[teslabox]

Aspartame (1965) was approved by the US FDA in 1974/1981. This is commonly paired with acesulfame-K (1967) to provide sweetness in low-calorie drinks and sodas.

Saccharin (1879) was the first artificial sweetener, followed by cylcamate (1937). Low calorie sodas (Tab, etc) using these sweeteners were introduced in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1980’s diet sodas sweetened with the combination of aspartame and acesulfame-K reached the market.

This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation. I think it’s interesting that the introduction and increased consumption of diet drinks paced the increase in America’s waistlines. U.S. adult obesity rates went from 15% to 30.5% to 41.9% (1980/2000/2020). U.S. childhood obesity went from 5.5% to 13.9% to 19.7% in the same period.

Others have made a case that aspartame, acesulfame-K and sucralose (discovered in 1976, US approval 1998) play a role in the etiology (causation) of the obesity epidemic: people who want to lose a few pounds switched their beverage consumption to artificially sweetened low-calorie drinks. The insulin released by the sweet taste of aspartame lowers people’s blood sugar level, thereby amplifying their hunger. This causes the diet-soda drinker to consume more total calories than if they’d had a HFCS-sweetened beverage.

There are certainly more important contributing factors to “the obesity epidemic”, but I think this is an example of simplistic science: it's technically accurate that low calorie sweeteners have fewer calories than sugar, but they are not that helpful for weight loss. I'd wager it'd be better to consume an 8oz can of HFCS soda than 12oz of 'diet' soda.

Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners? How about herbal sweeteners? If you regularly consume diet sodas, do you combine your diet drink with calories, or is most of your aspartame consumption on an empty stomach?

[torben-friis]

Aspartame does not increase insulin, unless I'm not updated on the current scientific consensus.

Also your idea is very american centric, diet sodas are mainstream around the world and most of those countries did not follow the us into the obesity epidemic.

[kreetx]

Not at all an expert, but the brief research says that it does cause insulin creation, though due to it not being actual sugar and also due to that there is 200x less Aspartame in mass in your drinks (as it's much stronger per weight unit), then this spike is small and the organism can easily handle it.

[buhfur]

Now i'm no health specialist but from what I gathered online , it's still a debated subject.

[HumanOstrich]

You are definitely not updated on current scientific research. TFA discusses this.

[throw034248]

I'm not overweight, but I observed the following:

- All artificial sweeteners when consumed on empty-stomach, causes very strong feelings of hunger in a short time. My guess is that this can more than cancel out the reduced calorie content.

- Sucralose gives me headaches.

[cantrecallmypwd]

Might be psychosomatic or unrelated to the sweetener.

Drinks containing caffeine tend to lead to mild dehydration and caffeine withdrawal headaches.

[layer8]

They do neither for me.

[riku_iki]

I personally don't observe this

[downrightmike]

I think the link between diet sodas is more "I am not drinking sugar, so I can eat more" Not so much, "diet soda makes you fat directly"

[profsummergig]

I started drinking too much alcohol during the lockdown era.

I experimented with non-alcoholic mocktails. The one that works for me is diet cola + milk in equal proportions. Somehow provides the combination of richness/creaminess, sweetness, bitterness that replaces the feeling of drinking Irish cream.

Diet cola contains aspartame. Anyone know if there's a safer non-sugar version of or alternative to diet cola that I could use instead?

[kelseyfrog]

Pilk? In all earnestness, I thought that was a joke drink.

[ein0p]

Here's why everyone is fat in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

It's not "aspartame". It's eating out twice as much as we did in early 70s [1], rise of fast food consumption, and huge portion sizes.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumption-nutr...

[Guzba]

This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now?

Such a significant behavior change across a large population is not well explained by "we just did".

I'm not sure fast food consumption or huge portion sizes is a great explanation. If fast food is the problem, why does that matter if it just comes down to calories? As for larger portion sizes, would even larger portions make us continue eating? Would tiny portion sizes make us all deadly malnourished?

[bobthepanda]

I wonder if it's correlated with cars.

We do know that walking rates, across the country, have fallen significantly. In 1969, approximately 50% of children walked or bicycled to school, with approximately 87% of children living within one mile of school walking or bicycling. Today, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren walk or bicycle to school. And we see this generally across the board, where for the most part driving to work alone dominates commute habits. If the only walking you do is from the door to the car, you are not getting much routine physical activity.

This would also actually well correlate with the rate of fast food consumption, since it's primarily car-centric, and is more car-centric than other types of eating out.

https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/sites/default/files/pd...

---

I also don't think it's really any sort of secret that fast food companies like return customers and engineer the types of food that become addictive. There is a book called the Dorito Effect which theorizes that not only has artificial food become more flavorful over time, but that our industrial scale food production has made the base products less flavorful in favor of prettier or hardier varietals.

https://foodcrumbles.com/the-dorito-effect-book-review/

[xp84]

I’ve read that Dorito book and it was excellent.

[alabastervlog]

Food got way, way cheaper, including and especially convenient (ready to eat) food. Plus a race between companies selling that food to optimize flavor and marketing strategies for maximum sales, which, at some point, had to start meaning “more eating”, not “more eating this instead of something else” otherwise line could not go up.

[Guzba]

With this in mind, is the real cause "calories in, calories out" or "optimized flavor and marketing strategies"?

[alabastervlog]

The reason a person gains weight is CICO.

The reason a population gains weight is way more complicated and probably best short-handed as “social”. Moving to America typically makes people gain weight. Leaving it leads to weight loss. If you’re trying to fix an overweight population, you need to look at lots and lots of things and, demonstrably (as in: the science is pretty clear), telling people to simply eat less and even very expensive high-touch interventions aimed at diet correction don’t work. Wrong tree to bark up, your solution lies elsewhere—or, probably, several elsewheres.

(But drugs might work!)

[loeg]

Potato, potato. CICO is just physics, but "optimized flavor and marketing strategies" has had impact on the "CI" side of the equation.

[Guzba]

It seems very different and critically important. Would we have a current obesity epidemic without "optimized flavor and marketing strategies"? Because if we would not, then that is the true cause and of fundamental public health importance.

If we would have an obesity epidemic even without "optimized flavor and marketing strategies", then it is totally irrelevant.

[esskay]

> This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now?

Have you been in a US supermarket? It's absolutely nuts and I don't think many Americans realise it.

To be bombarded with monumentally huge portions of everything is just a recipe for...well....the situation the US is in. Theres not many other countries that have whole food groups focused on cramming in as much peanut butter, jelly, marshmallow, chocolate, or whatever other high fructose corn syrup crap is being used.

Massive slices of cake prepackaged and ready to eat? Yeah why not. 50 different coffee syrup flavors? Yeah go for it. How about a lovely massive bottle of sugary drink to wash it down? Just one? No no have a crate of 20 of the things.

Just for a comparison, look up candy on the Walmart site. Now do it on Tesco UK. Next, try the bakery, or hell even the meat isle, somehow the exact same product ends up being significantly worse for you in the US.

[Guzba]

The orthodox reason for why people are overweight is calories in, calories out. Does it matter if those calories are a prepackaged cake or candy? In the end it is just calories.

Would gratuitously large steaks in the meat section and huge rotisserie turkeys instead of chicken at Costco produce the same result?

It seems strange to pick on certain types of foods unless believe those foods are the cause of obesity instead of just eating too many calories of any kind.

If you think cookies and candy are bad but other things are not, why? Is it that they are easier to over-eat? If so, how does that compound over time, given humans are trying to maintain homeostasis which includes a healthy set weight via satiety. Exercise induces more calorie consumption later. Over calorie consumption also induces lower consumption later. This seem like relevant factors.

[ein0p]

It is, of course, not as easy as calories in / calories out, although the "Twinkies experiment" proved that you can in fact lose weight via caloric restriction alone. For any kind of "normal" diet insulin plays a massive role in obesity. And that bag of candy will absolutely send it to the stratosphere, especially if you consume sweets frequently. Buy a continuous glucose monitor (it's now available OTC via Stelo), and see for yourself. That's what I did.

[Guzba]

I am aware of this, I am more trying to get those that really believe it is as simple as calories in calories out to break free from that Plato-ey over-simplified explanation.

[colingauvin]

This is an oversimplification.

>Does it matter if those calories are a prepackaged cake or candy? In the end it is just calories.

In the end it's a complex, poorly understood network of hormones and brain chemistry. Human action is mostly downstream of that.

[Guzba]

I agree, however for some reason calories in calories out is generally unquestioned among people I know personally.

[sevensor]

I didn’t fully grasp how poorly our US bread approximates the real thing until I visited Europe. It’s weirdly spongy and candy sweet, and that’s the “healthy” bread in the bread aisle. Our food culture is just kind of gross most of the time, and the ersatz health food is some of the worst, as it’s been punched up with loads of organic cane juice or pear juice concentrate. Or celery juice if it’s a product that wants to claim not to have added nitrates. And, it should go without saying, truckloads of salt.

[nobodyandproud]

Food designed to circumvent the sensation of cloying or satiation.

Also, eating more in isolation and without talking.

[Guzba]

Food design does seem like a higher potential explanation than many others offered.

[denkmoon]

The proportion of households with a person with time and energy to prepare a healthy home cooked meal has diminished. We have sacrificed domestic life on the altar of profit.

[homebrewer]

It really doesn't have to take more than 10-15 minutes per day in total, you just have to be aware of what you're doing. I know several examples — including myself — who eat healthy food on a budget and spend very little time doing it. We had our problems with American-style food when it appeared and became popular (I had a BMI of 30.5 for several years and blamed everything but myself), but quickly self corrected before real damage was done.

[Guzba]

If healthy home cooked meals are better, why is that? This is a non-answer.

It must be something about the ingredients (invalidating calorie theory) or it must be lower calorie (invalidating ingredient theory).

[profsummergig]

Why does capitalism not make people fat in Japan, France, Italy and Spain?

[redwall_hp]

Japan's easy: only about 1-in-3 households in Tokyo (and presumably the other large cities, where the majority of people live, are similar) own a car. People walk and take trains to work or to go shopping or eat out. A half hour of walking can burn upwards of 100 calories.

The typical diet is also relatively lower in bread (processed carbohydrates...with unnecessary added sugar in the US) and higher in protein. That combination is typical of any structured diet designed around controlling weight gain, such as Weight Watchers.

Fast food is also different. International menus have different items and different sizes. I've seen people express shock about the existence of things like the Triple Baconator or US soda sizes. Drinking a 32 oz of sugar-filled soda is an easy 350 calories right there, and a disturbing number of Americans "don't like water."

Konbini and ramen/soba shops also exist, so there are even more convenient alternatives to western fast food, which are often healthier in the typical portions.

[ein0p]

They have much smaller portions across the board. Their "venti" Starbucks drink is what we call "small" in the US, and our "venti" is simply not available. Might even be smaller than small, it sure seemed like it.

[profsummergig]

> diet is also relatively lower in bread

I've wondered about about carb substitution. The rice, and the wheat noodles, why are they healthier? (I can understand rice somewhat: it's less processed, by certain definitions.)

[Jensson]

> and the wheat noodles

Buckwheat is not wheat, soba noodles are based on buckwheat.

Not sure how large fraction of all noodles they eat are that though. Feels like there is something related to additives and other things that makes people eat more.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Buckwheat is not wheat, soba noodles are based on buckwheat.

Whilst you're correct about buckwheat, just about all soba noodles that I've seen here in the UK are predominantly wheat based (I'm gluten sensitive, so have read a lot of product labels).

When looking for gluten free noodles in Asian supermarkets, I've only really found ones that are rice based with some rarer sweet potato vermicelli varieties.

Edit: after a brief search, I have found some Clearspring 100% buckwheat noodles which I shall have to find and buy. They also sell the more usual wheat and buckwheat version of Soba noodles.

[ein0p]

Probably slower absorption. Bread really peaks blood glucose, and therefore insulin.

[bsder]

> This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation.

Average heights continued increasing through the 1980s. This suggests that a not insignificant chunk of the population was still in caloric deprivation until the 1990s. You can't get obesity while lots of people are still continuously hungry. For this one, correlation probably is causation.

In addition, smoking bans took off in the 1990s. Nicotine is a noted appetite suppressant. Correlation might be causation. You may be trading the problems of smoking for the problems of obesity--probably a decent trade.

[catigula]

Doubtful.

Smokers only gain a handful of pounds when they stop on average.

[bsder]

You're gonna have to quote something stronger about that.

In college, I knew a lot of girls who took up smoking to help get rid of the freshman fifteen. It seemed to work for the most part.

[mrandish]

> Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners?

My N=1 is that I've always liked Diet Cola drinks - a lot. I easily drink more than a couple liters a day and have since at least 1990. I have my own soda fountain at home (along with a flake ice machine). I was significantly overweight for about two decades. I'd tried a lot of different weight loss programs over the years including medically supervised. I approached each diet very diligently and put in a lot of effort - yet none ever worked long-term for me. I'd lose 10 or 20 pounds over a few months but would put it back on. I was always back where I started (or worse) in less than six months.

About seven years ago I decided to try keto. It was definitely the hardest, weirdest and strictest of any diet I'd tried but I did the entire program very diligently - just like the others. Keto worked extremely well for me, where nothing else had. The first 5-6 weeks was hard - not because I was hungry but just due to the degree of change, new things to learn and the rigorous ingredient tracking. All the other diets were much easier but I was constantly hungry. On keto it was the opposite. After the first three days, I was never hungry on keto. The challenge in keto was changing habits, learning new patterns and missing the flavors of familiar carb-heavy foods. But that only lasted about six weeks. After that my palette had been retrained and I didn't miss carb-heavy "comfort foods". I also had gotten used to the new patterns and it didn't take much extra effort or thought. Over the next 8 months I lost close to a hundred pounds, putting me back at a weight I hadn't seen since high school. I went from size 42 pants to 32 and I had abs! I lost weight so fast in the first three months, I heard some people at work suspected I had cancer or something.

To answer your question, I never changed my very heavy Diet Coke consumption during any of this. If anything, I increased it. And I've now stayed at my ideal weight for the last seven years. I stayed strict keto for the first couple years but now I'm not as strict although definitely still low carb by choice - because I feel better mentally, emotionally and physically on low-carb and because I now prefer these new foods and flavors. Doing keto helped put me in control of my weight and calorie intake through managing my blood sugar - and for me that was the key difference and a major revelation. I'm still never hungry and I can easily manage my intake and weight. If I creep up five pounds, I make a minor adjustment and it's gone in a few days.

However, I don't think keto will necessarily do the same for everyone. I've learned different people have different metabolisms as well as different preferences and ability to adapt to different changes. Strict carb management worked long term for me and Aspartame wasn't a barrier. The other counter-intuitive thing about my weight loss experience was I found early on that exercising did make me hungrier - so I stopped all exercise. While I've never been one for exercise or working out, during the 8 months I lost all the weight I became even more sedentary. I'm not suggesting that to anyone else, of course. I'm just sharing it as an example of finding what works for your metabolism, lifestyle and preferences. Interestingly, after I lost all the weight I found I started liking exercise more than I ever had and continue to today, seven years later. The typical advice is "Cut calories and hit the gym." What worked for me was "Cut carbs and hit the couch." My first week on keto I dropped almost all carbs but actually increased my calories (mostly in meat and cheeses). Once I'd weaned myself off carbs and had control of my blood sugar, cutting calories wasn't just easier - it sort of took care of itself. The whole 8 months I just counted carbs and stayed under 20 a day, while eating as much as I wanted. Without carbs driving my blood sugar and hunger, "as much as I wanted" to feel full all the time turned out to be a lot less calories. The key with the keto strategy is it only works if you execute it rigorously. Cheat all you want on calories but if you "cheat" on the carbs and go over 20g/day, even a little, you'll not only fail - you'll put on even more weight than before. I think a lot of people see that as a major downside but, oddly, for me the "all or nothing" aspect of keto turned out to be an unexpectedly helpful "feature".

[spondylosaurus]

My partner's lost a fair amount of weight on GLP-1 drugs and continues to drink Diet Coke like a fiend, and same thing, it doesn't seem to hurt their progress.

Very curious about that soda fountain and flake ice machine though...

[tulio_ribeiro]

Sweeteners are processed food. Timeline shows more processed food hitting the market, period. Obesity rises. Coincidence? Doubt it.

It's not just the sweetener itself. It's the whole shift. More processed crap in everything, sweeteners included. Cheaper, easier, engineered to be addictive. That's the real change that lines up with the weight gain.

Focusing just on sweeteners is missing the point. They're just one piece of the bigger processed food takeover. That's the simpler, more likely explanation.

[brandonmenc]

Calorie intake is up. Don't overcomplicate it.

From 2016:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...

> Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970. That’s more than most adults need to maintain their current weight

[edanm]

> Calorie intake is up. Don't overcomplicate it.

You're doing the opposite - oversimplifying it. Why is calorie intake up is a legitimate, important question.

[brandonmenc]

Because calories are cheaper now, thanks in large part to low cost, energy dense vegetable oils.

When people can get more calories per dollar they will eat more calories.

[edanm]

Totally might be the case. I'm not sure, but I think I've seen good reasons to think this doesn't exactly line up though - increased wealth in different countries didn't match exactly, timeline wise.

But I'm far from an expert

[sandworm101]

"Processed food" is a term without meaning. Amost all food is processed. Yogert is processed. Bread is processed. Steak is processed. Even raw fruit is arguably processed as it is picked before being ripe to eat and then subject to an optimized ripening process (google the science behind banana shipping). All foods are either cooked or mechanically/chemically processed prior to consumption. We are aguably unable to survive on unprocessed food. Short of biting into a whole head of lettuce, or into the side of a live animal, one cannot avoid processed foods. Washing/cooking has saved us from all manner of paracites. The people who eat raw/unprocceed foods are the ones who wind up with worms in thier brains. What matters for health is the degree of processing that does not add nutrition or safety, with every pundit picking thier own arbitrary point somewhere between a healthy chopped salad and a microwaved hot pocket. Imho, just avoid anything with added sugar or salt.

[atombender]

"Ultraprocessed" is arguably the more important term. While also formally defined, a rule of thumb is that if the average person can't make it in their kitchen, it's ultraprocessed. These are chemicals chemicals that are used to emulsify or stabilize ingredients, preservatives, and chemicals used to improve mouthfeel and texture: like lecithin, polysorbate, sodium benzoate, maltodextrin, partially hydrogenated oils, sodium phosphates, etc. — there are tons of them. Some of them have been implicated in causing gut inflammation.

[loeg]

"Ultra-processed" is just a retcon'd term circularly defined as any calorie dense, low satiety food you already have reason to believe is unhealthy.

[atombender]

Not really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification.

[loeg]

Yes, really. Nova's definition is exactly what I'm describing earlier. Here is their own definition, from the wiki you linked:

> There is no simple definition of UPF, but they are generally understood to be an industrial creation derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds. The resulting products are designed to be highly profitable, convenient, and hyperpalatable, often through food additives such as preservatives, colourings, and flavourings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food