Guidelines on Diet Coke ingredient from consultants tied to alleged industry front group an ‘obvious conflict of interest’, report says
It uncovered eight WHO panelists involved with assessing safe levels of aspartame consumption who are beverage industry consultants who currently or previously worked with the alleged Coke front group, International Life Sciences Institute (Ilsi).
Their involvement in developing intake guidelines represents “an obvious conflict of interest”, said Gary Ruskin, US Right-To-Know’s executive director. “Because of this conflict of interest, [the daily intake] conclusions about aspartame are not credible, and the public should not rely on them,” he added.
I was under the impression the research showed that there was a risk but you needed to consume an exorbitant amount to get there. Around 20+ cans of coke a day which the majority of people don’t do.
The World Health Organization said it was safe up to a certain level. The people in the WHO who said that work for Coca-Cola.
This means we can't rely on the recommendation, and the actual "safe" amount may be much lower than that. The article goes into good depth and gives counterarguments too.
It is important to note that in reality there is no safe amount for a carcinogen. Sometimes a threshold is set to reduce risk to a reasonable amount in necessary workplace exposure or medical treatments.
The truth is, I think we'll all eventually realize any sweetener should be seen as candy, not a thirst quencher.
Thank you being basically the only person in the thread who actually read the article.
The part where they said "aspartame is probably bad" wasn't the corrupt part. The corrupt part was when they put an addendum saying "a little bit of cancer is okay as a treat"
I read somewhere that asparteme doesn’t accumulate and just passes through the body, which was an argument for having a regular intake below the threshold to be not a risk. With this revelation though, that seems sus now too.
I think that's what this is about.
It doesn't mean aspartame is bad and we are all going to die.
It means that perhaps the safe limits, risk reductions etc need to be re-assessed for them to be with regard to actual harm reduction... instead of the current possibility of "just enough harm that coke doesn't get blamed, but good profit can still be extracted" that these coke associates may-or-may-not have influenced.
It calls recommendations into doubt as opposed to the actual raw science.
AFAIK, aspartame has been widely studied. If it was a substance of actual risk, it would have been highlighted.
Unmedicated, I would crave soda like a fucking sugar tick. I'd eat until I was sick, then eat some more. Actually rotted a bunch of my teeth with my shitty habits and poor self-control. Needed several root canals.... ugh....
Medicated, I have soda maybe once per month or every other month. I don't have uncontrollable cravings for sugar anymore. It's fucking great!!
Not to defend diet coke (any kind of soda is not healthy for you, regardless), but I would generally assume that drinking 144oz (assuming 18x8oz cans/day) of any type of beverage that isn't plain old water would tend to cause some level of serious health effects, given that's more than your entire general recommended daily fluid intake from all sources. I feel like the general takeaway is that most food and drink is bad for you in excess, and companies constantly slapping "diet/low fat/low carb/etc." labels on junk food products that are marginally healthier than their peers gives a false impression that you can have your cake and eat it too in terms of negative health effects from these foods/drinks.
Around 20+ cans of coke a day which the majority of people don’t do.
This guy has never met an American. Ever heard of a Big Gulp? We literally had private companies engineer bigger soda cups to handle how much fucking soda Americans drink.
I dont necessarily disagree with your overall point about Americans drinking a lot of soda, but I don't think pointing out that a company makes a cup a little smaller than 3 cans of soda is a very strong counterargument to the claim that it takes 20+ to be harmful...
This is fair lol. I’m Canadian and when I was 17-20 I’d consume around 4-6 cans a day which was a crazy amount to myself and most people. 20+ seems nuts just financially.
Agree. Even recently, I would have up to 5-6 cans worth myself (have since cut down a lot), but alongside the financial cost, there's also the acid eating away at your stomach lining and the excess caffeine to worry about alongside the Aspartame.
Frankly, given the stomach issues and acid reflux that too much soda can give you, I would imagine that people (even sodaholics) would have to stop much sooner than 20 due to all the other issues involved with sodas before the problems with Aspartame would even come into the picture.
Not to say that I'm not leery of Aspartame, but diet Soda has other major issues beside it.
A Big Gulp is 30 ounces, 20 cans of coke is 240 ounces of soda. That's a lot of Big Gulps. That said the Double Gulp, the largest size 7-11 offers, tops out at 50 ounces. Yet you'd have to drink almost five of those to reach 20 cans.
in 2018 The United States consumption of soda per capita was 38.87 gallons per year, or 13.6 ounces of soda per day. Which was down from 45.5 gallons per year in 2010.