https://peterattiamd.com/what-are-the-side-effects-of-aspart...
>While an excess of alcohol sugars can cause gastrointestinal distress (e.g., if you overdo it on these you can get diarrhea), in most people they do not cause secretion of insulin from the pancreas due to their distinct chemical structure (see figure of their structures, above).
The same is true for the first group of non-sugar substitute sweeteners I mentioned (e.g., aspartame, saccharin, sucralose), with respect to the lack of insulin response. In addition to studies confirming this, I’ve also documented this in myself for xylitol (my personal favorite), aspartame (Equal), and sucralose (Splenda).
My BMI and checkups were good. But I was also IFing a lot, having big meals in my eating window and eventually had stomach problems: mild gastritis, hiatal hernia and strong esophagitis. As my family has some history of stomach problems, it's hard to say what was the culprit.
Did you try switching to coffee or caffeine pills?
I'm glad I was that self aware because I stopped drinking it everyday. Maybe 1 or two a month.
probably because of the caffeine?
I had an injury I thought was unrelated, but could be. Premature ankle joint wear. On inspection from a CAT scan machine, I was told I seem to have some abrasions on the bone around the damaged area, likely from or similar to osteoporosis and/or osteoarthritis.
189cm and 72kg... For your datapoints.
PS: Note that anything in excess and out of balance causes health issues, I'm not debating that.
For others (like me) aspartame is not OK in some cases. I can either drink aspartame and ingest no sugar. Or I can drink sugary drinks. Both are fine.
But if I have both a diet coke AND sugary sweets -> my intestines produce gases that are considered a war crime even by Putin.
No idea why, but it just happens.
I'm very open to human data that aspartame is bad for humans in reasonable amounts, if you have any, but I haven't seen it.
I'm looking to avoid erythritol these days though.
Why? My loose sense of the current thinking on this is that erythritol is one of the "safer" alternatives.
In addition to making you fat, most others have some other bonus side effects like causing cancer, migraines, screwing up gut microbes, etc.
If we had to consume the amount of aspartame per kilogram these mice did we would have far more serious problems on our hand than insulin resistance
Saccharin (1879) was the first artificial sweetener, followed by cylcamate (1937). Low calorie sodas (Tab, etc) using these sweeteners were introduced in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1980’s diet sodas sweetened with the combination of aspartame and acesulfame-K reached the market.
This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation. I think it’s interesting that the introduction and increased consumption of diet drinks paced the increase in America’s waistlines. U.S. adult obesity rates went from 15% to 30.5% to 41.9% (1980/2000/2020). U.S. childhood obesity went from 5.5% to 13.9% to 19.7% in the same period.
Others have made a case that aspartame, acesulfame-K and sucralose (discovered in 1976, US approval 1998) play a role in the etiology (causation) of the obesity epidemic: people who want to lose a few pounds switched their beverage consumption to artificially sweetened low-calorie drinks. The insulin released by the sweet taste of aspartame lowers people’s blood sugar level, thereby amplifying their hunger. This causes the diet-soda drinker to consume more total calories than if they’d had a HFCS-sweetened beverage.
There are certainly more important contributing factors to “the obesity epidemic”, but I think this is an example of simplistic science: it's technically accurate that low calorie sweeteners have fewer calories than sugar, but they are not that helpful for weight loss. I'd wager it'd be better to consume an 8oz can of HFCS soda than 12oz of 'diet' soda.
Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners? How about herbal sweeteners? If you regularly consume diet sodas, do you combine your diet drink with calories, or is most of your aspartame consumption on an empty stomach?
Also your idea is very american centric, diet sodas are mainstream around the world and most of those countries did not follow the us into the obesity epidemic.
- All artificial sweeteners when consumed on empty-stomach, causes very strong feelings of hunger in a short time. My guess is that this can more than cancel out the reduced calorie content.
- Sucralose gives me headaches.
Drinks containing caffeine tend to lead to mild dehydration and caffeine withdrawal headaches.
I experimented with non-alcoholic mocktails. The one that works for me is diet cola + milk in equal proportions. Somehow provides the combination of richness/creaminess, sweetness, bitterness that replaces the feeling of drinking Irish cream.
Diet cola contains aspartame. Anyone know if there's a safer non-sugar version of or alternative to diet cola that I could use instead?
It's not "aspartame". It's eating out twice as much as we did in early 70s [1], rise of fast food consumption, and huge portion sizes.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumption-nutr...
Such a significant behavior change across a large population is not well explained by "we just did".
I'm not sure fast food consumption or huge portion sizes is a great explanation. If fast food is the problem, why does that matter if it just comes down to calories? As for larger portion sizes, would even larger portions make us continue eating? Would tiny portion sizes make us all deadly malnourished?
We do know that walking rates, across the country, have fallen significantly. In 1969, approximately 50% of children walked or bicycled to school, with approximately 87% of children living within one mile of school walking or bicycling. Today, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren walk or bicycle to school. And we see this generally across the board, where for the most part driving to work alone dominates commute habits. If the only walking you do is from the door to the car, you are not getting much routine physical activity.
This would also actually well correlate with the rate of fast food consumption, since it's primarily car-centric, and is more car-centric than other types of eating out.
https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/sites/default/files/pd...
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I also don't think it's really any sort of secret that fast food companies like return customers and engineer the types of food that become addictive. There is a book called the Dorito Effect which theorizes that not only has artificial food become more flavorful over time, but that our industrial scale food production has made the base products less flavorful in favor of prettier or hardier varietals.
Have you been in a US supermarket? It's absolutely nuts and I don't think many Americans realise it.
To be bombarded with monumentally huge portions of everything is just a recipe for...well....the situation the US is in. Theres not many other countries that have whole food groups focused on cramming in as much peanut butter, jelly, marshmallow, chocolate, or whatever other high fructose corn syrup crap is being used.
Massive slices of cake prepackaged and ready to eat? Yeah why not. 50 different coffee syrup flavors? Yeah go for it. How about a lovely massive bottle of sugary drink to wash it down? Just one? No no have a crate of 20 of the things.
Just for a comparison, look up candy on the Walmart site. Now do it on Tesco UK. Next, try the bakery, or hell even the meat isle, somehow the exact same product ends up being significantly worse for you in the US.
Also, eating more in isolation and without talking.
The typical diet is also relatively lower in bread (processed carbohydrates...with unnecessary added sugar in the US) and higher in protein. That combination is typical of any structured diet designed around controlling weight gain, such as Weight Watchers.
Fast food is also different. International menus have different items and different sizes. I've seen people express shock about the existence of things like the Triple Baconator or US soda sizes. Drinking a 32 oz of sugar-filled soda is an easy 350 calories right there, and a disturbing number of Americans "don't like water."
Konbini and ramen/soba shops also exist, so there are even more convenient alternatives to western fast food, which are often healthier in the typical portions.
Average heights continued increasing through the 1980s. This suggests that a not insignificant chunk of the population was still in caloric deprivation until the 1990s. You can't get obesity while lots of people are still continuously hungry. For this one, correlation probably is causation.
In addition, smoking bans took off in the 1990s. Nicotine is a noted appetite suppressant. Correlation might be causation. You may be trading the problems of smoking for the problems of obesity--probably a decent trade.
My N=1 is that I've always liked Diet Cola drinks - a lot. I easily drink more than a couple liters a day and have since at least 1990. I have my own soda fountain at home (along with a flake ice machine). I was significantly overweight for about two decades. I'd tried a lot of different weight loss programs over the years including medically supervised. I approached each diet very diligently and put in a lot of effort - yet none ever worked long-term for me. I'd lose 10 or 20 pounds over a few months but would put it back on. I was always back where I started (or worse) in less than six months.
About seven years ago I decided to try keto. It was definitely the hardest, weirdest and strictest of any diet I'd tried but I did the entire program very diligently - just like the others. Keto worked extremely well for me, where nothing else had. The first 5-6 weeks was hard - not because I was hungry but just due to the degree of change, new things to learn and the rigorous ingredient tracking. All the other diets were much easier but I was constantly hungry. On keto it was the opposite. After the first three days, I was never hungry on keto. The challenge in keto was changing habits, learning new patterns and missing the flavors of familiar carb-heavy foods. But that only lasted about six weeks. After that my palette had been retrained and I didn't miss carb-heavy "comfort foods". I also had gotten used to the new patterns and it didn't take much extra effort or thought. Over the next 8 months I lost close to a hundred pounds, putting me back at a weight I hadn't seen since high school. I went from size 42 pants to 32 and I had abs! I lost weight so fast in the first three months, I heard some people at work suspected I had cancer or something.
To answer your question, I never changed my very heavy Diet Coke consumption during any of this. If anything, I increased it. And I've now stayed at my ideal weight for the last seven years. I stayed strict keto for the first couple years but now I'm not as strict although definitely still low carb by choice - because I feel better mentally, emotionally and physically on low-carb and because I now prefer these new foods and flavors. Doing keto helped put me in control of my weight and calorie intake through managing my blood sugar - and for me that was the key difference and a major revelation. I'm still never hungry and I can easily manage my intake and weight. If I creep up five pounds, I make a minor adjustment and it's gone in a few days.
However, I don't think keto will necessarily do the same for everyone. I've learned different people have different metabolisms as well as different preferences and ability to adapt to different changes. Strict carb management worked long term for me and Aspartame wasn't a barrier. The other counter-intuitive thing about my weight loss experience was I found early on that exercising did make me hungrier - so I stopped all exercise. While I've never been one for exercise or working out, during the 8 months I lost all the weight I became even more sedentary. I'm not suggesting that to anyone else, of course. I'm just sharing it as an example of finding what works for your metabolism, lifestyle and preferences. Interestingly, after I lost all the weight I found I started liking exercise more than I ever had and continue to today, seven years later. The typical advice is "Cut calories and hit the gym." What worked for me was "Cut carbs and hit the couch." My first week on keto I dropped almost all carbs but actually increased my calories (mostly in meat and cheeses). Once I'd weaned myself off carbs and had control of my blood sugar, cutting calories wasn't just easier - it sort of took care of itself. The whole 8 months I just counted carbs and stayed under 20 a day, while eating as much as I wanted. Without carbs driving my blood sugar and hunger, "as much as I wanted" to feel full all the time turned out to be a lot less calories. The key with the keto strategy is it only works if you execute it rigorously. Cheat all you want on calories but if you "cheat" on the carbs and go over 20g/day, even a little, you'll not only fail - you'll put on even more weight than before. I think a lot of people see that as a major downside but, oddly, for me the "all or nothing" aspect of keto turned out to be an unexpectedly helpful "feature".
Very curious about that soda fountain and flake ice machine though...
It's not just the sweetener itself. It's the whole shift. More processed crap in everything, sweeteners included. Cheaper, easier, engineered to be addictive. That's the real change that lines up with the weight gain.
Focusing just on sweeteners is missing the point. They're just one piece of the bigger processed food takeover. That's the simpler, more likely explanation.
From 2016:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
> Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970. That’s more than most adults need to maintain their current weight
You're doing the opposite - oversimplifying it. Why is calorie intake up is a legitimate, important question.
