[kazinator]

This write up also only implicates saccharin in the harmful alterations of the gut flora, not other sweeteners. Yet the introductory text talks about artificial sweeteners are a group.

You cannot confirm the effects of "artificial sweeteners" as a category with an experiment that is based on saccharin. They are all different molecules. A bacterium that thrives on saccharin might not consume sucralose or aspartame.

Also glaringly absent is any mention of the sugar alcohols: sorbitol, xylitol, maltitol.

Who cares about saccharin. It is an outdated sweetener which is not widely used. Where can you find a diet soft drink or protein bar sweetened with saccharin?

[randallsquared]

First, I care, since saccharin is (was?) my preferred sweetener, for coffee, etc. Second, saccharin is very widely available at restaurants and so forth, coming in a very close second to aspartame, in my experience.

[kokey]

Interesting. I also prefer saccharin, but I have to specifically buy my own to keep at home and the office. Everywhere else seems to, nowadays, have sucralose (more so) and/or aspartame (less so). This is in the UK, Ireland and South Africa.

[randallsquared]

As I mentioned partially elsewhere, in the US, you'll typically find aspartame, then saccharin, then sucralose. Almost every restaurant has all three already on the table when you sit, in case you order coffee or tea. If one's missing, it's probably sucralose. If only one is available, it's probably aspartame.

You can buy all these and other varieties in most grocery stores, but due to the history of when soda use exploded here in the 1980s, and the debunking of the old saccharin studies not becoming widely known until well after that, virtually all soft drinks in the US use aspartame, and I'm not aware of any that are saccharin only.

[kazinator]

I know that it's available if you want it; but then, so are alcohol and cigarettes.

If a study could link popular, widely-deployed sweeteners found in processed foods and drinks, that would point to a big public health issue.

A problem with saccharin doesn't point to a wide-spread public health issue. Sacharrin has been vilified on and off over its entire lifetime. My parents' and grandparents' generation believed that it was a harmful poison, for instance; I remember hearing that as a kid. Only in the year 2000, in the US, were requirements for warning labels lifted, which had been in the effect since the 1970's, when saccharin was linked to cancer in rodents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin#Warning_label_additio...

In spite of the lift, it doesn't seem that saccharin has made a comeback. Part of the reason could be taste. Particular mixtures of sweeteners are used in diet foods sweeteners in order to better simulate the taste of sugar.

[randallsquared]

People who use saccharine probably are unaware that that's what "sweet n low" or even "the pink packet" is.

[kazinator]

Sweet'n'low packets are very common, and so are an easy way for anyone to get saccharin just by reaching into a jar.

Interestingly though, here in Canada, Sweet'n'Low is sodium cyclamate. Saccharin continues to be banned here as a food additive because of that (now long believed to be flawed) 1970's research which linked it to cancer.

I had no idea that Sweet'n'Low is saccharin south of the border!

[randallsquared]

Further, when Equal introduced saccharin and sucralose packets a few years back, it produced them in exactly the same color as Sweet n Low and Splenda, meaning that consumers can continue to just reach for the pink packet or yellow packet to get what they expect. There was some question about trademark infringement, I recall from somewhere. So, yeah, in the US, "pink" means saccharin.

[userbinator]

From the Wiki article linked above:

The current status of saccharin is that it is allowed in most countries, and countries like Canada have lifted their previous ban of it as a food additive

[lambda]

No, the study covered three sweeteners in mice. From the original study (paywalled, accessed via my university):

> To determine the effects of NAS on glucose homeostasis, we added commercial formulations of saccharin, sucralose or aspartame to the drinking water of lean 10-week-old C57Bl/6 mice

They found effects from all three sweeteners, though the strongest effects were from saccharin.

The followup study confirming the effects on humans, which was a much smaller study, only involved saccharin.

[tedunangst]

I, for one, care. About 100% of my artificial sweetener consumption is saccharin mixed in coffee or iced tea. I much prefer the taste over sucralose or others, but that preference is based on the assumption they are all otherwise biologically equivalent.

[pbhjpbhj]

>You cannot confirm the effects of "artificial sweeteners" as a category with an experiment that is based on saccharin. //

Hmm. Yes you can, you just can't generalise the result.

If you want to test the hypothesis that "artificial sweeteners cause ..." then you start by testing if something from that category causes whatever effect. That shows that "artificial sweeteners cause the effect" but as you note it doesn't show that "all artificial sweeteners cause the effect".

Of course you follow up by looking at other sweeteners as this feeds in to understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Logical analogy: Do birds sit on telephone wires? Yes, I saw one. Does that mean all birds sit on telephone wires, no. Indeed it's demonstrable that some birds never even see a telephone wire.

[seanflyon]

When you conclude the <category> has <trait> you are implicitly assuming that the elements of that category are somewhat representative.

If you only saw some pigeons sitting an the wire it would be better to conclude that pigeons sit on wires because the assumption that those pigeons are representative of pigeons is much more reasonable than assuming that those pigeons are representative of birds.

For a more contrived example I could do a study and conclude that liquids are poisonous. Technically true but extremely misleading.

[curun1r]

When it comes to health effects, it's not necessary to prove that all members of a category share those effects. Simply showing that at least one member of the group is dangerous can be enough to recommend that people alter their behavior.

For example, not all snakes have venom that's harmful to humans. But some do and that's enough to assume than an unknown snake is venomous until it's been shown to be otherwise. Similarly, your "liquids are poisonous" study is enough to conclude that we shouldn't be ingesting liquids that haven't been shown to be safe.

Similarly, if we can conclude that one or more artificial sweeteners are harmful to our health, we can and should be consuming unsweetened foods until such time as individual artificial sweeteners are shown to be safe.

[pdonis]

> it's not necessary to prove that all members of a category share those effects

You're assuming "artificial sweeteners" is a meaningful category, of the same kind as "snakes" or "liquids". Since the various substances in question are very different, chemically, I think that assumption requires more justification than just a bare assertion.

[jrapdx3]

With pharmaceuticals the FDA customarily insists that "class effects", meaning adverse effects and black-box warnings, apply to all drugs considered to belong to a category. It doesn't even matter if a brand new drug is far less likely to produce certain "class effects" than prior drugs in the same category, the exact same warnings must still be listed.

In other words, the implicit rule is that drugs or additives in a class are "guilty" of potentially causing an adverse effect unless thorough study provides evidence that a member of a class does not produce particular negative effects. It's a high bar for manufacturers to get over and it's seldom attempted.

The FDA can assume serious adverse effects of one artificial sweetener apply to others, if the others are officially in the same class of substances as the first.