I read this article in Hustler back when it was originally published, thankfully it’s still available online. It would be a wild ride for the obvious conclusion of the story to be that the whole thing was based in truth.
https://constantinereport.com/the-swirl-the-swastika-nutrasweet-the-nutrapoison/
This is perfect content for onion
Yesteryear’s conspiracies are today’s common truth. Getting slowly used to that one.
It was never a conspiracy, just that causation is hard and the the amount you’d have to drink for it to be a real risk is ridiculous. Also, anyone who is consuming 30 cans of soda a day is probably more likely to be over-exposed to other environmental risks.
Do you eat bananas? They are carcinogen too. Hell water will kill you.
That is the problem with this type of non-sense. Everything is about dosing. Aspartame is not carcinogenic in the amounts humans consume.
UV rays from the sun cause cancer, but I wonder how many people put sunscreen on every time they go outside.
People in their 50s that have good looking skin did :-)
Feels like a spin to me to be honest.
They used to say the same things about lead before transitioning to the current “unsafe at any dosage” view.
Labeling everyday products as carcinogenic would work to muddy the waters after a few damaging papers on industry important products. I remember the ‘red meat is cancer’ craze breaking out suspiciously close to the first studies linking glyphosate to cancer.My euristic will be to take popular belief into account. I see it as emergent intelligence by trial and error, not merely nonsense.
You do you of course.In my mind, the main reason to avoid edulcorants (including stevia and acesulfame), is that they taste like shit.
Might as well go with “processed food or drinks are bad”. It’s been proven so many times, you are far better off avoiding them as much as you can.
Fun fact: processed animal flesh is a class 1 carcinogen (according to the WHO), which it shares with smoking and plutonium.
The IARC ruling […] is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not [… and] does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume.
From the article. ^^^
This is something people frequently overlook. A substance may be a “possible carcinogen” and also completely benign at levels any sane person would consume.
Bananas also contain carcinogenic material, but eating bananas is still very much a healthy thing to do. There’s a reason banana equivalent dose is a concept, and “the dose makes the poison” is a common refrain in toxicology.
Yes this is the type of “research” my mother would show me when I was younger to get me to stop drinking soft drinks like coke or energy drinks.
Gary Taubes talks about this in his slew of books about sugar, the historical studies that caused the craze about artificial sweeteners being linked to cancer in the 80’s all were done with massive doses in rats so large that a human being physically could not consume an equivalent dose. I still think it’s worth considering that there is some mechanism at play between these things and cancer, but like you say, the volume is a very important variable.
I’ve accepted everything gives me cancer. You could be super strict about avoiding everything that potentially gives you cancer, and then surprise 50 years later they will discover something you consumed or out of your control causes cancer. 🤷♀️
I think this is the key quote:
Since 1981, JECFA has said aspartame is safe to consume within accepted daily limits. For example, an adult weighing 60 kg (132 pounds) would have to drink between 12 and 36 cans of diet soda – depending on the amount of aspartame in the beverage – every day to be at risk. Its view has been widely shared by national regulators, including in the United States and Europe.
12-36 cans per day. That’s a lot of diet cokes. Even for Trump.
I have no doubt there are people out there consuming a 12 pack of soda per day. I’m not sure they’ll live long enough to get cancer as I’m sure they have lots of other health problems but there are definitely people out there chugging those sodas.
