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We have an unfortunate monkey paw thing regarding this in the UK now then
We introduced a sugar tax a few years ago to try and reduce the amount of sugar in food, it has been quite successful in that regard. However in many, many places, aspartame is the substitute ingredient.
Most cases you can avoid given it's generally unhealthier food, but I'm not a monk, so I'm going to consume junk on occasion.
Before you take this to mean anything about why you should do, you are not a mouse. This is a study in mice and the differences between what impacts it will have in mice and humans may be very large. Mice are not good human analogues, but they are very cheap and good model organisms.
The findings they report include weight loss and cardiac/neurological impacts. This appears to compound over time with worse impacts as the study continued. This would make sense if the impact of aspartame was a slow chronic toxin or inhibited some normal pathway. If it is the former then avoiding aspartame for mice is important at all times. If it is the latter then having a break every so often should ameliorate the damage, though how much and what time ratio is not tested here.
That said, this is in mice. In my experience human brains a fairly different from mouse brains and the metabolic context is also quite different. I doubt the applicability of this to humans will be replicated well any time soon. If they do find an issue it is likely to be different to what happened to the mice, and though it is possible this will carry over to humans it is unlikely.
Also to point out, this doesn't implicate any other artificial sweetemers. If you're in Australia, the sweetenersight be listed by code rather than name:
Also you will usually find 950 (aspartame) along with 951 (acesulfame K) because the two have slightly different profiles and work very well together. If we do a study on humans I would want it to include the common and also some uncommon combinations. A lot of people are switching over to erythritol and stevia but I don't know how safe they are. We make erythritol internally but the dose may be quite different, and coming in through the gut could be quite different to internal production, not to mention with the stevia as actually prepared not lab purified.
Here's the actual open-access study instead of clickbait tabloid trash. One of the study's conclusions is pretty chilling:
Until the neurological sequelae of aspartame are better understood, children and adolescents should probably avoid aspartame as far as possible,
I always tend to avoid stuff with the "Diet" or "sugar free" labels, just for this reason.
And it didn't require a study to convince me that random stuff that is not a part of nutrition, is better off being out of a regular diet.
But it definitely takes a study to validate my concerns.
Exactly my reasoning as well. My body knows what sugar is and how to handle it.
The big problem with diet sodas is that the pancreas is activated by the taste of sweet, not just blood sugar levels. People drink gallons of this garbage a year and diabetes rates only go up.
My understanding is this is just with sucralose. You can easily validate this yourself with a continuous glucose monitor. Diet sodas have their problems and the one in this article is particularly concerning but they don't typically trigger insulin responses.
The continuous glucose monitor shows only glucose; I'd love a continuous insulin monitor.
Over the course of the year-long experiment, the most significant changes were seen in how the brain processed energy. Using FDG-PET imaging, the researchers tracked glucose uptake across the whole brain as well as specific regions, and found that after only two months of intermittent aspartame intake, the mice had sharp rises here – roughly double that seen in the control group. And this effect was across the entire brain, suggesting it was burning more fuel in the early stages of the experiment. However, at around six months, this spike actually reversed, and at the 10-month mark, the brains of the aspartame-dosed mice were burning around 50% less glucose than the control group. Because the brain runs almost entirely on glucose – to fuel processes like the firing of neurons and maintaining circuits linked to memory and learning – aspartame appeared to be robbing the organ of what it needs to function smoothly.
Were they getting enough glucose in addition to the aspartame? The article didn't make it clear whether we're seeing the effects of aspartame or just hypoglycemia.
Were they getting enough glucose in addition to the aspartame? The article didn’t make it clear whether we’re seeing the effects of aspartame or just hypoglycemia.
The liver will happily make enough glucose for the human brain from fat and protein, let alone the mouse brain (gluconeogenesis). It's not true that the human brain requires glucose, just a couple of cell lines (obligate glucovores), like red blood cells and some parts of the eye. The rest of the body, including the brain, can use ketones derived from fat, muscles can use triglycerides directly, in fact as we age the brain preferentially uses ketones. Here mouse models fail because they're evolved as primarily carbovores (grains etc, although they do eat (low fat) insects for extra protein) and really, really hard to get into ketosis, while humans drop into it with 12 hours fasting. Which makes this study an interesting datum, but inconclusive (and likely false in detail) in humans. That said, seems like a no brainer to drop artificial sweeteners and limit sugar to me, evolutionarily we got a big burst at the end of summer (fruit) which we used to fatten up for winter and little the rest of the year.
TLDR: “Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate.”
Fruit is bad, apple is like sand with splenda, you need to buy the expensive kind of grapes and oranges, or else tastes like so fckn acid. Bananas are ok as long as you eat with bread and are on point, the same as watermelon, but a lot of em needs more sugar.
Mouse metabolism is nothing like human metabolism. Over reliance on mouse models has wasted billions and decades in science, and generated bullshit artifacts.
Still think rabbit studies win the bullshit artifact prize since they are the basis of the diet heart hypothesis.
Throughout the experiment, the mice were fed standard chow (SAFE® A03 rodent chow from SAFE), and the control group was provided with normal, unadulterated drinking water, while the aspartame treated group received 0.4 % (w/v) aspartame (Tokyo Chemical Industry, CAS 22839–47–0, purity ≥) three days every two weeks, which equated to an average daily human equivalent dose of approximately 7 mg/kg/day [20]
It makes you dumb, unfit and fat
Well, I've been that way my entire life.
Phew, thank God I'm not a mouse. I'll keep drinking my diet sodas.
Hmm… sounds like avoiding all sorts of sweet things might be worth considering.