study).
4. There was a group of rats fed Aspartame at those levels for 1 month, then left to recover for 1 month. The sciatic nerve in these rats recovered significantly, and although it appears the recovery was incomplete, they also state that this difference is not statistically significant. There is also no discussion about whether recovery over a time period > 1 month would have resulted in complete recovery.
Skimmed through the text, and I'm fairly convinced (haven't drank Diet Coke in months), but I'd like to see a fourth group administered high fructose corn syrup and/or other artificial sweeteners.
> Diet soda actually tastes damn good these days, there isn't really a reason to drink regular soda.
I've been wondering about that. I wasn't sure if my memory has faded or maybe drinking it often made me like the taste but these days I find Diet Coke/Coke Zero to be equally enjoyable as Coke. Have the taste of the non-sugar Coke been steadily modified?
The last time I tried Coke Zero, it tasted like Diet RC. I didn't like it at all.
Diet Coke has huge differences in flavor between sources and packaging options. It's universally bad out of a can or bottle, and the stuff from soda fountains varies by restaurant.
Well, exactly right. I'm not choosing between putting a packet of splenda in my coffee or drinking it black. I'm choosing between a packet of splenda or two packets of sucrose. I'd find a study telling me which one of those is the better choice to be very helpful.
> I'm choosing between a packet of splenda or two packets of sucrose.
The claim is that that's not what you're choosing between, because if that were the real choice, then the people who chose splenda would lose more weight than the people who chose sucrose, but that's apparently not the finding. So maybe the real choice is between two packets of sucrose, or splenda+two packets of sucrose, because the splenda causes you to eat more sucrose (or other trash) without your conscious realization.
Well, if you eat an actual ripe strawberry they're incredibly sweet. The ones at the grocery store with the bitter white center are not ripe. But I get your point.
"Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control in the long term. People need to consider other ways to reduce free sugars intake, such as consuming food with naturally occurring sugars, like fruit, or unsweetened food and beverages,” says Francesco Branca, WHO Director for Nutrition and Food Safety.
"NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health."
If I read that correctly, the WHO is recommending that the overall amount of sweet foods consumed should be reduced and that replacing sugar with other sweeteners will not cut it.
I'm afraid you might be wrong about that. Why do they keep inventing new sweeteners, now, every few years? After all, they're all sweet, and zero calories. But they keep investing money inventing new ones, when the customers are happy with the old ones.
Perhaps because the public research eventually catches up to them.
E.g.
"sucralose ingestion caused 1) a greater incremental increase in peak plasma glucose concentrations (4.2 ± 0.2 vs. 4.8 ± 0.3 mmol/L; P = 0.03), 2) a 20 ± 8% greater incremental increase in insulin area under the curve (AUC) (P < 0.03), 3) a 22 ± 7% greater peak insulin secretion rate (P < 0.02), 4) a 7 ± 4% decrease in insulin clearance (P = 0.04), and 5) a 23 ± 20% decrease in SI (P = 0.01)."
NNTs, sweet on the tongue, sweet on the liver! Yep, they trigger the same deleterious hormonal response that sugar does. They produce a cascading chemical chain reaction in the body leading to the over-production of insulin, the hunger-hormone, which signals your fat cells to begin absorbing glucose (triglycerides) from the blood stream. Removing the sugar from the bloodstream would normally cause insulin production to drop, but in this case, it's not the sugar triggering the productions, it's the NNT chemicals that are still circulating in your body..
Because nothing so far tastes as good as real sugar. The common practice in employing artificial sweeteners is to combine two or more in an effort to avoid the bitter aftertaste that you get from relying on just one.
More likely it's because they cannot claim their product is helpful to dieters, after there is mounting evidence that it may actually be worse for them.
Eh I get what you're saying but I don't think most people who switch to vaping actually stop quit nicotine all together, they just continue vaping with often higher levels of nicotine. I guess they have the advantage of getting rid of second-hand smoke and the permeating smell of cigarettes.
I think a similar thing happens with "diet" "sugar-free" products. Almost all of the people who use these products neglect every other aspect of their health thinking they're really going to tackle obesity by swapping out processed sugar for sweeteners.
Anecdotally, I've never seen someone using copious amounts of these sweeteners look healthy. They continue on being obese and out of shape. I think if your goal is to be healthy then your mind set has got to change and using an option like artificial sweeteners is just a "have your cake and eat it too" position that won't result in making you healthier.
Nicotine itself is not more harmful than coffee or similar products. It is the smoking that is the main health risk.
Assuming that vaping is less harmful, that would make it a win if one was to choose between smoking and vaping.
Of course, doing neither is the absolute best choice.
Slight clarification: Nicotine at normal doses is not more harmful than coffee - though at high volumes it is pretty bad. In the context of this conversation though what you said is totally true.
I think we have to be more nuanced with health than this. Vaping can be the absolute best choice if it helps you maintain a healthy weight and/or a healthy career which keeps your health insurance activated.
There are plenty of people who swear by chemicals like nicotine and caffeine that help them achieve indirect benefits and I can't imagine they're all wrong.
" There are many health risks and side effects associated with using nicotine.
Some of the health risks include:
Nicotine contributes to the development of emphysema—a type of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease— in smokers.
It’s potentially carcinogenic. Chronic nicotine use is linked to lung, gastrointestinal, pancreatic, and breast cancer.
Nicotine use is associated with peptic ulcer disease (PUD) and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).
Nicotine use increases the risk of hypertension and cardiovascular diseases.
Nicotine use during pregnancy increases the likelihood of complications and adverse outcomes like miscarriages and stillbirth.9
Children exposed to nicotine in the womb are more predisposed to health problems throughout their lifetimes. These health problems affect their endocrine, reproductive, neurologic, respiratory, and cardiovascular systems.9
Nicotine use can cause cardiac arrhythmia—a cardiovascular condition characterized by an irregular heartbeat.10"
> Nicotine is the chemical that makes cigarettes addictive. But it is not responsible for the harmful effects of smoking, and nicotine does not cause cancer. People have safely used nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) to stop smoking for many years. Nicotine replacement therapy is prescribed by doctors or is available from pharmacies.
The risks for hypertension, etc is true for nicotine, because it's a stimulant, so same risks exist for coffee. There is very little conclusive evidence that nicotine (not talking about smoking or vaping) has any health effects that aren't also caused by coffee/stimulants.
The best thing you can say about vaping is that it's very understudied and long term effects are unknown, and likely has some long term effects that are bad for you.
Smokeless nicotine (swedish snus-variety) is considered very safe.
The problem is smoking and nicotine have been so intertwined for so long that when they say "Nicotine causes x" most of the time what they mean is "Smoking causes x" and maybe also "Vaping could potentially cause x"
False. I provided you the evidence. Here's more, keep lying if it makes you feel better.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/
"In several in vitro experiments, it has been found that nicotine in concentrations as low as 1 μM decreased the anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic effects exerted by chemotherapeutics on several different malignant cell lines"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/
"There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer."
Are you a big vaper or something and this is upsetting to you or something? I can't see any other reason for you to react with outright lies.
These are all health risks associated with smoking, not with nicotine itself. If you click through to the pages those risks link to, you'll see they are talking about smoking, not nicotine. There are some risks from nicotine (high blood pressure and faster heart rate), but it does not cause emphysema or cancer.
Do we really know what portion of this isn't just correlation between nicotine and the fact that it has to be administered which usually involves smoke, fiberglass irritation, etc?
I think the main problem with nicotine is its addictiveness and the fact that that will lead you to accept risks in administration via cigarettes, toxic fluid vapors, chew with fiberglass, etc.
Nicotine isn't bad. There are plenty of ways people use nicotine in just as benign a way as many people use caffeine.
You've missed the far-and-above most beneficial effect of switching to vaping, which is getting rid of inhaling the huge category of carcinogens that come with inhaling partially burned solid fuel.
Cigarettes don't give you cancer because of nicotine. They give you cancer because of partially burned solid fuel.
Most of the really old people that I see are quite thin - is that due to the long-term health effects of being overweight meaning that they don't survive as long, or is it that extreme old age (>80) also involves a reduction in appetite?
I can’t speak to OP’s claim about former smokers. However as a younger person who knows many younger never-smoker vape users, I can attest that they all consume vastly more nicotine than would ever be practical with cigarettes.
Vape pods are highly concentrated and you can use them anywhere, any time. No more need to bother with sneaking out of the house or taking smoke breaks.
"What’s worse, says Blaha, many e-cigarette users get even more nicotine than they would from a combustible tobacco product: Users can buy extra-strength cartridges, which have a higher concentration of nicotine, or increase the e-cigarette’s voltage to get a greater hit of the substance."
I have a few memories of picking blueberries with my mom as a kid - sweat dripped off my eyebrows, down the back of my neck and onto the strap that held the tray. She tried to get us out early, but there was a period around 10:00 just after the dew burned off when the humidity was still 100% and the sun was high enough to bake you. As a 7yo wishing I could stay home on my "hard-earned" summer vacation, most of the hardship was purely imagined. And maybe the flavor of those sweaty blueberries was imagined: I've not been able to replicate the taste for some time, even if I drag dragging my own boy to the U-Pick field. I wonder what they taste like to him.
Vaping is wrong for a very different reason, i.e. because the amount and quality of nicotine is unregulated which means the standard vape has an overdose of nicotine which can result in death in a single vape. 6 deaths by vaping in my state of Indiana alone last year, and all of them teenagers.
These kids are vaping THC adulterated with vitamin E[1]. Vitamin E is added because it makes a cut product thicker, and thickness is thought of as an indicator of quality. My guess here is that marijuana still has a stigma/is illegal, so these kids are finding it easier to just blame nicotine vapes to try and get themselves out of trouble.
There's no reason to cut nicotine vape liquid since the base ingredients (vegetable glycerin + propylene glycol) are absurdly cheap.
I find that very hard to believe unless these people are making their own vape juice with hundreds of times the recommended amount of pure nicotine. For example, a standard Juul pod contains about 40 mg of nicotine, each puff gives you a max of 160 µg, which is significantly less than a 2000th of the commonly believed lethal dose (500 mg orally for a 80KG person).
That’s not a general vaping thing, that’s about certain nicotine containing liquids or pods or whatever kids use these days. There are people like me who have zero nicotine in their vapes.
It feels to me that this advisory was not put out sensibly. WHO advises "against [artificial sweetener] use" because they "do not help control body mass or reduce the risk of weight-related illnesses" and because long term "[may increase the risk] of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease". But is that enough reason to give such a blanket statement disallowance?
What if you want to have some sweetness from time to time but you are watching your sugar levels? Surely that's better than just taking sugar. What if you are weaning yourself off so much sugar? Surely that's better too. It seems to me that artificial sweeteners are a useful product for many people and is obviously not a panacea. I mean, honestly, hardly anything is good in excess!
I feel this is so poorly communicated and almost guarantees people will take the wrong message from this.
> WHO suggests that non-sugar sweeteners not be used as a means of achieving weight control or reducing the risk of noncommunicable diseases (conditional recommendation)
> Conditional recommendations are those recommendations for which the WHO guideline development group is less certain that the desirable consequences of implementing the recommendation outweigh
the undesirable consequences or when the anticipated net benefits are very small. Therefore, substantive discussion amongst policy-makers may be required before a conditional recommendation
can be adopted as policy.
> Because the WHO Nutrition Guidance Expert Advisory Group (NUGAG) Subgroup on Diet and Health focuses on providing guidance on the prevention of unhealthy weight gain and diet-related NCDs, providing guidance on the management of diabetes in individuals with pre-existing diabetes is beyond the scope of this guideline. Therefore, the guidance in the guideline may not be relevant for individuals with existing diabetes.
I don't understand the expectations some people have of the WHO. Anything more complicated than a headline is going to get oversimplified by the media.
Thanks a lot for sharing that official document. It has great evidence and addresses the concerns I had. Additionally, the statement is labelled as a "recommendation", which is much more accomodating.
> What if you want to have some sweetness from time to time but you are watching your sugar levels?
Partly it seems the issue is that in many cases the reason for avoiding sugar and using a substitute does not actually avoid the negative consequences of sugar. I say this as someone who avoids sugar and has very little.
I agree though i'm a bit confused by this WHO post. I have difficulty determining the severity of the issue. Based on what they're saying it sounds like you should avoid both sugar and substitutes. This post makes them sound basically the same, so why hyper focus on one?
Artificial sweeteners have been shown to cause weight gain, since they make you hungrier, and also lower your metabolism. This was shown in follow up studies with humans, but with mice, they had three groups that each got a fixed amount of calorie counted food and a hamster wheel. They then added sugar to one group's water and artificial sweetener to another group's. The artificial sweetener groups gained the most weight and was the least physically active.
If you're trying to watch your sugar levels (and are not diabetic) then artificial sweeteners are strictly harming your progress toward whatever goal you're trying to achieve.
They also cause all sorts of other health issues (cancer, digestive problems, neurological problems), but those are mostly product specific. The above applies to all non-nutritional sweeteners that have been studied.
I hope the WHO ruling includes "organic" artificial sweeteners too.
> Artificial sweeteners have been shown to cause weight gain
That does not seem to be the scientific consensus:
"The majority of clinical studies performed thus far report no significant effects or beneficial effects of artificial sweeteners on body weight and glycemic control" [1]
"Thus, evidence from controlled studies suggests that artificial sweeteners don’t cause weight gain and may even be mildly effective for weight loss." [2]
The healthline story is summarizing a large number of studies, all of which have ambiguous results, or show negative side effects.
So, like tobacco (which doctors used to recommend to help with lung health to kill colds, etc), there are a lot of ambiguous "no / little effect" studies in favor of artificial sweeteners, and a lot of studies showing clear negative effects. However, there aren't any showing significant benefits.
It's easy to produce a no-effect study via lazy experimental setup, and slight positive effects via P-hacking for strange things. For example, this quote from [2] looks like P-hacking:
> However, a recent review of nine observational studies noted that artificial sweeteners were associated with a slightly higher BMI — but not with increased body weight or fat mass (17Trusted Source).
Anyway, here are some other quotes from [2] against artificial sweeteners.
I pasted in their conclusion at the bottom of this comment, which can be summarized as "they won't help much, but they might hurt. If you have the following symptoms, discontinue use":
Though artificial sweeteners provide sweet taste, many researchers believe that the lack of calories prevents complete activation of the food reward pathway.
This may be the reason that artificial sweeteners are linked to increased appetite and cravings for sugary food in some studies (8Trusted Source).
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in five men showed that sugar consumption decreased signaling in the hypothalamus, the appetite regulator of your brain (9Trusted Source).
This response was not seen when participants consumed aspartame — suggesting that your brain may not register artificial sweeteners as having a filling effect (9Trusted Source).
...
Another argument against artificial sweeteners is that their extreme and unnatural sweetness encourages sugar cravings and sugar dependence.
...
Though observational studies cannot prove cause and effect, the results are sometimes quite staggering.
For example, one study found that a high intake of diet soft drinks was linked to a 121% greater risk of type 2 diabetes (24Trusted Source).
Another study noted that these beverages were associated with a 34% greater risk of metabolic syndrome (25Trusted Source).
This is supported by one study on the effects of artificial sweeteners on both mice and humans. It associated the sweeteners with glucose intolerance and a disruption in gut bacteria (26Trusted Source).
...
In fact, replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners may be helpful in reducing body weight — though only slightly at best.
...
However, if you experience cravings, poor blood sugar control, or other health problems, avoiding artificial sweeteners may be one of many things to consider.
> They also cause all sorts of other health issues (cancer, digestive problems, neurological problems), but those are mostly product specific. The above applies to all non-nutritional sweeteners that have been studied.
I would love to see some support of this. Artificial sweeteners are some of the most studied food additives. If there were a definitive association at practical consumption levels, that would be huge news.
What about for dental health? I haven't had sugary drinks regularly for a long time, but when I do, my teeth almost instantly get covered in plaque. It feels so icky. The artificial sweetners must at least be helpful for that
In all honesty, after and during Covid19, I find it hard to trust WHO or anything coming from hospitals’ doctors, integrity was lost, or maybe clear it was gone long ago.
When COVID hit, the WHO had a pandemic plan in place (written in 2016). Organizations often do this so that when an emergency happens, they can use the decisions made with cooler heads rather than trying to react to a rapidly changing landscape... at least until new, solid evidence emerges.
The WHO did the opposite of its pandemic plan. They failed to follow best practices and did so without any evidence for it.
The best evidence that the current WHO is not to be trusted... is the old WHO.
As someone who knows nothing about either side (and I assume many other readers are in the same boat), can you explain why it's reductionist? Genuinely curious about both sides.
Well - simple thought: You are reading a random comment that has made a claim:
Claim: A plan was in place in 2016 that would have been effective for covid, but was not followed.
But right now they have absolutely zero evidence to back that claim up -
where is the plan?
Who decided it would work in 2019?
Did the plan need to be changed for reasons not foreseen (ex: expected or real supply shortages, unclear statistics/data, dissenting opinion from other groups, etc)
Did the WHO even have the ability to implement this plan? (ex: political meddling is a real thing)
---
Basically - I'll start with question #1: Show me the plan, because googling for a 2016 World health organization pandemic plan comes up essentially blank outside of some general influenza prep that was absolutely not usable for a pandemic of the scale of covid.
If this is so obvious, and this plan was so readily available... I would think a 10 minute google search would turn something up - but I have not found it (not claiming it does not exist - just that the rest of the conversation is fucking pointless without it).
True, but it was clear to me that most if not all hospitals’ doctors will follow and do whatever they are told, from the hospital committee, pharma, or whatever, maybe because they are afraid of getting their license suspended. Unlike in engineering for example -which is why I love-, you don’t see similar restrictions or monopoly on approaches, say something major happened around the world, like building collapsing or airplane crashes or internet cuts or whatever, you will see different takes on the incident from all aspects, engineers agree with something others disagree, and then a final conclusion can be made, eithet after or during the incident.
The even bigger reality is that people chase money and follow orders, even going against their better judgement or the interests of those they are charged to care for.
Anybody who believes there is an almighty assembly of "experts" out there with super-human integrity, incorruptibility, and infallibility, is sadly deluded.
...like most things in life, just trust your own instincts, and eat a mixed diet (including carbs, meat, gluten, dairy), with the occasional splurges. And like with most things, the poison is in the dosage.
These Do's / Don'ts change like every 10 years.
But most people seem to love self-searched guidance in their life, especially from so-called authorities, or other "SMEs".
PS: Come on introverted HN lurkers, i want more downvotes! You can do it - give them to me! 46 Karma to go!
That’s what I personally did, I kept an open mind but at the same time kept actively questioning anything and everything, after all, that’s the scientific approach.
Also: downvotes here are kinda cool, I couldn’t care less about it though, I just state my opinion and move on.
After being diagnosed with diabetes T2 I have worn a CGM and decided which foodstuff I needed to drop. I dropped basically all starches, no potatoes, no rice, very careful with bread. Only desserts I eat are made with almond flour, no wheat flours. And, of course, NSS. I have wrestled my blood sugar level below diabetic levels without any drugs, this ought to be enough. This already has leeched a lot of pleasurable activities from my life -- before this, I used to love to travel to eat. Lyon , Florence, places. I simply refuse to do more. There's a point where you don't live longer, you just exist longer. What for?
In much broader strokes, I was already not happy about how obsessed we became with prolonging life far beyond anything desirable. But even places where medically assisted death is accepted, you can't just go and say I am too old and infirm, help me end in dignity, no you need to suffer until your body and mind is gone. So says Lord Of The Rings
> ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and rail from my high seat unmanned and witless. Nay, lady, I am the last of the Númenoreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift
Companies need to stop using artificial sweeteners because they're just too sweet! If you ever do a low carb diet, it feels like your pallet is forever changed afterwards. Unmodified and unprocessed food taste naturally sweet on its own. Food with artificial sweeteners added tastes unbearably sweet.
Also, salt. I cooked lunch + dinner for myself for like a month, and now all processed food is just too damned salty.
There was an international agreement to cut salt in processed foods by a few percent a year for a few decades, and all stakeholders emphatically agreed to do it, since there's no real downside.
Of course, nothing happened after that.
The problem is that increasing salt a few percent gives processed food manufacturers a marginal advantage over their competitors since by desensitizes them to salt, and also tastes slightly better in side-by-side comparisons. This leads to a prisoner's dilemma type situation everyone is incentivized to work against their own long term best interests.
Regulation could trivially fix the problem by stopping the arms race, and doing it slowly wouldn't lead to people noticing the reduction.
I actually thought sweet stuff was sweet long before doing low-carb. I think a big difference is that here (Germany) we don’t put a ton of sugar and/or sweetener in pretty much everything. From what I’ve heard, that’s a thing in the US, and I know that it’s a thing in South Africa.
I can attest to that, coming from Denmark but living in Germany now. My wife is Thai and the food in southern Thailand can be sickly sweet, but if you travel to northern Thailand they usually leave out the sugar in foods.
Sugar and sweetners are insidious. Once you get used to sweet salads, you won't like normal salads anymore and then one start putting sweetners in every meal. It's surprising how unhealthy a salad can be.
Ewww. I’m normally a regionalist, my state (SH) over the others. But sweet salad is a traditional thing here. I always make myself forget about that fact. It’s disgusting.
I’m not giving up my Coke Zero. It’s an indulgence that I can live with long term. Unlike alcohol, donuts, pizza, and all the other shit that I enjoy but have to severely restrict.
Nobody's going to make you give up your Coke Zero. The sweetener epidemic has, however, deprived me of things I enjoy. Coke, fortunately, remains available in "Classic" form, but here in the UK many drinks are no longer available without sweeteners: Vimto, Irn Bru, Tango, Lilt, Ribena, Robinson's Barley Water, Schweppes Tonic Water - all are now full of aspartame and saccharin in their non-"diet" variants.
As a person with a healthy weight and the self-discipline to maintain it long term, with no diabetes or risk of it, who is not and never has been addicted to sugary drinks but who enjoys them (greatly) as an infrequent, calorie-counted treat, the loss of these childhood tastes is saddening, especially since there is very little evidence of any actual public health benefit.
If I were magically transported back to the 1980s the first thing I'd do is buy a bottle of Corona Cherryade.
To me what is saddening is that those were your childhood tastes. That stuff should never have been allowed to be sold to kids. Coloured sugar water should not be what someone remembers as a childhood treat.
Then again, I understand. I'm a long-term exile to the UK from a Mediterranean country. Fruit and veg in the UK are absolutely tasteless and therefore pointless as anything but a sort of medicine. You guys are really unlucky.
What a bizarre little drive-by. You make several assumptions about my life, tastes and eating habits that couldn't be further from the truth, but I don't have to defend myself. I'm sorry to hear you've moved to the UK but aren't earning enough to afford decent fruit and veg.
Wait, what assumption did I make? You said that Ribena, Irn Bru and friends are "childhood tastes". I made no other assumption. The rest of my comment is my experience of living in the UK.
And there's nobody more sorry of this than me but the food in the UK is shite. There's this story I like to tell where I was buying bread from the Waitrose and it tasted like carton, like it had a distinct taste of wet box. So I figured they just don't know how to make bread because they're British and bread is not their thing. So I bought some flour and made my own bread... and it tasted exactly the same. Because it was the flour that tasted like carton. That was wholemeal flour, Waitrose own brand, and Waitrose is supposed to be "posh" or "poncy" or whatever. "Supposed" as in the British call it that because it has decent produce, imagine that.
And if it was just the bread! Everything I've ever eaten Made in Britain tastes bland, odorless, tasteless, like the perfect murder poison.
Then I take the ferry and cross to France and finally bread tastes of bread, again, cheese tastes of cheese, coffee tastes of coffee and not of boiled rotten socks. The fruit and veg is still not stellar, mind, but at least I can finally enjoy food. And if I take the train and go back home, every stop on the way I can taste the coffee getting better the farther away I move from those wretched, miserable rain-drenched isles.
For one thing you assumed my childhood was spent in the UK. More importantly, though, you assumed that when I called those drinks "childhood tastes" it meant they were the tastes of my childhood. Far from it. Food is the most important thing in my life after family, and that goes back generations.
Your experiences of food in the UK don't match mine, and I've travelled plenty. In most places in the world you'll find some specialities done well, but I've yet to find anywhere with a greater range and depth of culinary options than London (although any truly global city will compete).
I rarely eat supermarket bread as we make our own daily. We mostly use Marriage's flour, which is available in many places, including Waitrose. That said, the bog standard Chorleywood stuff is comparable to equivalent products in Europe and decent farmhouse loaves, San Francisco style sourdough, baguettes, ciabatta, pain de campagne, etc. are all widely available in supermarkets. I can obtain more specialised baked goods from any of at least 4 good bakeries a short walk from my house.
As for cheese, France, Italy and Switzerland do have some wonderful ones, and I can obtain many of them any time I want from the cheesemonger down the road. As often as not, though, I'll buy something UK made. Baron Bigod is better than any Brie de Meaux I've tried and while Roquefort is briefly entertaining in a salty sort of way it can't compete with Colston Bassett Stilton. I don't recall seeing much of any of them in Mediterranean countries.
I can't speak for coffee as I don't drink the stuff. I'm pretty sure I could obtain just about any kind of coffee in the world with ease here, though, if I wanted to.
The tyranny of "healthy" food is the exclusion of experiences for no good reason. There's nothing wrong with sugar, fat or salt, you just need to avoid eating too much of them (or too little in the case of fat and salt). By far the most effective tool for that is good old-fashioned calorie counting, and thank god that alongside the various ill-judged public health measures in the UK there's also now the requirement for most food sellers to provide calorie info.
FWIW my dinner last night was homemade olive and garlic sourdough, which I had with some Ubriaco Rosso and some Godminster Cheddar. Delicious and life-affirming. 820kcal.
I don't know where your obsession with turnips has come from. I think I've only ever had them as part of Cornish pasties, which rule. I'm more of a swede man myself - give me haggis, neeps and tatties any time.
Upon reading the headline, I assumed this was related to the recent research suggesting that sucralose damages DNA. As someone who was drinking a sugar free energy drink every day, that was enough to get me to quit. The pure somatic horror of “DNA damage” far outweighs whatever enjoyment and lift I get from a can of [brand name].
WHO also advises against steaks cooked rare. The kind of people who make pronouncements in
big health orgs are the most cautious, neurotic people on the planet. You can safely ignore them.
If your goal is to lose weight, it seems like diet coke is the better choice short-term (because it has much less calories) and normal coke the better choice long-term (because according to studies, NSS don't help long term and to reduce their other long-term effects).
So I guess if you drink a coke once in a while, diet coke is better and if you drink coke very often, you should stop drinking coke.
Normal Coke is probably worse but they're both horrible.
I only drink normal Coke but sparingly. Usually I'm having water or plain black coffee. I think the takeaway is that diet Coke doesn't allow you to train yourself to enjoy normal sweet foods again. I just had an apple and strawberries and it is basically candy to me.
Edit: I have a question. Rank these food items by how healthful they are:
> Rank these food items by how healthful they are:
Are you considering mental well-being as well, or just pure physical health? Because in case of the former, option b) will end up with the lowest score.
So people shouldn't use it not because its poisonous (like lead); but because people think it's part of an effect weight management strategy - which for most people it is not?
Which blows my mind, because when all else in the diet holds equal, swapping two sugar'd sodas with two artificially sweetened sodas will save you (using my old vice Dr Pepper as an example) 54g sugar and 200 calories per day. It's just a little annoying that WHO (or this article, not sure who's most at fault) decided not to get into the nuance that people tend to make up those missing 200 calories in other ways.
Agree. The lede "Don't consume artificial sweeteners" reads like "they're poison". They're not. The better title should have been "Artificial Sweetener Use Is Not A Long Term Weight Management Strategy".
Not that anybody actually reads or pays attention to these things when they're wolfing down a bag of fritos; but still to the person at What-a-burger getting an 1100 calorie meal - they're probably better off opting for 400 fewer calories with a diet Coke than a fully loaded one.
We now know that the intestines have 'taste buds' that can detect sweetness.
There's a theory, and I don't know how tested it is at present, that the body uses these detectors to control the digestion process. Within this theory, the presence of the artificial sweeteners may encourage the body to work harder to scavenge calories from your digestive tract.
The upshot of this model is that if you eat a burger with a glass of water, you absorb X calories. If you eat the burger with a diet Sprite, you might be absorbing X + Y calories instead.
Remember, calorie counts for food are based on measures of caloric value of a unit of food minus the caloric value of what the average person excretes. If we were furnaces instead of meat we would get more calories from our food. And if you have odd digestive microbes you may be absorbing more or less calories from your food.
The caveats section covers a lot of variations, between food samples and individual digestive tracts.
I've you've ever been diagnosed with anything that isn't mainstream, you're familiar with how much the medical community likes to stuff pegs of any shape into their favorite receptacles. A patient with ideopathic symptoms could be lying to you and sneaking food in the parking lot (I've known a couple of those), or they could be an anomaly. Singular or a few percent of the population. The world of genetics is vast and a handful of rare conditions can net you several examples within your Dunbar number.
We have a lot of people these days who don't seem to correspond directly to calories in/calories out. And unless they're absorbing energy from the universe, then something about our assumptions is broken.
At work I often find myself having to remind people that if your assumptions tell you that an event must be impossible, then it's not your eyes that are wrong but your assumptions. Half of debugging is being able to efficiently name your assumptions and sort them by probability x difficulty of verification.
If people aren't losing weight on diet soda, we need to be dismissing rules of thumb and directly testing patients instead of shrugging and saying, "exercise more, scrub." Which is a polite characterization of how medical people treat my obese friends.
"All else being equal" doesn't seem to really happen in practise. Some mechanism means this doesn't work. Maybe Swapping 2 sodas (diet or not) for e.g. 2 glasses of water means you will have less sugar dependence over time and will get healthier all around.
It does happen in practice, but unfortunately because it doesn't happen in practice on average, the WHO has opted away from educating people on the nuances and instead continue this maddening war about which is worse.
The other issue is that there's so much variance. Are you making an effort at improving the quality of your food and made up that 200 calories with nutrient rich items? Too bad, you still aren't losing weight, so WHO declares that diet soda is ineffective for weight loss, articles summarize and declare that artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and you still get people thinking that diet soda is worse for you than regular soda.
"Doesn't happen in practise" probably didn't fully describe what I meant - i.e. on average across populations if you tell people to "just" change their drinks for diet drinks, it seems other parts of the diet compensate for the lost calories.
> All my food is measured out and counted beforehand.
That's great, but that is not representative of most people.
After a long period of stalled weight loss, I switched to a low carb diet (to reduce my feelings of hunger and aid in eating less), and with that came a plethora of keto-friendly protein bars. For a while I thought that 4/5 BMs being straight liquid was just my body acclimating to the diet, but after reading about how erythritol can cause diarrhea, I decided to hit the breaks on those bars and everything has gone back to normal overnight.
I may have one occasionally but definitely not going back to eating them every other day.
To be frank I do not know what to do. I have been trying to reduce my insulin resistance but most of the low carb protein powder seem to use some sort of artificial sweetener.
If I'm reading the article by the WHO correctly; its not saying stop using Artificial Sweeteners because they are poisonous - they're saying that Artificial-Sweeteners aren't part of a long term weight management strategy.
If your protein powders have them - no factor. I feel like the headline is 10x more inflammatory than it needs to be.
One of the best things you could do is get unflavored whey isolate and just mix it with something you trust, like a bit of juice.
Unflavored isolate is pretty expensive for me, and I often find good proteins on sale (I like ISO100 from Dymatize and buy it whenever it's cheap) but for me, it is sickeningly sweet (and artificial as well). So I've been using 50% flavored protein with 50% unflavored isolate to really reduce the overall sweetness. Add in a spoon of fat-free yogurt, maybe a splash of skim milk, water, it's a good time.
If you can, start to lay off all sweets. Your taste will change, but you need to be patient. The end result is less desire for sweets. Totally worth it.
Pea protein with no flavor takes some getting used to but is quite healthy and filling. You can mix with some sugar free almond milk to help the taste.
Overall my suggestion is to start viewing food as fuel. Of course you should enjoy some meals but don’t allow yourself to be picky or give into cravings.
Again, once your mind and body start to correlate eating good foods with feeling good you’ve got it made. You won’t even want to drink alcohol, eat sugar or seed oils. You’ll shutter at the thought because you know they will make you feel like crap.
Ever since I found out WHO is fine with doing anti-science things like having a 'panel of experts' make health proclamations without evidence; I'm not sure who uses the WHO. (A panel of 'experts' said if a 1 month old watched tv for 1 second, they would have detrimental effects. No science to cite, 0, but like 9 names of random old people were cited.)
If the WHO says something, you need to go through all the work of checking their sources, and in this case, there was no source:
>The recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) is based on a review of available evidence which suggests that artificial sweeteners do not help control body mass or reduce the risk of weight-related illnesses.
I'm a bit offended that I pay taxes to such a prominent anti-science organization. I don't mind the idea of a world health organization, but to be so brazenly anti-science and pro-authority is the last thing I want.
Yeah, I realized WHO was completely anti-science when they started publishing World Healthcare Rankings where 60% of the score was based purely on how socialist a country's healthcare system was and only 40% was based on the actual quality or results of the healthcare.
If no one can afford it, does it matter if it can cure everything?
On an individual scale it matters.
On a massive scale like a country, more affordable but less good is overall better for the whole country,but not for the individual.
As an example, in the US you pay thousands for an ambulance call, get to hospital, pay hundreds of thousands, insurance (for which you pay thousands more per year) covers most of it, except they're trying to cheat you out of as much as possible so they pay less, and in the end, all amerikans are one incident away from bankruptcy.
In most if not all of Europe, you pay health taxes, but not in the upper thousands, get good doctors, and don't end up bankrupt for breaking your arm or hip. And the ambulance is free (as in your taxes pay for it).
As an American living with and around other Americans, none of whom make more than 40K a year (myself included) but also make too much to qualify for low income coverage through combinations of community, city, county, state, and federal coverage (all of which exist and can overlap or stack depending on the specifics)... none of us have paid out of pocket for healthcare except when services are performed by explicitly private entities for services not considered necessary to preserve life, limb, eyesight, mental health, or communicable disease. Dental health appears to be the only exception.
Every other service is "nice to have" rather than "need to have" and I would certainly argue that many of those "nice to have" services ultimately will prevent the need for "need to have" services, so there is definitely room for improvement in my opinion. However, this trope of "Americans have to sell their home to afford an ambulance rode" and other snark needs to be tempered with the reality that those situations are almost entirely because of people intentionally opting out of (or being ignorant of) the existing systems to prevent such financial burden.
I'm sure many will have anecdotes to the contrary. I'm also sure many of those anecdotes will stem from someone either being unaware of available resources or choosing not to use them for one reason or another.
I also know plenty people who believe they will have to pay for things and therefore they don't get help. They don't pay for services bevause they don't get them, and they don't get services because they think they will have to pay for them out of pocket. That mentality comes (in part) from people who keep spouting the same myth that you posted. Please don't spread that rumor, it kills people.
FYI most Americans do not pay (full price) for health insurance. Most people are on Government healthcare.
For instance, our clinic has patients in poverty that pay 0$ per visit and 5$ per month for health insurance for... 11 people in their family. They get far better service than a private person who is cost conscious and paying $125 for a visit. Typically the former will use all 16 visits, the later tries to get out in about 4 visits.
The article seems to be implying that you shouldn't use artificial sweetners as an alternative to sugar but instead should just have a healthy diet. There don't appear to be any sources for anything but I wonder if people who consume more artificial sweetners are also the ones who consume more sugar because they're used to a sweeter diet.
There's a huge difference between:
- Don't use this, it's harmful to you, and
- Don't use this, it won't make things actively better.
Study after study has shown that it is extremely, almost absurdly difficult to lose weight and keep it that way in the long term.
If "not actively causing long term weight loss" is the only criteria for advising against something, then we should be advising against a heck of a lot more things that are perfectly fine.
It's phrasing like this that causes people to go on crusades against random foods, rather than actually using moderation in all things.
The article states reasons for its recommendations in addition to not being effective for long-term weight loss:
"WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults."
Splendid news. I can ditch the artificial sweeteners and return to putting three sugar lumps in my tea, since, somewhat counter-intuitively, using sweeteners instead of sugar doesn't help with weight control.
I was (and technically still am) pretty addicted to sugary drinks and energy drinks. Switching to diet soda and sugar free energy drinks helped me lose a lot of weight and got me an easier way to start regulating my weight and nutritional input. I would not have considered starting without the availability of these substitutes and I am glad I did. To condemn them without the context of the individual that may be like in my case substituting liters of sugar water and energy drinks a day seems rather short sighted
In case anyone's looking for the direct paper, it's available at https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240046429. Page 29 of the PDF is where the cardiovascular issues start (which is what I think is the most interesting.)
the article linked on the WHO's site is titled "WHO advises not to use non-sugar sweeteners for weight control in newly released guideline", I mean why drop the "for weight control" part
WHO provides no value whatsoever at this point. It's clearly halfway between a joke and a self serving bureaucracy with a parallel structure of anti west social purpose thrown in for good measure.
Low quality article. The only takeaway is that NSS does not result in long term weight loss by itself. That's it. NSS does not spike insulin response in humans. Stop reading studies involving rats when the same studies involving humans exist.
There is a correlation between NSS consumption and negative health outcomes, this is true. However, read how this article states this:
>WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults.
A layman will obviously read this as a statement that NSS is a direct cause of harm, not as the correlation that it actually is.
The correlation is simply explained: NSS is heavily consumed by people who have diabetes and/or who are obese. These people are naturally going to have far more health issues than non-diabetics, and non-obese people. They even acknowledge this in the article:
>the connection between consuming NSS and disease outcomes might be subjectively determined due to “baseline characteristics” of those taking part in the study
If you have a choice of drinking regular soda and diet, the diet is without a doubt leagues better for you. I think the most convincing evidence that NSS is safe is this: It's obvious that diabetics and obese people consume NSS significantly more than the general population. Diabetics and obese people are naturally prone to high levels of health issues. Yet why is it that they never just filter these people out to get a good baseline? What are the chances that these university educated people can't filter out obese/diabetics, or that they did not anticipate needing to do this and thus did not collect sufficient data? That they didn't read decades of prior studies who failed to do this, including the studies that specifically mentioned the dirty baseline issue? Is our higher education system this bad? Are researchers just this stupid? Not likely.
The more likely explanations are these:
1 The study was funded by corn growers that are threatened by NSS (a huge number of the studies I read through fall into this category).
2 The researchers have a bias for "natural" products.
3 The researchers dislike the taste of NSS and are afraid that NSS proliferation will reduce the supply of the flavors that they enjoy.
They've tried to prove NSS is harmful for way too long. Sure, that's not proof that NSS is completely safe, but if it is harmful, it must be so minimally harmful that 4+ decades of intense research can't definitively prove it.
I don't know what kind of an egregious organization the WHO is. First they let millions of people consume sugar alternatives for years, if not decades. Then they release a report saying those alternatives may lead to premature deaths. At this point, I feel like saying, F** it. I'm just gonna consume whatever the f** I feel like without ever reading about or listening to anything in the news.
Your choice of language is interesting. Regarding the WHO, if they banned artificial sweeteners from the start would you have suppored this unilateral process? "They let" indicates that you beleive the WHO does or should include a degree of power over every-day life.
So sure, consume "whatever the f*: you feel like knowing that either way you will be receiving "sciene based" communications from interested parties supporting that behavior.
Except it’s not. Because that’s exactly what happened with sugar. Why are studies funded by Big Food 10x more likely to say sugar is ok? Coincidence, right? Science isn’t as objective as you think.
To use an analogy their argument is: Vaping is bad for you, don't do it. While ignoring that a ton of people quit smoking using vapes and that they're letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
Same thing with NSS. While NSS are a useful tool for sugar reduction, studies have shown that over the medium-long term, you'll want to reduce artificially sweat foods and even sweat food substitutes, to create a "new normal" or new baseline where an e.g. strawberry is sweat again. Which has been shown to be more sustainable.
The WHO aren't wrong, but everyone jumps on this with their own agenda. They are claiming that switching to NSS isn't a sustainable way to reduce BMI (and associated negative health outcomes) over the long term, hard to find data that disagrees with that. That's all they're claiming.