8 ms·

Aspartame (1965) was approved by the US FDA in 1974/1981. This is commonly paired with acesulfame-K (1967) to provide sweetness in low-calorie drinks and sodas.

Aspartame (1965) was approved by the US FDA in 1974/1981. This is commonly paired with acesulfame-K (1967) to provide sweetness in low-calorie drinks and sodas. 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?

downrightmike 2y ago
I think the link between diet sodas is more "I am not drinking sugar, so I can eat more" Not so much, "diet soda makes you fat directly"
ein0p 2y ago
Here's why everyone is fat in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-... 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-nutrient-intakes-and-diet-quality/summary-findings https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumption-nutr...
- Guzba 2y ago
  This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now? 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?
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    I wonder if it's correlated with cars. 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/pdf/What-is-SRST-factsheet-REVISED-06-14-11-w-footnotes.pdf https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/sites/default/files/pd... --- 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. https://foodcrumbles.com/the-dorito-effect-book-review/ https://foodcrumbles.com/the-dorito-effect-book-review/
    - xp84 2y ago
      I’ve read that Dorito book and it was excellent.
  - denkmoon 2y ago
    The proportion of households with a person with time and energy to prepare a healthy home cooked meal has diminished. We have sacrificed domestic life on the altar of profit.
tulio_ribeiro 2y ago
Sweeteners are processed food. Timeline shows more processed food hitting the market, period. Obesity rises. Coincidence? Doubt it. 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.
- brandonmenc 2y ago
  Calorie intake is up. Don't overcomplicate it. From 2016: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/ 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
  - edanm 2y ago
    > Calorie intake is up. Don't overcomplicate it. You're doing the opposite - oversimplifying it. Why is calorie intake up is a legitimate, important question.
    - brandonmenc 2y ago
      Because calories are cheaper now, thanks in large part to low cost, energy dense vegetable oils. When people can get more calories per dollar they will eat more calories.
      - edanm 2y ago
        Totally might be the case. I'm not sure, but I think I've seen good reasons to think this doesn't exactly line up though - increased wealth in different countries didn't match exactly, timeline wise. But I'm far from an expert
bsder 2y ago
> This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation. 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.
- catigula 2y ago
  Doubtful. Smokers only gain a handful of pounds when they stop on average.
  - bsder 2y ago
    You're gonna have to quote something stronger about that. In college, I knew a lot of girls who took up smoking to help get rid of the freshman fifteen. It seemed to work for the most part.
throw034248 2y ago
I'm not overweight, but I observed the following: - 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.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  I personally don't observe this
- layer8 2y ago
  They do neither for me.
- cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
  Might be psychosomatic or unrelated to the sweetener. Drinks containing caffeine tend to lead to mild dehydration and caffeine withdrawal headaches.
torben-friis 2y ago
Aspartame does not increase insulin, unless I'm not updated on the current scientific consensus. 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.
- kreetx 2y ago
  Not at all an expert, but the brief research says that it does cause insulin creation, though due to it not being actual sugar and also due to that there is 200x less Aspartame in mass in your drinks (as it's much stronger per weight unit), then this spike is small and the organism can easily handle it.
- buhfur 2y ago
  Now i'm no health specialist but from what I gathered online , it's still a debated subject.
- HumanOstrich 2y ago
  You are definitely not updated on current scientific research. TFA discusses this.
profsummergig 2y ago
I started drinking too much alcohol during the lockdown era. 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?
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  Pilk? In all earnestness, I thought that was a joke drink.
mrandish 2y ago
> Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners? 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".

downrightmike 2y ago

I think the link between diet sodas is more "I am not drinking sugar, so I can eat more" Not so much, "diet soda makes you fat directly"

ein0p 2y ago

Here's why everyone is fat in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-... 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-nutrient-intakes-and-diet-quality/summary-findings https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumption-nutr...

Guzba 2y ago
This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now? 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?
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  I wonder if it's correlated with cars. 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/pdf/What-is-SRST-factsheet-REVISED-06-14-11-w-footnotes.pdf https://www.saferoutespartnership.org/sites/default/files/pd... --- 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. https://foodcrumbles.com/the-dorito-effect-book-review/ https://foodcrumbles.com/the-dorito-effect-book-review/
  - xp84 2y ago
    I’ve read that Dorito book and it was excellent.
- denkmoon 2y ago
  The proportion of households with a person with time and energy to prepare a healthy home cooked meal has diminished. We have sacrificed domestic life on the altar of profit.

tulio_ribeiro 2y ago

Sweeteners are processed food. Timeline shows more processed food hitting the market, period. Obesity rises. Coincidence? Doubt it. 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.

brandonmenc 2y ago
Calorie intake is up. Don't overcomplicate it. From 2016: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/ 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
- edanm 2y ago
  > Calorie intake is up. Don't overcomplicate it. You're doing the opposite - oversimplifying it. Why is calorie intake up is a legitimate, important question.
  - brandonmenc 2y ago
    Because calories are cheaper now, thanks in large part to low cost, energy dense vegetable oils. When people can get more calories per dollar they will eat more calories.
    - edanm 2y ago
      Totally might be the case. I'm not sure, but I think I've seen good reasons to think this doesn't exactly line up though - increased wealth in different countries didn't match exactly, timeline wise. But I'm far from an expert

bsder 2y ago

> This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation. 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.

catigula 2y ago
Doubtful. Smokers only gain a handful of pounds when they stop on average.
- bsder 2y ago
  You're gonna have to quote something stronger about that. In college, I knew a lot of girls who took up smoking to help get rid of the freshman fifteen. It seemed to work for the most part.

throw034248 2y ago

I'm not overweight, but I observed the following: - 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.

riku_iki 2y ago
I personally don't observe this
layer8 2y ago
They do neither for me.
cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
Might be psychosomatic or unrelated to the sweetener. Drinks containing caffeine tend to lead to mild dehydration and caffeine withdrawal headaches.

torben-friis 2y ago

Aspartame does not increase insulin, unless I'm not updated on the current scientific consensus. 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.

kreetx 2y ago
Not at all an expert, but the brief research says that it does cause insulin creation, though due to it not being actual sugar and also due to that there is 200x less Aspartame in mass in your drinks (as it's much stronger per weight unit), then this spike is small and the organism can easily handle it.
buhfur 2y ago
Now i'm no health specialist but from what I gathered online , it's still a debated subject.
HumanOstrich 2y ago
You are definitely not updated on current scientific research. TFA discusses this.

profsummergig 2y ago

I started drinking too much alcohol during the lockdown era. 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?

kelseyfrog 2y ago
Pilk? In all earnestness, I thought that was a joke drink.

mrandish 2y ago

> Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners? 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".