Diet Rite is a popular diet soda brand that does not contain aspartame, produced by the company that makes Dr. Pepper and Snapple products. In July 2023, the World Health Organization reclassified aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” with “limited evidence”, but stressed that it is safe to consume up to 40 milligrams of aspartame. Diet Rite offers a range of flavors, including cola, cherry cola, and white grape.
Diet Rite is a pioneer in the diet soda market, using Splenda as a sweetener. They became the first major diet soda in the United States to use neither aspartame nor saccharin as a sweetener. In 2005, “Pure Zero” was added to the name, and Diet Rite uses a blend of sucralose and acesulfame potassium. Diet Rite’s rapid adoption of the aspartame sweetener aligns with the brand’s original positioning as a health-conscious diet soda.
Diet Rite Zero is a healthier alternative to regular Diet Coke and Pepsi, as it does not contain aspartame, sugar, or carbs. It is readily available in southern Illinois and is a great price. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener widely used in various food and beverage products since the 1980s, including diet drinks, and its use has raised concerns about the potential health risks associated with aspartame.
📹 Ask Dr. Nandi: Is diet soda bad for you? Know the health risks
Do you turn to diet sodas to quench your thirst? Despite negative headlines, diet pops are still popular, especially among those …
What chemical is in Diet Rite?
DRIERITE desiccants, made from gypsum, are an all-purpose drying agent designed to solve various drying problems. They are used to maintain a dry atmosphere in storage spaces, vaults, and commercial packages, as well as protect hygroscopic materials from mildew, corrosion, rust, or other deterioration caused by high humidity. DRIERITE comes in various granular forms, ranging from powder to 4 mesh, weighing approximately 65 pounds per cubic foot. The powder is ideal for removing moisture from organic liquids and as an additive in polymer formulations.
The most popular granule sizes are 200 mesh, 20-40 mesh, 10-20 mesh, 8 mesh, 6 mesh, and 4 mesh granules. DRIERITE has an efficiency of 0. 005 mg./liter in gases dried at 25°-30°C, and air is dried to a dew point of -100°F. Organic liquids are dried to the low ppm range, with little change in efficiency at temperatures up to 100°C.
Is sucralose like aspartame?
Sucralose is a non-nutritive sweetener, containing less than two percent of the calories in an equivalent amount of sugar. It is low in calories or has no calories at all. Aspartame, on the other hand, adds caloric value to foods, containing more than two percent of the calories in an equivalent amount of sugar. Both are synthetic non-sugar sweeteners, created chemically and not found in nature. Aspartame is formed by the reaction of amino acids L-aspartic acid and L-phenylalanine methyl ester, while sucralose is made by replacing three hydroxyl groups in sugar with three chlorine atoms.
What are the ingredients in Diet Rite Cola?
The product contains the following ingredients: carbonated water, caramel color, phosphoric acid, sucrose, citric acid, potassium benzoate (preservative), acetylphosphomethyl potassium, natural flavors, acacia gum, and potassium citrate.
Is Diet Rite soft drink healthy?
Despite being low in calories and sugar, diet soda lacks nutritional value and contains artificial sweeteners that have been linked to adverse health effects. The safety of diet soda is a topic of ongoing research, with findings indicating mixed results, particularly with regard to its consumption on a daily basis. The potential adverse effects of diet soda include headaches, gastric discomfort, and constipation. It is imperative to limit one’s consumption of diet soda in order to prevent the adverse effects associated with it.
Should I avoid aspartame?
JECFA has concluded that dietary exposure to aspartame does not pose a health concern, based on current dietary exposure estimates. The Director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety for WHO has commented on the assessments, stating that while safety is not a major concern at commonly used doses, potential effects need to be investigated through more studies. The American Cancer Society supports the call for more research on aspartame and other artificial sweeteners, as well as conducting its own studies to better understand their possible link with cancer and improve prevention efforts.
Does Diet Rite use aspartame?
Diet Rite, a leading diet soda, switched from aspartame in 2000 to Splenda sucralose and Sunett acesulfame potassium for sweetness due to public concern over first-generation sweeteners in the 1990s. The company aimed to position itself at the forefront of non-aspartame formulations. In 2006, it introduced a cherry cola variety, combining citrus and spice-infused cola recipes with a sweet-and-fruit fusion profile, capitalizing on cherry Coke’s popularity.
Which diet soda has no aspartame?
Aspartame, a common artificial sweetener in diet sodas, is a concern for some consumers due to potential health risks. Some popular brands that do not contain aspartame include Diet Coke with Splenda, Pepsi One, Diet Rite, and Zevia. These brands use sucralose as a sweetener, acesulfame potassium and sucralose, a combination of sucralose and acesulfame potassium, and stevia as a natural sweetener. Aspartame is a low-calorie alternative to sugar, but its potential health risks include:
- Increased risk of heart disease and stroke
- Increased risk of type 2 diabetes
- Increased risk of type 3 diabetes
- Increased risk of type 4 diabetes
- Increased risk of type 5 diabetes
- Increased risk of type 6 diabetes
- Increased risk of type 7 diabetes.
Is aspartame bad for you?
Aspartame, an amino acid found in food, can cross the blood-brain barrier and affect neurotransmitter levels in the brain, potentially leading to neurological symptoms like headaches, dizziness, mood changes, and cognitive impairment. Long-term exposure to aspartame may contribute to neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Despite being calorie-free, aspartame consumption may disrupt glucose metabolism, leading to increased appetite, weight gain, and a higher risk of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
Additionally, aspartame can alter gut microbiota composition, exacerbated metabolic dysfunction. While regulatory agencies have deemed aspartame safe for human consumption, concerns have been raised about its potential carcinogenic effects, particularly in animal studies. More research is needed to confirm these findings in humans.
What happened to Diet Rite?
Diet Rite, an American brand of no-calorie soft drinks, was initially distributed by RC Cola and introduced in 1955. It was initially marketed as a dietetic product but was later marketed as a healthful beverage in 1962. The original formula was sweetened with cyclamate and saccharin. After cyclamate was banned in 1969, NutraSweet brand aspartame was added, and saccharin was replaced with caffeine in 1987. In the 1990s, fruit-flavored varieties were introduced.
In 2000, the line was reformulated with sucralose and potassium from Splenda and Sunnet, becoming the first major diet soda in the United States to use neither. In 2005, “Pure Zero” was added, and a cherry cola flavor was introduced in 2006.
Is diet Rite bad for your stomach?
The consumption of excessive quantities of diet soda has been linked to the exacerbation of gut symptoms, particularly in individuals with a proclivity towards such issues. Other symptoms may manifest as sleep disturbances, headaches, and food cravings. It is of the utmost importance to exercise moderation in one’s nutritional intake. In lieu of diet soda, alternative beverages such as kombucha or fruit teas are recommended.
To gain further insight into the physiological effects of diverse dietary components and to receive ongoing guidance from qualified nutritionists, we invite you to participate in a complimentary quiz.
Does Coke Zero have aspartame?
Coke Zero Sugar is sweetened with a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium, which provides a zero-sugar and zero-calorie taste. Diet Coke is sweetened with aspartame and SPLENDA®, while Sprite Zero in the United States is sweetened with a blend of aspartame and Ace-K, resulting in a crisp, clean taste with reduced or no calories.
📹 The WHO Says Diet Soda Causes Cancer. Does It?
The World Health organization recently added aspartame, an artificial sweetener used in diet soda and tea, to its list of possibly …
yes lets focus on artificial sweeteners that MAY have some health impacts over decades of heavy over consumption instead of high fructose corn syrup in basically every other food you buy at the groceries store and the fact food additives need to be shown to be harmful instead of being shown to be not harmful like the EU does it. exactly how they’d like it to be
As a physician I wish more article rebuttals like this were available to the general public. Bad studies that generate poor data which is interpreted inappropriately. That is then presented to the unsuspecting public as if it’s a gold standard rule. Thank you for helping shed some light on this subject. Please keep them coming!!
Heads up- I was served an ad from “Safety of Aspartame” before this article, which a beverage industry-backed group. Another website I follow had a similar issue and they were able to set some filters for what kinds of groups can run ads on their content. Thanks for making such great, science backed articles!!
It’s scary that the consequence of the IARC publishing this change of classification, might well make some people who drank diet sodas, switch to those with sugar in them instead, probably making their health worse in the process. Science communication is so difficult to get right, especially when it comes to risk assessment.
And this is why you always check your data to eliminate any sort of outliers, data errors and biases. Anything can be toxic if over consumed, even water can, but typically you have to consume said items in excessive amounts which the study showed, meaning that 9/10 times the foods we consume currently are perfectly safe to consume.
Thank you for this. I enjoy way too much soda but switched to diet because I didn’t need the empty calories and I looked up the state of evidence on aspartame… When I heard this new change I was instantly suspicious it was just a category thing. Basically there isn’t enough good evidence to say it is carcinogenic, but there are too many poor studies linking it anyway to ignore. Okay… I do a half dozen other things much more dangerous so thanks for the update WHO hahaha
Trying to drink less diet soda is always a good thing, but in terms of health habits this one seems like strain a gnat, swallow a camel territory. Most people probably have other health habits that both would be easier to change or tweak and would do more for their health outcome odds and general wellbeing. I really like diet soda, but I don’t have a lot of of it since carbonated drinks give me heartburn. I drank a big bottle of diet pepsi almost daily for most of my 20’s though, and fully understand why it’s hard for some people to kick the habit
All of a sudden, all the media outlets are eager to tell me that Aspartame is not bad. I see Aspartame ads on youtube and doctors claiming aspartame is safe on TV. Sorry, but I would instead go with a nonprofit organization like this one (WTO) instead of billion-dollar companies that are running marketing campaigns.
Thank you for this. Diet Coke (or diet Dr. Pepper) is my caffeine source, and I honestly can’t stomach caffeine in any other form. I hate coffee and tea, hot chocolate tastes great but upsets my stomach, and full-sugar sodas make me feel ill after I drink them. I try to limit my intake so I can actually sleep, and other than that there’s not much I can change. I’d sooner give up bacon – which is also in one of those categories under the WHO guidelines…
Ok, back in 1991 I found myself struggling remember how to tie my shoes, and other cognitive suff. My boss asked me if I had been consuming a lot of diet products. I had, and it was ice ice cream with Aspertame in it. I ate and (still eat) a lot of ice cream, so figured it would be nice to cut my sugar consumption. Now I did find out that it only affects a small percentage of people, but occasionally I still try stuff with it as the sweetener (NEVER soda, it never tasted good) and I do get a little foggy if I have “too much”, whatever that might be.
What I remember about this was mostly that the rats where given absolutely ludicrous amounts. As in: In absolute numbers humans typically don’t consume this much. So I came to the conclusion: 1. I don’t even like the taste of that stuff so I avoid it anyways no matter if it poisonous or not. 2. It seems entirely impractical to consume this much. If you drink a dozen cans a day I am certain that you have more significant problems. I mean with sugar that would melt your entire digestive tract in the mid term.
It would be nice if you actually explained how it works: The body basically treats Aspartame as alcohol, by breaking it down in the liver. If you over consume aspartame you overwhelm the liver, and over time you get bad stuff accumulating in the liver that can give you cancer and other problems. Just like alcohol.
One thing I’m curious about is the “humans are not rodents” comment in this vid. There are other SciShow articles on the addictiveness of sugar, but weren’t those tests also done on mice/rodents? And mice that had been deprived sugar for a time before being set loose on sugar, which they then consumed in large amounts? I thought that for these reasons the “sugar is more addictive than cocaine” study was flawed. I might be wrong on some of these details. If anyone has into insight into that, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks! Love SciShow<3
I was under the impression that most artificial sweeteners, even if otherwise not dangerous, can (indirectly?) increase the chance of developing diabetes? As I understand it, the body releases insulin to process the sugar when something sweet is tasted under the assumption that it’s glucose. When it’s not glucose, the body is left with a bunch of insulin and nothing for it to do, increasing insulin resistance until your body no longer reacts or produces it, causing hyperinsulemia/hypoglycemia? So, maybe not specifically dangerous, but I was pretty sure that artificial sweeteners could be dangerous this way? Or has that been debunked or addressed otherwise?
I know there might be some side effects from artificial sweeteners, but surely, it is better to drink 3 diet sodas a day than 3 sugar sodas that each contain 200 calories. You did a fantastic article 4 years ago on artificial sugars, but could you make a article directly comparing, consuming diet soda and normal soda?
Do they understand how they undermine their credibility with ordinary people with this sort of thing? After a while people just roll their eyes when they hear about something being carcinogenic, because they give the impression that virtually everything is carcinogenic. Or, on the other end of the spectrum they make people paranoid and panicky.
I can imagine it’s difficult to get reliable data out of a longitudinal study. Even if you find a correlation, it’s not hard to imagine people who are happy to consume large amounts of diet soda are also likely less concerned with their overall health than people who avoid soda all together. They most likely have a higher tendency toward other unhealthy habits which would increase their risk for cancer through ways other than aspartame.
Any artificial food is bad, People think if something doesn’t contain sugar is automatically good, That’s never the case, artificial food sometimes even worse than sugar, diet soda have aspartame and other artificial sweeteners, which associated with liver cancer, and directly worsen your microbiome.
Aspartame does metabolize into other things, one of them being methanol. Whose difference with ethanol is the M. So, make no mistake it is toxic in really high doses and, surprise, especially to your liver. The logic tracks but the doses are so small that you wouldn’t notice unless you were allergic to it (like I am…)
I’d be more worried about how sweeteners affect your insulin activity. On that front at least, aspartame is probably the most benign, and sucralose is probably absolutely awful for you. I try to avoid both added sugar and artificial sweeteners and my body seems to appreciate making that change a few months back.
I have a personal rule that if its not intended for our body to digest it like Artificial sweeteners, I will generally avoid them if possible. An example would be some things that contain sweetners but in small amounts, its a whatever moment. But entirely flavored by artificial sweeteners is a bit odd. Frankly I feel like there hasn’t been enough research on these and the large beverage companies are interfering with that.
I think some kind of guidance is appropriate though, because some people actually DO consume a lot of soda every day. Even so of course, if it was normal soda it would be equally harmful in other ways. For most people that have varied drinking habits it seems it’s just not correlated, but you might just get cancer anyway no matter what you drink or eat or get radiated by the sun – or not. Still, appropriate warning by the WHO.
Sweetness in excess fools you into a temporary sense of, not satisfaction, but only the illusion that you’re satisfying yourself. It lasts only while the “food” is being consumed and then disappears the moment you stop eating. Often leaving you feeling sick. Eating good food, maybe with a small dessert option afterwards, which can be something as simple as a sweet cup of tea or coffee, is truly satisfying on the other hand. And even veggies are sweet when skillfully prepared. And I’m not talking about lengthy, complicated processes here. Cooking good food well is easy and cheap. You only need a reasonable grasp of a handful of techniques to eat like a king in this day and age. On a budget no less.
I’m 47, 5’2 and 106 lbs, very fit, active flexible. I love sweets. I love my Diet Coke. I drink one almost everyday, eat lower sugar yogurt with artificial sweetener, add Splenda to my oatmeal. I’m doing great. I guess I’ll find out in 20 years or so, but my goal is to not get diabetes and still enjoy my sweets. Side note: I prefer Coke Zero and Splenda over aspartame, but I’ll take either and have eaten plenty of aspartame before Splenda came out.
All you need to do in order to get and stay “Healthy” is eat a varied diet that meets all of your nutritional and caloric requirements according to the recommended nutritional guidelines for your age, gender and level of physical activity and get physically active regularly. that’s it. it doesn’t matter if your food is “Natural”, “Organic” or if it was synthesized in a laboratory; what matters is that the food fulfills but not exceeds your nutritional and caloric needs. with Moderation, Variety and following your nutritional guidelines, you can eat any food you want while getting and staying healthy.
Aspartame causes an incredibly violent reaction in my gut. One swallow, and if I catch that it happened and I immediately drink a LOT of water, the reaction will abate. Two swallows and nothing will stop it. I feel like my whole gut is filling with razor blades… like my whole gut is being sliced up from inside. Then I need to find a restroom urgently and basically I will have to keep repeatedly finding toilets for the next couple of days. I most recently got caught on a trip to Europe. They are now adding aspartame to non-diet soft drinks there!!! Arg!!
Can you do a article on leghemoglobin an ingredient used in imitation burgers 🍔? Some people are saying it’s bad, but global regulations say it’s okay in moderation. Is there any reason to believe that pepsin and protease would treat it any differently in the body than regular heme or myoglobin found in meat
In an effort to postpone the inevitability of death, I recommend one avoid ionizing radiation, ingesting mercury, inhaling asbestos, committing gun crimes, smoking cigarettes, driving while intoxicated, actively engaging in gang membership, participating in conventional warfare, abusing IV drugs, and tens of thousands of other clearly risky activities. You can also not drink diet soda, but I recommend you first focus on activities higher up on this list in order to achieve maximum postponement of inevitable death.
So, why did they make this announcement? Why not do further studies or await independent research first? Is someone going to benefit materially from it? Did they actually announce it, or did some sensationalist media outlet find out about their study and decide to make a bunch of panic-inducing noise about it? Who is supposed to be benefiting from the WHO’s research, and who is actually benefiting from it?
Its a failure on the part of various regulatory bodies that they have not arrived upon an intuitive and pragmatic way classify and communicate the dangers and harms of substances. Case in point: Ethanol is classified as “Carcinogenic” and forbidden as a cleaning agent in labs, while you can buy vodka in the supermarket around the corner. The same warning-sticker is applied to a bottle of ethanol as is applied to hexane, which is worse by orders of magnitude. the non-nuanced categorization only serves to obfuscate the “real” dangerous compounds.
Please do a dive into sugar vs artificial sweeteners! Too often the artificial sweeteners are talked about in a vacuum but in reality they are almost always replacing sugar, and I think a discussion of the two side-by-side could be very informative as to various health risks that may or may not need to be considered by various people. (Like, in my case: I’m not diabetic but sugar gives me horrible headaches and sometimes GI issues. Drastically reducing my sugar intake has almost eliminated the regular headaches that I’ve been experiencing my whole life and had just accepted as unavoidable. I was also gaining a lot of weight in the years prior to reducing my sugar intake, and have since gone from 190 back to my healthy weight of 155. Sure, I understand that sugar-free alternatives aren’t going to pass through your body without any effect on it whatsoever, but unless those effects are proven to be as harmful to me as what I experience with sugar… I’ll stick with the alternatives.)
Just because aspartame most likely isn’t a cancer risk, doesn’t mean it’s perfectly safe to consume. A lot of the diet soda drinkers I know drink a lot of diet soda every day, as if it were water. Just because it’s zero calories doesn’t mean it’s just like drinking water. It does still stimulate the release of insulin, even though there’s no sugar. That can sap energy and promote weight gain. Also, sweet taste tends to stimulate appetite, so diet sodas can lead to over eating. And drinking sweet sodas a lot desensitizes your sensation of sweetness, which means the rest of your food probably needs to be a bit sweeter just to taste normal to you. So assuming you aren’t eating all home cooked meals using aspartame in your recipes, you’re probably consuming more calories from sugars in food and possibly overeating.
All soft drinks with aspartame have been removed from UK supermarkets but there’s still a huge prevalence of other artificial sweeteners out there which I actively try to avoid. I pay a lot more for cordials sweetened with natural sugars because they don’t leave an aftertaste of cardboard or something akin to vinegar; to my way of thinking, if faux sugars taste like that, they can’t be A Good Thing.
Things like these are good examples of 1.) how important it is to put risks into adequate context, and 2.) how vital information may be lost the further you go from the original source. 1.) Especially the part about dosages was relevant here. There are many chemicals which cause abnormal cell growth or even cancer when administered in ridiculous doses over long periods of time. Some of those do end up labeled as carcinogenic for safety, but in a usual workplace environment there’s not much to worry as long as you do not ingest them or, in the case of dust particles, wear a sufficient particle filtering mask. As I said, proper risk management is key. Neither too lax, nor far too overboard which may cause other hazards or unnecessarily slow down work progress or even stop it by prohibiting work with certain substances, or limiting their use way too harshly. 2.) This is how stuff like this often goes: Study: increased cancer rates in test animals when given high doses of aspartame → Newspaper: New study indicates possible link between aspartame and cancer → Yellow press: DANGER SODA?? New study claims aspartame may be causing cancer → Reader to his friend: Don’t drink diet soda you get cancer. And this is a prime way of inadvertently creating false information, or conspiracy theories if done intentionally. PS: Also, the vast majority of carcinogens work differently than what people expect when they read a carcinogen hazard statement. The risk of cancer increases with exposure time.
Holy hell. My nephew back in Australia was one of these panic kids. Oh no cant drink that I will get cancer. I feel the Media organisations are to blame for this panic. And that that many people just do no like soft drink companies or just soft drinks and would like to shut them down. I personally know that it would be better I do not drink that coke zero but on the other hand I prefer not to drink alcohol except for social reasons and I do not smoke so hey we do not have to be perfect.
One has to wonder if, potentially, people who are obese tend to drink more diet sodas than people who are not obese — and it’s a known fact that obesity is a health risk, including many cancers. So if a link between aspartame and cancer was ever shown positively, would it be a case of correlation rather than causation?
Sci Show sounds like spoke person for artificial sweeteners. Sci Show Director: You must say with loud and excited voice that one study find no correlation with cancer. Even though there are two study that did found such correlation. You must say the findings for cancer are vague. A dude: How they are vague? Director: Huh, good question. I don’t have an answer but do make sure to say its vague. Other dude: If we don’t explain why we are saying things that we are saying, won’t people be suspicious about our integrity and probably conflict of interest. Director: Who’s going to pay your bills if we don’t run pr for evil companies? So, just do what any entertainment outlet does and run with the pr script.
I can not drink any drink if it use aspartame as it does not taste sweet to me at all, it makes whatever it’s used in to taste bitter. There is only few soft drinks on the market which I can drink simply because unlike all the big named brands they have not cut half of the sugar in normal drinks and added the sweetener to it. It’s not just the diet drinks that have sweeteners added to them, even your normal drinks have added sweeteners as well, I have to read all food and drink labels for any additives, I hate wasting money on drinks and food only to find I can not consume them. So if your drinking a drink and it does not taste as sweet to you, check to see if it has sweeteners added to them, and don’t be surprised if they have been. It’s cheaper than sugar and takes up less storage space than sugar.
So, because its hard to avoid a thing shouldnt be worried about? nah. Chronically sleeping at night, as in shift work, causes increased risks of cancer as well as other diseases. Maintaining consistent sleep is a huge factor in health, as is consistent excercise. There are a bunch of hormonal and chemical reasons for these, and people should be aware to minimize risks. One diet soda isnt gonna hurt you, neither is a few all nighters, but we need to keep studying these things to understand cancer, and our bodies better.
I take a pill that gives people cravings for sweets. I gained 55 pounds before I started diet soda. I dropped most of them after I gave up sugared soda and almost all other sugar. Everyone who takes this pill is at “high risk” for diabetes. My blood sugar is normal. So, I’ll keep drinking diet soda.
I remember seeing these rats over 10 years ago. They were definitely covered in tumors. Anyone who says they won’t tumors has a special interest in keeping it on the market. I looked into when my diabetic father died of a brain tumor. There’s article of these rats and they are walking tumors. I say. Panic
Here in Spain, around mid 1990’s a “diet sugar” was banned because (they said) there was a strong correlation with cancer. That product was of course aspartame 😮. Later I studied biology and everyone “knew” artificial sweeteners were not the best thing. Even if aspartame is not very dangerous, I never consume artificial sweeteners, and very little “real” sugar. We just don’t need them.
I have an inflammatory response to aspartame. I grew up on diet soda (born in 1984) and my parents both had diabetes so they just always drank diet soda and always had it in the house. In my early 30s I started to have swelling and pain all over my body, and in joints. I stopped all consumption of aspartame and felt better within two weeks.
Guess I’m not going to be long for this world since I drink 2-liter bottle of Asparme drink a day (well, at least 4 days a week while I’m at work). I still remember the Saccharin scare which was bogus since they fed their animals the equivalent which was 700 times that of anything a person would take as I recall the story.
For many of us, diet soda is a literal lifesaver. I struggle with my weight and diet soda allows me a “snack” that satisfies my sweet tooth without sugar. It’s easy to say “soda is bad for you,” but for many people, if they weren’t drinking diet soda, they’d be eating cookies or drinking sugar-saturated regular sodas – and their weight would skyrocket. And we KNOW the very real and well documented dangers that obesity presents. So one question that larger healthcare community needs to ask is: “If we recommend to patients that they cut out artificial sweeteners, what are they replacing those artificial sweeteners with?” The cure may worse than the disease.
Aspartame is the most studied food ingredient in all of human history, if it was dangerous, we would know by now. And yet its legal in almost all of the world. Because it is safe. We keep studying it again and again because people just won’t accept that sugar is a killer but artificial sweeteners isn’t. Let’s study more important and less understood ingredients
I click on this article, get an advertisement, “Safety of Aspartame”… you have got to be #&@$%^! kidding me. Who is funding this advertising campaign I wonder… It’s the American Beverage Association! The American Beverage Association is a lobbying group that represents the beverage industry, aka Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Need I say more?
As a past anorexic who went down to a 15.5BMI, I can confirm that diet soda (inherently) doesn’t directly cause any weight gain/health issues. I must say I abused it when I was losing weight and drank it loads, now I wouldn’t say it’s a good think to overendulge on as I must say it would leave me with a very acidic taste in my gums & teeth and some can be quite high in sodium. Other than these factors, I think diet soda is perfectly safe and the caffeine in them can be pretty beneficial for metabolism
So far 3:13 minutes in and it just seems like the tests trying to prove diet soda is bad resulted in them basically torturing those poor rats till they die and then claim whatever lead to their deaths was cause of diet soda. Too much of something is always a bad thing so a healthy balance is always preferred and having 1 diet soda a week mind you has 0 calories seems like a great compromise between drinking a soda filled with sugar and not having it at all.
5,000 mg/kg of body weight for a robust 100 kg human means 500,000 mg of Aspartame. If a soda has 200 mg, that’s 2,500 sodas. That’s many, many gallons — a can is 12 oz which means you need about three to complete a quart, which means just shy of eleven cans of soda, per gallon, which means you need to drink about 234 gallons of soda to get that dosage. DAILY. You are not going to drink close to 10 gallons per hour, and you would die because of the electrolyte imbalance way, way before you got there. (If you weigh half, or only 50 kg, you still would need to drink more than five gallons PER HOUR DAILY for the whole 24 hours. It’s not happening.)
As someone with an education in public health and a former community health social worker, we always talked about moderation. Consuming stuff in moderation, as long as it is not entirely wrong for you, is generally okay. There will always be fringe cases and people who fall outside of the normal (people who shouldn’t consume certain sugars or chemicals for whatever reasons or who consume far too much). Most people have nothing to worry about, just like the claim that dark chocolate and wine will keep you from cancer… Everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Some of these studies are created with bias and, under particular circumstances, not discussed by the media or groups touting those claims.
I’ve heard about a left handed sugar molecule that tastes just like real sugar but can’t be metabolized by our bodies. (it’s got the same atomic makeup as normal sugar but the molecule is mirrored in it’s arrangement) I wonder if any progress has been made to easily mass produce that. (and what clinical trials of it’s use have been done if any where conducted) But I wouldn’t give my hopes up. It seems the large food companies aren’t interested in making us healthier. An obese and sick population feeds the USA’s parasitic health insurance system so it’s a big factor holding back advancement towards stuff that could make us live healthier lives. As long as a for profit health care system continues to exist in America we won’t really see actual improvement in things like the way our food is made. 🙁
Aspartame makes me crazy. Not the fun kind of crazy, the bad crazy. I get anxiety and paranoia, and can be destructive. I haven’t had diet soda with aspartame in many years, but that last time was the time I knew it was causing my problems. I hadn’t had anything else unusual. I locked myself in and played all of my most destructive article games until the insanity ebbed. I’m just glad I had enough control left to keep myself away from others!
Aspartame IS safe! But, honestly, it should be avoided anyway! It DOESNT contribute to weight loss like people think, in fact some say its just as bad as sugar for weight gain. For diabetics, it barely better than sugar. Before anyone jumps on me for that, my diabetic mother stopped her diet mtn dew habit, and her a1c went from 9.2 ..to a much healthier 6. No other life changes! If ur struggling, find a way to spice up plain water instead
The WHO did not say that. IARC said that. IARC is a separate entity with its own structure that deals specifically with cancer. The WHO has the same opinion as the US-FDA and the EU’s equivalent came to. IARC came to a differing opinion from bad science, from one Italian agency who’s data was flawed and had a lash out calling it a personal attack that the scientific community couldn’t replicate the findings in human studies.
I really don’t understand why an organization to promote public health would issue guidelines that (A) are influenced by whether people are merely writing about something and (B) divided into categories with unusably vague definitions. Like… To do public health, literally your two main responsibilities are faithfully representing a scientific consensus, and knowing how to usefully inform the public.
As someone who is extremely sensitive to artificial sweeteners (and there are a number of us out there), I really wish that there were labeling laws put into place that if anything has artificial sweetener, it has to be in big, bold letters on the front of the packaging. I bought a chewable calcium supplement and had to toss the whole thing in the garbage because it had sucralose in and I didn’t know it until after I opened it and tried it.
Amongst other hot drinks, AIRC had coffee listed as ‘possibly carcinogenic’ but ended up reporting that in parts of the world where a correlation was found, people had incredibly hot drinks, and that plain water at 70C+ is carcinogenic (same cell damage as burning). The ‘possibly’ category means just that, it’s interesting enough to look into but may come to nothing. What I don’t understand is the point of drinking coffee so hot you can’t taste it.
Of course there is just looking at the chemistry instead of vague studies. Aspartame is aspartic acid and phenylalanine (both amino acids your body needs and has enzymes to get rid of any excess-with the exception of people who have phenylketonuria, but then they get most of there phenylalanine from other sources, the warning on the label is just so they can keep count of their intake) held together by a methyl group, i.e. carbon and two hydrogen atoms. Above 80 degrees Fahrenheit or so, it breaks down into the two amino acids and methanol. A can of diet soda contains the equivalent of .28 milligrams of methanol per 12 oz serving. A similar serving of orange juice has .24 milligrams of methanol (it’s in there naturally). Tomato juice has .84 milligrams of methanol per 12 oz. serving. For the methanol to be dangerous you need to drink enough to get drunk, roughly 1-10 grams. Using the lower limit and dividing by the amount per can means it takes about 4000 cans of diet soda for the methanol to be dangerous. You’ll die of water intoxication long before that. Your body also has a background level of methanol that is always there. No long term studies of that background level of methanol have been cited, which would be more relevant to this research by establishing a baseline. The problem is, doctors are people just like anyone else and they each have there own hang ups and agendas. That must be kept in mind when hearing about results like the ones in this article (and also who funded it, the sugar industry paid to make sure their name was kept out of a late 1970’s-1980 study about saturated fat even though the raw data in the study didn’t look good for sugar, who knows who has been funding these studies).
There’s definitely more than one side to this coin. “Does it help you lose weight” and the answer seems to be no. So you might wonder what’s the point? Maybe in the US, it’s the way people avoid HFCS as they prefer. And in all sorts of places in the world, aspartame has been coopted to be used side-by-side with cane sugar, both to lower the calories on the label and to ease the burden of the sugar supply chain. (In my country because of the recent global shortages, Coca-cola switched their “regular” coke formula to be half-aspartame and half-sugar. They don’t sell a cane-sugar-only variety anymore and aggressively market it as “classic taste” even if it’s not, especially for people who can distinctly feel the aspartame side effects in a drink like dehydration and hunger. A lot of other drink brands have done this for many years before Coke did it.)
Aspartame is guranteed to be dangerous. I mean it contains methanol.(and some definitely not dangerous amino acids for healthy induviduals) Thing is, the doses are so incredibly low it’s really unlikely that any amount could cause any issues. High doses of methanol every day obviously lead to problems. Aspartame itself is incredibly unlikely to cause any issues other than methanol. And I would personally rather take aspartame than most other artificial sweeteners. Most fearmongering is because of a disease that “melts” your brain when you take too much of a ESSENTIAL amino acid and aspartame contains it. But you don’t have that disease, you would know it. Your brain doesn’t melt.
Thank you for snuffing out over-reactions to tenuous information. I became skeptical of the dangers of food ingredients after reading in “Poisonous Plants of the World” that bananas contain poison (IF you were to consume approximately 5 pounds of bananas per day for a month you =Might= get poisoned. “possibly”and “might” do not necessarily mean “absolutely”
It’s kind of ironic everyone panicking about this. To me “possibly carcinogenic” is the same as “probably not carcinogenic”. This study just slightly quantifies some of the potential risk, whereas before, we didn’t really have any idea what the risk was. If anything, people should be relieved. If there was an unacceptable level of risk, it is very likely the longitudinal study would have resulted in a more startling outcome. After seeing this, I’m less concerned about the cancer risk than I was say ten years ago when it was just a big unknown. That being said, I don’t really like the taste of it so I’m probably still not going to drink it.
Also have to take into consideration ingestion route (e.g. gavage, IP, drinking water), rates of clearance (human vs mouse), mouse strain, etc…. Lots of potentially confounding factors affecting translation. Thing is, we have more than enough aspartame in the wild through soft drinks and gum for over 40 years at this point, that good and rigorous association, longitudinal and controlled clinical studies should be exceptionally easy and long past available.
Add to that artificial sweeteners are not the same in the way they travel through the body. Sucrolose is 90% in your stool. Aspartame is 85% through your urine. Sooo they would not cause cancer i the same way at all so making a group of artificial sweeteners is pretty silly. They are separate chemicals.
There seems to be a math error in this article. At one point you say that the rats were given aspertame equivalent to 5000 mg/kg of body weight, which you say would be equivalent to drinking 26 sodas per day. But by the same 200 mg per can of diet coke metric before, it seems like someone just divided 5000/200. Since it’s a per kg metric, you can’t do that unless the rat weighs exactly one kg (which seems very heavy for a rat). Either you’d want to convert it to rat weight (i.e. ~a third of 26, or 9 sodas) or give the equivalent for a human (i.e. somewhere around 3750 sodas).
To me, aspartame was always the definitive “sketchy food ingredient”. It was originally created when a chemist was developing a substance in order to test a possible treatment for stomach ulcers. The chemist got some of it on his finger without realizing it, licked it, and found that it tasted sweet. Even if it’s not really dangerous, I still try to avoid it. Thankfully I drink sparkling water these days. No artificial sweeteners, no sugar, no problem.
So wait, you’re telling me that people who tend to drink diet soda tend to people who have higher body weight and more cancers related to body weight? That sounds like an interesting correlation, until you think “Oh, well, of course the people who tend to drink diet soda often tend to be people who are already overweight and might already have those issues.”
From my perspective, the amount of research of humans consuming aspartame and how it’s effects are completely negligent to those who don’t drink too much sugar and positive to those who who do, far far far outweighs a study of rats where the negative results themselves are even arguable. To me, this is a really flawed perspective from the WHO and will only result in negative health results for the populous as diet sodas are a great tool for people addressing over consumption if sugar. If you want to say this tool that has been analyzed for years and shown to be safe and effective, is now bad, I think you need studies that meet the same level of scrutiny as the recent longitudinal studies.
I refuse to call them the “W-H-O.” They will forever be referred by me as “The Who.” As for aspartame, I just don’t have that much of a sweet tooth. I drink black covfefe, the occasional flavored seltzer, and I’m working on the slightly less occasional alcohol. But I gave up soda years ago, and I don’t miss it.
I don’t know about cancer but i can tell you every single time i drink a diet soda i get a migraine. I haven’t had a diet soda in literally decades. Way back in the 90’s i was having a lot of migraines and after doing that whole journaling all my food to try and find triggers thing my doctor came to the conclusion that it COULD possibly be diet sodas so i stopped them. My migraines reduced almost immediately. Cut to about 5 years ago and we were at a birthday party for my friend’s little nephew and all that was left in the cooler was a few diet drinks. Ugh but i thought what the hell and drank one. I had a terrible migraine the next day. Haven’t had a diet soda since. I still get the occasional migraine but not as much as when i was drinking diet soda. Is that scientific? No but I’m convinced they were a factor. I don’t think people should freak out but i do think those artificial sweeteners aren’t great for us. Especially Aspartame.