1, it's aspartame
2, Mice aren't humans, and routinely, things that happen in mice do not happen in humans. It is not at all indicative of anything and can really only be used as a hint better than nothing for looking into similar effects in humans.
You don't need to change your diet, and you certainly don't need to replace it with sugar.
*But drinking a glass of water from time to time won't kill you either.
Comment paid for Big Aspartame.
Big aspertame made that account 6 months ago, posted 1300 unrelated comments, just for this one moment...
Not to mention that the gene pool of these lab mice is super small. Source: my brother is a PhD biochemist and lectured me often on this shit when I said, "hey, look at this study!"
Guarantee the study also states that you have to consume an ungodly amount of it too...
News reports grab on to stuff like this all the time. Like what they did with safrole.
The article actually states how much. 15% of the daily recommended amount.
There's a daily recommended amount for mice? Or was that 15% of the recommended amount for humans, which would be massive for mice?
I am a relatively recent transplant from the red place, I can tell I ain't in Kansas anymore, actual good information being up voted so cool.
Aspartame is, because of all the claims against it, the single most studied food substance known, and it seems to somehow keep coming okay. There are a lot of studies with really bad methods that were a smear job attempt but science doing what it does they were labeled for what they are and disregarded. Is it possible to be allergic and a reaction to be anxiety sure, but that is not on the food.
Oh, good! I thought it was the rapidly declining state of the world.
Sugar shills and don't touch my diet coke ppl in this thread doing Spidermanpointing.jpg
Stevia crew represent.
Mice lie, monkeys exaggurate.
This is a study on a small number of mice using a measure of anxiety which does not directly map to humans. Using mice for a study like this is fine for a pilot study but this has not clinical significance and can be safely ignored by the scientific press as well as the public. When we see a long term study which is double blinded in humans with reasonable doses, good controls, and hopefully some sort of mechanism of action then we can pay attention. Until then, aspartame has been linked to everything under the sun and yet nothing has been shown to be meaningful yet. It is one of the most well studied substances in the human diet and it seems to be at the very least mostly fine. Worry about lead in your water before you worry about this.
I think I'll pass on the opinion of someone who can't spell "exaggerate."
Cool, fair enough, I do have a little trouble with spelling and that is fine. Of course it could be software, learning difficulties, or just a bad day, but feel free to discard all the words I spelled correctly. Also, if you are in the US including the full stop in your quotation is typical but in the rest of the world you would keep the punctuation outside the quotes unless it is what you are quoting, otherwise the sentence doesn't have its own full stop.
When we see a long term study which is double blinded in humans
For several generations like the this one this would be 60 years minimum. Basically can't be done.
I see what you are saying but I disagree. The changes that we would consider important for aspartame should happen over a reasonable period of time. If it takes 100 years to have an impact then we probably don't care because most people won't live that long. What we care about is whether it has an impact over meaningful lengths of time in a human life, say over a decade or two.
If I have tobacco every day for a year will I have cancer? Unlikely. But if I give a large number of people who are well randomised tobacco or tobacco substitute I will see changes in their outcomes in a short time, even as little as a year.
So for aspartame, we already know it is not a massive signal. If it were then people who find the taste acrid would be better off than those who do not. But is there a possible issue there? Sure, it is possible, but it will very likely be a mild issue over a long time at a high dose, not at small doses over a short time, so this study design is not fit for purpose and it should be ignored.
The control was plain water. That seems like the sort of methodological flaw that would preclude a study from publication in a journal like PNAS.
It's so bizarre that you wouldn't have other sweeteners in other experimental groups and, especially, an experimental group that was actual sugar.
Wow, lots of astroturfed opinions defending aspartame.
I mean, if the choice is between sugar and aspartame... seems like an easy choice to make - the science should speak for itself
I've been dabbling with stevia but last time I put to packets in my tea and it was apparently too much and I did not feel well after
So my problems are because my mom is addicted to diet coke? It's all adding up!
Ah, another one of the "we found something in mice and that totally means it happens in humans" pseudoscience studies. Though we can probably blame the press for making such claims that the studies do not, unless this is one of those studies made by the known pseudoscience "scientists" like Seneff.
The title used by the reporter:
A Popular Sweetener Was Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice
The title of the original publication:
Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression
I did not read the latter so I cannot vouch for it, but the former is most definitely click bait, through and through, from title to content. I mean, here we are talking about it and sharing the link so... they accomplished their purpose, and why should they care what happens afterwards?
In my research to find a substitute for mom's sugar intake, Stevia came down to being the safest and most reliable, albeit not the best flavor substitute, necessarily.
And avoid Erythritol above all else.
Erythritol is tolerated by people at pretty varying rates. Some people have no issues, others have stomach problems. It doesn’t really bother me much.
I personally like allulose the best tho, but it’s not easy to get in the EU yet.
When a sample of mice were given free access to water dosed with aspartame equivalent to 15 percent of the FDA's recommended maximum daily amount for humans, they generally displayed more anxious behavior in specially designed mood tests.
What's truly surprising is the effects could be seen in the animals' offspring, for up to two generations.
We know that when it's consumed, aspartame splits into aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol, which can all affect the central nervous system. There have already been question marks over potentially adverse reactions to the sweetener in some people.
We know that when it’s consumed, aspartame splits into aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol, which can all affect the central nervous system.
This is precisely why this all sounds like BS and such studies have frequently been called out for their poor methodologies. Aspartic acid and phenylalanine are crucial amino acids that we consume in a bunch of foods at much higher concentrations. And the methanol produced in its breakdown is extremely minimal.
Hence why the vast amount of pseudoscience claims about aspartame have been debunked one after the other.
Hence why the vast amount of pseudoscience claims about aspartame have been debunked one after the other.
This is literally them doing science, lol. It's a study.
There are plenty of studies done by those wishing to push pseudoscience claims. We wouldn't have people like Andrew Wakefield otherwise.
And nutrition is one such field that has an outsized amount of pseudoscience pushers.
There are also a shit ton of studies done by food processing & manufacturing companies that are bogus. Knowing how your own body reacts to foods isn't pseudo science. You'd agree that nutrition is part of that, yes?
You sound like team cigarette! "It's made from all natural materials and plants and people have been smoking for centuries".
Oh no, I'm an actual scientist who knows molecular biology and the decades of research showcasing pseudoscience health claims to indeed be pseudoscience.
History check: it's the scientific community that showed cigarettes were bad for you years before the public ever listened to the facts.
Taurine is an amino acid we generate ourselves
Its also a blood thinner and critical component of all energy drinks. And is why energy drinks can kill you.
Just because its an amino acid doesn't mean its harmless.
Of course. But those sorts of impacts have not been shown for these amino acids in their otherwise much higher consumption concentrations. Unless you have phenylketonuria, but you'd know if you did already.
Donald Rumsfeld and the Strange History of Aspartame
Edit: I think he came back from the dead to downvote this.
Well, shit.
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