Indeed. It turns out that “MSG headaches” are just high sodium level headaches, either through dehydration, unbalanced electrolytes, elevated blood pressure or whatever else higher than normal sodium levels cause headaches. The same headache could be caused by salt. MSG actually makes recipes require less of other flavor ingredients, including salt. It’s also often found in dishes that still contain relatively massive amounts of salt.
So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just don’t eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.
I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespread danger to public health from these additives, but it doesn't mean there aren't still individuals whose health gets messed up (including legitimate headache or migraine symptoms) by these additives.
> discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG
This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this. MSG is nearly identical to the glutamic acid in other foods. If it were true they'd be unable to tolerate parmesan cheese, soy sauce, aged meats, tomatoes, mushrooms, and seaweed.
Glutamate is considered a migraine trigger, though. Many people do avoid or limit those foods for that reason. Thankfully it doesn’t appear to be a trigger for me, because I love all those things.
There is some controversy about dietary glutamate being directly responsible for migraine. It’s common in the brain already. It’s only allowed selectively through the blood-brain barrier. However it could trigger other types of headache, and those can trigger migraines. Also, apparently more of it is formed in the brain when there are high levels of lysine and ornithine in the body. Many of the foods with high levels of glutamate also have high levels of those aminos.
High levels or low levels of sodium in the body can also be a migraine trigger. MSG is lower in sodium than table salt, but it is additional sodium. Many of the issues blamed on it though are after eating foods that contain MSG and a high amount of salt as well. That’s also true of many of the glutamate-containing foods for that matter (gravies, miso, soy sauce, aged meats).
Doctors recommend eliminating one single ingredient at a time to find your triggers. However, I’m sure many people don’t control for salt when eliminating MSG or natural food glutamate.
I agree on all your points. If someone suffers from migraines, though, it’s worth trying figuring out plausible triggers even if the evidence isn’t really solid.
It’s important not to conflate ingredients when doing an elimination diet, though. Separating restaurants or prepackaged foods at home that use MSG from those that use a lot of salt (or preservatives, or artificial dyes, or “natural flavors”, or any number of other things) is pretty difficult. I’ve seen several instances over the years of people assuming a restaurant used MSG based on getting a migraine, even when that restaurant doesn’t use MSG in any of their dishes. I’m not even a doctor, just an interested person with migraines. I’m sure a nutritionist or headache specialist could tell us stories.
There's a pretty good finding here[1] about elimination diets being inappropriate for most patients. Basically without any diagnosis of something like celiac, allergy, etc you have a high risk of misidentifying foods as causes because the co-occur with non food triggers. The literature just seems super weak for most alleged dietary triggers.
> This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this
Nevertheless, it continues to give her migraines even in small portions where other foods don't. I don't doubt it could be some byproduct from the process of MSG salt's synthesis or cooking with it rather than the actual glutamic acid, or some allergy as others have suggested.
I wouldn't be so strong as to categorically say that MSG can't cause migraines in any of the human race as you so claim though. There's so much we don't know about human biological mechanisms in niche cases; even water can cause allergic reactions in certain individuals (see Aquagenic Urticaria). What is true generally is not always true specifically when it comes to human health.
I'm curious: have you done a (single or double) blind test where you prepare dishes (selected at random) with or without MSG/aspartame/yeast extract and record the effects?
To be clear: not saying you should, just wondering how you came the conclusion that those ingredients are the trigger.
MSG is the salt form, wherre the glutamate is bound to a sodium atom. In food, my understanding is that MSG will split into two things: sodium ion and glutamate ion. The difference between adding MSG to food and food being already high in glutamate would be the salt content.
I don't recommend telling people their subjective experience isn't true- you don't know for sure that they don't actually get migraines from MSG. I think it's fine to tell people that often their subjective experiences can be colored by prior knowledge, and people often ascribe causes to unrelated factors. (My personal belief is that most people who say they got a headache from MSG experienced a headache, but consuming glutamate was not the cause).
For some people, migraines can be triggered by things like light or certain smells. It's not at all impossible that a certain taste can also trigger them.
That's very interesting because cheese, paneer and cured meats do trigger wife's migraines. I had not considered that richness is n glutamic acid is a common factor.
The personal, anecdotal relation seems strong on the cheese and paneer component. Even if she had something not aware that it contains either of those it would trigger a migraine, sometimes not immediately though, seems to take a few to several hours.
Oh she/you should check out mast cell activation syndrome (mcas). Basically different foods increase histamine levels in the body or prevent its degradation. Old proteins and fermented foods are particularly problematic because microbes break down the protein and release histamine precursors.
Well, my dad got migraines from everything° on that list bar tomatoes - though he did from dried tomatoes, so does that count as everything on the list? I don't know the biological pathway, but it was neither self-diagnosed, self-derived, nor made from woo; he visited several real-MD neurologists before someone identified the chemical(s) at fault, and gave him a list of foods not to eat.
°In fact it was all cheeses, not just parmesan; the more aged the worse. And also chocolate, and olives. Basically anything aged or fermented. I don't know how that lines up with MSG's chemistry, but he was careful with MSG, though nothing like as avoidant as he was with soy sauce and cheese.
Migraines can possibly be triggered by cause and effect chains several intermediate causes long. It could help explain for example why certain things are triggers for certain migraine patients and not others.
Aspartame is also a trigger, but the fact that one person has multiple triggers doesn’t mean they are related at all.
Now you’re right that MSG is more than sodium. Sodium can be a headache trigger, including migraines. Glutamate is also a migraine trigger and a fairly common one. It doesn’t happen to be one for me. However, it is a neurotransmitter that is involved in pain signaling. It’s understandable how it could easily trigger a migraine or make the pain worse.
Some triggers for some people actually help other people with migraines, like caffeine. Migraines are such an incredibly complex topic that there are medical specialists for them. Mine can be fairly debilitating, but are rare enough I don’t qualify for most prescriptions. So I definitely understand how trigger management and symptom management are a big deal.
It's possible she believes that those items all trigger her migraines therefore her body gives her a migraine when she believes she's had one of her triggers.
A big tell would be her getting a migraine and blaming it on "hidden MSG" in a food item that doesn't have it.
Or her not getting migraine from foods that have MSG naturally but is never pointed out. Like tomatoes.
It's funny... reading this thread, I'm reminded of a friend of mine who indeed gets migraines from tomatoes. That was actually what she figured out first; the MSG connection came later.
This effect is very obvious on me. I consistently get headaches when my sodium intake is too high. I don’t even use MSG in my own cooking but occasionally I add too much salt.
Might consider a mix of electrolytes instead of just salt. I usually keep a container mixed with "snake juice" ratios for electrolytes and use that to season with instead of salt alone. I'll also sometimes put a pinch in my water, not nearly snake juice amounts, when I get a bit off and start getting leg cramps.
I drank sodas with aspartame just fine for many decades. Then one day they suddenly started giving me migraines any time I had one, so I had to quit cold turkey. No other amount of caffeine, regular sodas, salty foods, MSG-laden meals etc. seem to trigger it though, and I have no idea why.
It triggers a headache for me as well. Happens whether I'm previously aware of its presence in the product or not. I'm fine accepting that it's a generally safe chemical that has been thoroughly studied and I just have a quirk, but I also don't want my quirk to be dismissed because studies don't validate it.
The headaches are replicable and severe enough that it's turned me off of all artificial sweeteners, although I doubt they all have the same effect. I don't want to risk it.
> So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good.
Salt and MSG are sometimes said to strengthen existing flavors, but I'm pretty sure they mainly just contribute their own unique taste: salty and umami.
(There could of course theoretically be some interactions with other taste receptors, similar to how sweet things make things taste much less bitter, e.g. cocoa, but that is a relatively specific effect and not one that acts as a general flavor enhancer.)
If you lick plain MSG, it tastes bitter. Add it to something very sweet and it just tastes bizarre. Sprinkle it on fried chicken and it tastes like you just dumped chicken gravy on it and pumped up the taste. It really does mainly amplify flavors.
And while MSG tastes very wrong in sweets, sweets generally always taste better with a bit of salt. Salt is its own flavor and a flavor amplifier.
Probably because a lot of fat sources have high levels of glutamates in them. You're not tasting the fat, per-say, but the other stuff that isn't fat. It's why beef tallow is so much tastier than neutral oil. Same level of fat.
If there's anything wrong with MSG that isn't simply due to sodium intake, I think it's unknown to science (at least in the sense that there's no theory about it with any wide uptake). MSG is also intensively studied and has a very similar mechanistic story to aspartame.
One thing that is "wrong" with MSG is that a lot of restaurants overuse it as a condiment. So you're paying money for a good food experience, but you're getting the taste equivalent of instant ramen noodles.
I actually _like_ instant ramen noodles and MSG, and I use MSG when cooking. But it feels like cheating when fancy restaurants also use it.
> So you're paying money for a good food experience, but you're getting the taste equivalent of instant ramen noodles.
Restaurants, even nicer ones, cut corners. This especially flared up in the news a couple of years ago when a posh UK restaurant served a cheese plate at a decently high price, where the label was still on the cheese and revealed it had come from an ordinary supermarket’s house brand.
I’ve seen this personally, too. I ate sushi today at a sushi place where the menu said “crab sticks” were an ingredient of some rolls, but these were surely the imitation crab meat called surimi.
Or another Asian place in my area is known for offering “duck” on the menu, but what you get is mock duck[0] wrapped around the meat, to make people think it’s the duck skin, but the meat itself is chicken.
Sure, but it feels like a silly distinction. The famous example is water, which fits those same criteria. Would we that that there's not "nothing" wrong with water?
Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):
But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]
The same This American Life episode raised serious doubts about Dr. Steel's claims, which is mentioned in the article you link:
> When reporters tried to corroborate Dr. Steel’s claims, however, holes started appearing, according to the This American Life episode. Chief among them: There actually was a real Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, and his biographical details seemed to match those provided in the letter, like his professional title, the name of his research institute, and the date of his move to the US.
> While both Dr. Steel and Dr. Ho Man Kwok had died by the time the digging began in earnest, their surviving family members were able to shed some light on the situation. Dr. Ho Man Kwok’s children and former colleagues were adamant that Dr. Ho Man Kwok had in fact written the letter. Meanwhile, Dr. Steel’s daughter said her father was a lifelong prankster who loved pulling one over on people. With this testimony in mind, the reporters came to the conclusion that Dr. Ho Man Kwok was most likely the true author and Dr. Steel had taken credit for years as an elaborate practical joke.
The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.
The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.
It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.
Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.
Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.
Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
It's not that everything has to be sweet, but rather that, for example, Coke really isn't Coke without sweetness and people just happen to enjoy Coke. And if you're going to enjoy a Coke, Coke Zero or Diet Coke is better for your health.
Of course there are other things like coffee that really are not defined by sweetness and can be perfectly enjoyed unsweetened.
A guy on the Internet recently reverse-engineered the Coke formula and published the recipe. I always liked Diet Coke, the regular one is just too sweet for me.
So I replicated the recipe, and I actually liked unsweetened Cola! It feels a bit tea-like, but also more acidic. Kinda like coffee but without the bitter undertone.
The Japanese diet, which people in the west sort of accept as default-healthy, is also heavily sweetened; that is, it uses "sweet" as a flavor component probably even more than Americans do. Japanese home cooking adds sugar to savory dishes the way Americans add black pepper.
I think it's obvious that Japanese people generally consume less sugar than Americans do, so it's not my argument that sugar is fine or that the western diet isn't problematic.
Rather: the idea that there's some moral/health advantage to avoiding sweetness is unfounded, kind of culturally blinkered, won't hold up under scrutiny.
And as always, too much of anything isn't good for you either. A sugary soda on occasion won't do much harm, but some have several a day or it's the only thing they will drink.
Sugar please. I can't stand the taste of aspartame. They've started using Dextrin to replace sugars in confectionary (Mars Galaxy minstrels) and they taste awful.
I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.
Sounds like aspartame is a boon for your health if its addition means you eat fewer Mars bars and drink less sweetened bubbly water. Hooray for aspartame!
In that case feel free to jump. Eat candy bars, drink sweetened coloured preserved bubbly water and do all those other things you want. Isn't freedom great? As long as your freedom does not curtail another's feel free to do what you want within the bounds of the law. I'll even go so far as to add that some laws can be violated without consequences because they're outdated, superfluous, bought and paid for by those who stand to profit from their establishment or otherwise not conducive to a thriving society. Of course there is that problem with the consequences of your and my freedom: if you decide to indulge in too much freedom and as a result of that incur large medical bills from cliff-jumping, the mentioned candy bar and sweetened water diet and other similarly unhealthy habits it would not be fair to limit my freedom to do what I want with my hard earned money by claiming the tax payer (where I live) or insurance customer (where most people on this forum live) need to pay for your habits. As it stands this is the case but it doesn't have to be that way. Maybe there should be extra insurance premiums for habitual cliff jumpers and candy bar customers? Of course this is not easy to implement since it would not be fair to those eating one of those bars every other month or people who jump from 2 m high cliffs.
It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.
All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.
That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.
The small Coke Zero cans make it tough to have just one. I typically will have 2 small cans with a meal which feels roughly equivalent to one regular sized can
Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
Would this insulin response be detectable with a CGM?
The answer is no - sucralose, saccharin, aspartame; it doesn’t matter, diet soda and artificial sweetener does not affect blood sugar in any detectable way, at least for me. It was one of the first things I checked when I got my CGM.
“It will crash your blood sugar” and “it will spike your blood sugar despite not having carbohydrates” are myths.
Did you read this paper? Do you really think this is good evidence for the claim? I'd love to hear why.
I could give a fulsome critique of it but I think the simpler thing to say just to kick this off is that I could give you a PubMed cite to back basically any claim, true or otherwise.
You really need a large volume of repeated results by different groups doing the experiment/research so you get the proper regression to the mean. Individual papers are more important at saying "here is something interesting that others should also check out".
You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).
Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?
The larger the impact of the information you are sharing, the more clicks and follows you will get.
People trying to become content creators quickly realize that pointing out a 30cm rock headed towards Earth gets no money, err, attention. So they drop the 30cm part, call it a massive chunk of rock that will rip through the atmosphere, and suddenly they are getting much more money, sorry, attention.
This is what makes social media so depraved, any idiot who makes a good word salad can profit from being an idiot.
Is it really so "depraved" if they are simply smart enough to notice what generates revenue and acting on that?
Of course we could argue that making money off people is wrong, but I think that is a losing battle in a capitalist society, which is most of the world right now from what I understand.
I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth.
It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.
And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.
Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
They all have variations of a bitter aftertaste to me. It’s not sweet or pleasant at all.
And it’s a different form of bitterness than the one you get from kale/collared greens, brussel sprouts, etc., whichi quite enjoy. I _almost_ want to drink a diet drink along with one of the “bitter” vegetable or even a crème brûlée to quantify the difference.
I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.
You're conflating two different things. Unless you have some very weird genetic condition, it does taste sweet to you. That is, it activates the same sweet receptors on your tongue and in other parts of your mouth that sugar activates - and more or less to the same extent (relative to concentration).
However, sugar isn't simply a sweet taste. It also has some amount of flavor, and so do the artificial sweeteners, and it is these flavor differences that you (and many others) dislike. Flavor is something that happens in the air tract, and is far more complex than taste.
It absolutely does not. The places on my tongue that taste sweet and the places that taste aspartame are completely different (the latter strongly at back of my throat, sugar strongly on my tongue).
No, this is pretty common in folks who don't drown their taste buds and systems in tons of it every day. Then you feel it anytime its there, since its pretty rare and its disgusting chemical bleh, one feels it fully.
Its a bit like smoking cigarettes - to many non-smokers, its disgusting beyond description, smearing face with old feces wouldn't be worse. To many smokers its mild, pleasant, they enjoy it with lunch etc.
Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
At this point I think it almost definitely is "most" in USA at least, going by volume/count/shelf-space.
Like >90% of energy drinks use at least one (normal red bull is a rare exception), and diet sodas typically have more shelf space than regular from what I see, often by a huge margin.
Almost all gatorade-likes have it now too (I typically can't find even a single counter-example in a store, unless they're one of the oddballs carrying regular gatorade (most do not)), often also including regular sugars. Even stuff you'd hope would be maximally-simple like pedialyte has it in almost every variety.
Almost literally every single water-flavoring in stores uses them, I go years without seeing unsweetened or sugar only. skratchlabs.com is sometimes in expensive bike or running stores though, yay.
Stuff like Liquid Death used to be just low amounts of sugar, but now has stevia in it too. The same happened with Bragg's drinking vinegar(???!).
It's wild to be someone who dislikes the flavor of these things and read labels, and watch the massive rise in use in despair. They're in lots of candy bars now too! That was a rather nasty discovery.
Aspartame has a pretty strong, weird metallic flavor to it, and a lot of the sugar alcohols taste... idk, like a belch after a slightly sweet chemical cocktail? Some taste... airy, or dusty, like an absence of flavor, like there's a gap where you'd usually taste something. Hard to describe but very unpleasant. And the flavor lingers for quite a while. Xylitol is mostly alright tho, sadly it's usually blended with other stuff nowadays.
Personally though I think stevia might be the worst, and it's getting added to everything lately, even stuff with more than enough regular sugar.
Honestly I'd prefer to not taste that, since I think most probably are pretty safe and fine (though I would be glad to see a reduction in sweetness in general). But it's really not a choice, nor have I "gotten used to it" in 40 years, despite it being extremely common.
This summarizes pretty well the three main problems I have. Most things are already way too sweetened, the trend of adding artificial sweeteners to something already naturally sweet ruins something that could be good, and many artificial sweeteners taste metallic and have weird aftertaste.
Its one thing for soda or other sweet items, I get the reduction in sugars there. Its just boggling how many foods people, particularly americans cant eat unless its sweet enough to be dessert
You know what, it's exactly what everything tasted like the week that I discovered that grown-ups could catch hand, foot and mouth from their children and also what my toddler was so upset about.
When I drink a non-diet cola, it tastes awful to me; sickeningly sweet. I don't have any problem with diet colas (though I don't like Diet Pepsi, it's slimy to me).
The main point is that it's not that X has an awful taste. It's that different people have different reactions to different Xs. It's not that X tastes bad unless you happen to get used to it.
I also found it super gross but after a few weeks of tough endurance, the chemical taste subsided and disappeared. It comes back after a week or so without Diet Coke.
But yeah I could hardly swallow it in the beginning.
It's an acquired taste. All alternative sweeteners taste differently from sugar. These days, I appreciate that such beverages don't leave a film in my mouth and have a little extra bite compared to sugar.
I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.
It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.
It's an acquired taste. I felt the same way, but when I started trying to get fitter a lot of protein supplements (protein drinks, protein bars, etc) contained artificial sweeteners. After eating these for a bit I got used to the flavour profile and even started to like some aspects of it.
The best comparison is beer. The first time I had it, I thought it was kind of gross. After trying it a few more times you get used to the bitter and fermented notes and the taste becomes more pleasant.
What I find weird is the assumption that everyone would like soda with artificial sweeteners, but I guess other don't taste it the same way. There are restaurants where I just give up and just get water. Strange because I assumed much of their profit came from drinks.
I know a few people like myself, that won't drink artificially sweetened soda, but we are the minority. Mostly people are confused when you tell them you don't like the taste, and that you drink so few sodas that the sugar doesn't make any difference in terms of health anyway.
I am convinced that something weird is going on with Pepsi Max though, the about of that stuff being consumed is absolutely insane. At events it not even close, it's Pepsi Max that people primarily consume.
I felt the same way, they used to taste awful to me, now I only notice a slight difference between Dr Pepper zero and regular. Maybe I just got older and my taste buds degraded?
A lot of the “zero” soft drinks are sweetened differently from the “diet” ones. There’s often a mix of different sweeteners so you don’t get too much of any one aftertaste.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
I felt this same way all my life, until 6-months ago, when I found a flavored sugar free mix I actually liked.
I returned from vacation in Mexico, where I was drinking Coke with sugar. When I returned home, regular Coke, made with Corn Syrup in the U.S., tasted off. I decided to take the opportunity to stop drinking it.
I tried dozens of low calorie drink mixes and found one I could tolerate. I did some research and all things pointed to that being healthier than my Coke habit.
My tastes have changed again since starting this, but I don’t drink Coke anymore.
One thing that might have helped was drinking aspartame in my coffee, where its aftertaste is harder to detect.
I should mention the only good side effect I’ve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I haven’t lost any weight by the change. It’s also much easier to make a diet work when I’m not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.
For me it was a persistence thing. Keep drinking and you don't really notice it any more. If anything sugared drinks now feel overly sticky or caramel-like to me. I can no longer enjoy non-diet coke.
Maybe, while I can relate to this feeling when it comes to some sweeteners commonly used in baked goods, I genuinely habe a hard tile distinguishing between sugar and sweetener containing beverages at this lokng.
Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.
I actually hate the taste of sugar in sodas after switching to diet for long enough. Taste is subjective and your preferences can change. That being said, saccharine is probably the better tasting of all of them, and the most maligned.
I've wondered this myself. The aftertaste on some of them is vile. The disappointing thing is that so many products use them when they reduce sugar, but sometimes I just want a reduced sugar product without any additional sweeteners. That seems hard to find these days.
I've been curious about the just-less-sugar idea myself. Like how would a Coca-Cola "dry" taste? Maybe the fact that nobody is offering this just means it doesn't taste good.
Some other countries have products with less sugar than the US's version. Fanta is a noticeable one. I just want a late afternoon beverage that isn't alcohol, doesn't have a crap ton of sugar, has no sugar substitutes, and isn't too heavy on the caffeine. Might go back to decaf.
Coca-Cola tried at least twice to market half-sugar Coke (C2 and Life). But instead of just doing half-sugar, they added aspartame and stevia respectively to compensate...
An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
As the article mentions, this is a false dichotomy.
If you're an ordinary person driven to be healthy, drink water. Water is great. If you're already drinking water, you should absolutely not replace it with whatever bottled crap that Coke or Pepsi is peddling, be it "smart water" or otherwise.
But for people with sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population in the developed world, replacing sugary drinks with zero-calorie artificially-sweetened drinks can be a net health benefit. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are bad for your health, and consumption of sugar water is a significant driver of these. Yes, you could be even healthier by drinking water instead; see above. But sugar is an addictive chemical (sugar withdrawl is, in fact, a thing), and not everyone is going to quit cold turkey.
(And for the record, I fully agree that people should be more cognizant of their gut biome and how their diet affects it, including being skeptical of aspartame and other random synthetic ingredients.)
Our bodies are designed to crave calories, but habitually ingesting too much sugar is more about hijacking dopamine release pathways than about fulfilling your body's basic need for satiation.
Or... you know, there could be some little actual effort in shedding such addiction (sugar ain't that hard), build a bit of character and walk off better off in many regards. Winning against addiction won't kill you, break you or similar damage but makes you (much) stronger and healthier as a bonus. Why do people shy away from such things?
But no, lets do everything possible just to keep the comfortable crappy couch lifestyle, no sweat, no effort, miserable health, miserable life. Then there are articles how US population (which suffers the most these shit HFCS addictions and resulting obesity problems) is depressed... for many reasons of course, but this sort of helpless victim mindset is one of them.
Have you ever met someone with a true addiction to food? I'm not talking about someone with a habitual craving for sweets. I'm talking about someone who consumes food compulsively like a chain-smoker; someone who, in the absence of whatever their favorites are, will consume and consume with little regard for what the food is: an entire jar of pickles, multiple pounds of grapes, a whole rotisserie chicken, et al.
I used to be one. I once ate six baked white onions¹ in one sitting before vomiting everywhere and rethinking my life.
I broke through naturally, but I wish GLP-1s had been prevalent at the time. Want to know what made breaking it so challenging?
1. Unlike other addictions, you have to continue consuming this one or else you will die.
2. Nearly every social event in the USA is tied in some way to food which means that you have to exercise willpower __constantly__ if you have a social life.
3. People are more interested in shaming you than supporting you. Most want you to fail.
The HFCS stuff always feels weird to me. Like sure, there's glycemic index impact, it is measurably different, etc... but I feel like people don't realize that "high" fructose is different only by a few percent from table sugar, and is "high" only because it's being compared to regular corn syrup.
Like... HFCS-42 is 42% fructose. That's lower than cane / table sugar, which is 50%. If you really think fructose is the problem, HFCS-42 is an improvement. Or even better, embrace regular corn syrup because it has little to no fructose normally! It's nearly 100% glucose! (This is why 42% is "high")
And if it's glycemic index that people are worried about, throw in a tiny amount of dissolvable fiber in your drink and it'll lower that by more than the sugar balance affects it.
I don't believe it is measurably different! Apart from what you noted (HFCS is "high fructose" relative to normal corn syrup, not table sugar), ordinary sugars are broken down instantly by the human body.
The subtext and I think valid concern about HFCS is that it drastically reduces the cost of calorically sweetening foods and especially beverages.
But people routinely cruise past that to claims that HFCS itself is uniquely harmful to humans, and it isn't, at least no more than sugar is.
I think it's fairly safe to say there's a measurable difference - fructose generally (afaict) has noticeably lower insulin responses compared to glucose. Though it's still very minor compared to the total change vs none of course, and I haven't seen much of anything showing evidence of a benefit compared to the other - just "technically different".
Definitely agreed that there's a weird demonizing of HFCS in particular though. Maybe because it sounds technical? It's easy to point to because it's common, and it doesn't sound "natural".
And personally I don't think HFCS's clear manufacturing benefits really affect much, it's just the most convenient so it's the most used. The addictive qualities of sugar are much more valuable, IMO They™ would continue to sweeten things at the same level even if it were completely banned. They'd just use something else, and sucrose is also very cheap.
On the other hand, allowing people to feed their sweet addictions only re-enforces and desensitizates them further. So while you are probably safe drinking ungodly amounts of aspartame water, you won't find equivalent substitutes for sugar in other foods and you might suffer rebound consumption there, perhaps to a much higher total caloric intake versus just drinking sugary water in moderation.
Another thing to watch out for is caffeine input which is often associated with sweetened drinks. Caffeine is a diuretic and you will see yourself drinking can after can of diet coke while not quite quenching your thirst or properly hydrating yourself. This is documented to lead to intense muscle pain and unexplained migraines for people who do physical work and abuse these types of drinks, and can't be good for your kidneys long term, even under the assumption that sweeteners are 100% safe.
Overall, just drink plenty of water and use everything else in moderation seems like a solid advice.
How would that work? It's hydrolized into its constituents, which are present in higher quantities in apples and chicken and other foods, in the upper GI. Do you have a cite for this?
Did you read the second paper carefully? It seems to model direct gut exposure to aspartame under experimental conditions. In reality, aspartame is quickly broken into its constituents in the upper GI. Capsaicin will also quickly damage epithelial cells in a petri dish! It's still widely and uncontroversially present in ordinary foodstuffs.
Does aspartame cause intestinal inflammation, or do artificial sweeteners sans aspartame cause intestinal inflammation? Or which specific ones do?
Cause reading the blogpost, it explicitly calls out that most other artificial sweeteners do not get broken down "at all", suggesting their in-body lifecycles are quite different. I'd expect this not to apply to aspartame as a result, and thus it not being a missed angle at all:
> Incidentally, this same logic does not apply to other artificial sweeteners which mostly aren’t broken down at all.
>An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome.
Everything affects the gut microbiome. Every single type of food you eat alters it. Taking a walk alters it. Taking a flight alters it.
The whole "but it changes the microbiome" thing needs to be qualified by whether that change is meaningfully relevant in some direction, and evidence thus far, for most sweeteners, is unconvincing. 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016 is the only mildly legitimate research on this (a seemingly well executed RCT), but even it shows a rapidly fading effect, and no effect for aspartame given it's the subject of this submission.
But researchers who want a bit of attention (and a remarkable amount of research is plied not for useful results, but knowing that certain topics are easy mass media coverage) know it's gold to write a paper saying a sweetener changed the microbiome, because it plays into a fear people have (people are always susceptible to the "too good to be true" aha moment). Or worse still the garbage observational studies that conflate that people with metabolic issues are more likely to use sweeteners, so flip cause and effect and claim that sweeteners cause metabolic issues.
>What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
If people ate calorie-restricted, balanced diets, and limited simple carbs and sugars, most food problems fade away (presuming they aren't eating overtly poisonous things, which many of our ancestors did). But that isn't reality. In reality sugar is one of the greatest health crises of our times, and finding some mechanism of reducing that problem is beneficial. Better still people should tame the sweet tooth, but we live in reality.
And FWIW, you can do the reductionist thing that wellness grifters do with most any food. Loads of "balanced whole diets" are full of crazy, scary constituents, many of which are known carcinogens. Spices and herbs are full of deleterious ingredients. And so on.
I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.
There's no harm to doing that if you can do it. But advice like "just eat healthy, natural food" is not really something most people can stick to long term. I know I can't!
When I find myself in a stressful situation the craving for sweets is very strong and artificial sweetners at least mean I have options that won't dump a bunch of calories/refined sugar into my body.
I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.
Look up CDED (Crohn's disease exclusion diet) which is the first line of treatment for pediatric Crohn's and now it's increasingly being used for adults. So don't dismiss the diet link despite the facts and research.
n = 1 but I clearly feel the effect when I start drinking aspartam drinks a few times a week. So much so that I just stopped drinking them.
I didn't use to. But I stopped rafined sugar for a year and compensated with coca zero. After that, guts never been quite the same and it took some copious amount of probiotics with regular doctor checks to feel better.
Even then, it's still no back up to baseline, and now drinking aspartam more than once is upsetting.
People say this about MSG too, but when you blind-test them the effect vanishes, which is unsurprising because the constituents in MSG are, like aspartame, widely prevalent in traditional foodstuffs.
In Italy we have an "indipendent research lab" that become really famous for a study that demonstrates that aspartame may cause cancer.
The same institute published few years later a study about 5G emissions that may cause cancer.
“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding factor.”
Not a medical professional, but inflammation is something different from cancer that they mentioned in their website.
And we need to understand also the trial scenario: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
I think you and I agree. This is about the Italian cancer aspartame study you referenced (Ctrl-f on cancer). This is EFSA saying the study has major issues and reiterating that aspartame is safe.
I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.
I know this lab! Ramazi Institute or something right?
We covered it in this podcast I used to produce (not explicitly the subject, they came up re: artificial sweetener studies and we explored them a bit). They’re very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.
There is a waste area in the Italian society that is very prone to the conspiracy theory. Some famous journalists and some TV shows are very good in spreading this news.
In the past, a party (M5S, now pivoting to a left wing, populistic, pro Putin movement) took 34% at the election, just taking advantage of those crazy ideas.
Not mentioned in the article: there is a really obvious biological effect of aspartame: it triggers your sweetness receptors. And you have them in your mouth (duh!) and elsewhere in your body including in your gut.
One might imagine that aspartame triggers the receptors in the gut and that this has some effect. Maybe different sweeteners have different effects, too, since they are metabolized differently.
There's not much question that there's some linkage between perception and chemical processes in the body, but there's also no real evidence that those pathways are causally linked to significant metabolic impact.
Your upper GI system quickly transforms aspartame into constituent substances that are widely present in ordinary food.
Different sweeteners certainly have different impacts, but this thread is about aspartame, the best studied and probably the safest of all of them.
I'll impart my n=1 experience, since I've been using powdered Aspartame (in combination with Stevia) in drinks and baking for almost 20 years, and I've tried almost all available sugar substitutes over the years.
We already know from glycemic index charts that almost all sugar substitutes impact blood glucose to a certain degree, and there are only a few that have no impact. When sucralose became widely available, I bought some to try to bake with, but the carrier was maltodextrin - a starch, which prevented me from using it. Undeterred, I purchased pure sucralose drops in a neutral liquid. The sickly-sweet mouth feel after consuming sucralose is a bit tough to take [0], but that wasn't the worst of it. It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it ("Several studies have shown that sucralose is not physiologically innocuous").[1]
Then I read how sucralose is produced; literally thousands of pounds of sugar is used and converted to produce a few pounds of sucralose. It's being pushed hard by the industry, and I can only think of the 'vilification' of cheaper sweeteners such as Aspartame by industry, much in the same way that saccharin was vilified by flawed [2] studies in the 1970s - just as Aspartame was being developed as a commercial product.
Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, and sugar causes irreparable damage to millions of people around the world. I find it somewhat odd how people react to what appears to be a flawed and dubious Aspartame study, when there are much larger elephants in the room.
> It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it
Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.
Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.
As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.
This is an article of faith on the Internet, but I haven't seen a credible cite to back up a material, meaningful insulin response to the mere taste of sweetness. Worth remembering: insulin response to aspartame has always been a major research focus, like a day-one concern; it was tested fasted, unfasted, in great quantities and small, with food and in beverages.
From personal experience (sorry, n=1), I can eat pure Aspartame powder and have zero reaction - no increase in glucose, no "anticipatory" response - nothing.
When I have other sweeteners such as taking a swig of a stevia-laden diet iced tea, I have a reaction. I used to be able to drink the exact same iced tea when they used Aspartame with no effect. I don't think your body is "fooled" by sweet tastes - it only reacts when there is actually something to process.
The fact sucralose is being added into all kinds of products has removed many choices for me, which is unfortunate as the selection was quite small to begin with.
I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.
Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.
My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.
What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc
Those are excellent choices; pure monk fruit drops are great, but they cost a small fortune compared to others, and the affordable version is usually mixed with erythitol, which increase blood glucose, so that's a non-starter. Amazon and local health food stores sell a "tub" of stevia for a decent price, and that's my main go-to, but the bitter aftertaste is off-putting, hence Aspartame.
Prepared food is pretty much a no-go; there's only a single energy bar I purchase that uses stevia only, but I make my bars from whey protein isolate, cocoa powder, and peanut butter powder, plus roasted flax, almond flour, almond milk, and sweeteners. I did skip sweeteners completely for some time, thinking that I'd "get used to it", but I really didn't - we're programmed for something sweet!
Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?
Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.
The sweetness in stevia is very different from sugar/hfcs... it has a flavor of its' own and is somewhat off-putting if you aren't used to it. Using a mix of sweeteners is often better overall flavor than any single sweetener (stevia, aspartame, ace-k, etc) on its' own.
I really wish Coke Life had better marketing and was more popular... It was a much smaller amount of real sugar combined with stevia for sweetness. It was lower calorie, but not zero, and probably a much better option than either full sugar or zero sugar.
I keep getting people telling me this doesn't happen. GAH. Instant migraine trigger for me too, along with sucralose and several other artificial sweeteners.
I can tell when a mixed drink uses a soda with Aspartame in it. My mouth instantly feels like it's covered in a thin film of plastic and the migraine is usually just around the corner.
Everyone in my family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, have the same reaction, too.
When I drink a single can of Diet Coke or anything with aspartame, I get crippling stomach aches and then sudden diarrhea, all within about 2 hrs and very predictable. It's definitely not harmless. This doesn't happen to me with stevia or sucralose, and I know sucralose isn't good for your either.
Coke Zero is sweetened with aspartame and phosphoric acid. It's just formulated differently to avoid the taste associated with Diet Coke, which some find unpleasant.
> Coca-Cola updated the recipe for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in the US, quietly adding stevia to the existing blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium (Ace-K) in late 2023/early 2024
-there are concerns that aspartic acid which is produced "can act as an excitotoxin, overstimulating nerve cells and potentially leading to neuronal injury and cell death" with chronic exposure or high doses
-potentially carcinogenic
-no nutritional value (thus no "need" to consume it)
Fruit, honey, or maple syrup in contrast are natural without some of these concerns in the same way
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
There's also an ever-escalating sweetness issue. When fresh fruit was plenty sweet enough and you get used to this level of sweetness, everything else seems to taste pretty bland. If this becomes the normal (I suspect it kind of has), everything gets sweetened; yogurts, crackers, bread, etc. The method those things get sweetened could be aspartame, but many will not be.
Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.
Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.
Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.
I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.
Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.
Some people are super tasters and they'll always have that problem. But most people stop noticing the aftertaste after a week or two of regular consumption. But I agree, when I started sugar free that aftertaste was nasty.
Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.
Fact 5 is a false fact. Taking facts 1-4 into consideration with the (0th?) fact that it is considered the most studied ingredient is enough evidence. This is how scientists come to a consensus. Going beyond that is obscene to science.
I don't drink things with Aspartame because it makes me feel queasy. I don't know of any mechanism that causes that effect. Occasionally I encounter something that I would not have expected to contain Aspartame that I notice the feeling before I have even considered the possibility that it might be present. I take that as a sign that it is not psychological.
The increase is cancers in younger age groups was noticed earlier than that, and the cancers can't be expected to occur instantly upon exposure to a carcinogen.
Where does the confidence that it is due to sweeteners come from? This isn‘t about your comment in particular, more of a general observation.
Many people instinctively attribute this rise in colon cancer to diet products, almost pretending as if it is the only thing that has meaningfully changed over the past 40 years or so. Others like to point to changing consumption habits in people drinking more sugary beverages.
It is almost as if everyone is projecting their personal believes into this. But the truth seems frustratingly simple: we really just do not know yet
I'm still expecting the cause to be HPV and increase in anal sex. Some studies seem to point that way (and other studies that say it might not), but it hasn't been proven yet. However it would make sense, considering that it leads to cervical cancer, throat cancer, etc.
Not an expert on this by any means, just went down this rabbit hole when deciding if I should be asking about my son getting the HPV vaccine when it was first made available to males, and before it was broadly recommended for men.
A rise in meat (esp red & cured meats) consumption and a drop in vegetable consumption would also do it, particularly if it were disproportionately occurring in certain cohorts.
12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.
> The history of aspartame and the FDA is contentious and sort of infuriating
Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.
So basically there's no scientific consensus either way, there's no tradition of using it and there are extreme commercial incentives for harm so it's a no from me
Not sure how you get to that conclusion from the article when it ends with the conclusion from 5 health agencies that it's safe (and then more references from the scientific community that it's safe).
> So basically there's no scientific consensus either way
"The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion."
"While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"
There is no such thing as "it's just a normal chemical". Sugar is "just a normal chemical" that doesn't mean refining it and injecting it into products with a commercial incentive to habit form hasn't helped create a health crisis
> "While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"
You just cherry-picked this from where they are only talking about the chemicals it breaks down into which yes, does not alone prove it's safe. But then it (right after in the section titled "The scientific consensus") goes on to list the science from most major health organizations and concludes with the quote I shared. Did you just ignore all the evidence presented because it doesn't fir your confirmation bias?
Assuming, of course, that one's body _does_ naturally produce insulin. I'm glad it and other artificial sweeteners exist and are as prevalent as they are.
> Half of the world’s aspartame is made by Ajinomoto of Tokyo—the same company that first brought us MSG back in 1909.
There is nothing wrong with MSG either
Indeed. It turns out that “MSG headaches” are just high sodium level headaches, either through dehydration, unbalanced electrolytes, elevated blood pressure or whatever else higher than normal sodium levels cause headaches. The same headache could be caused by salt. MSG actually makes recipes require less of other flavor ingredients, including salt. It’s also often found in dishes that still contain relatively massive amounts of salt.
So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just don’t eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.
I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespread danger to public health from these additives, but it doesn't mean there aren't still individuals whose health gets messed up (including legitimate headache or migraine symptoms) by these additives.
> discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG
This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this. MSG is nearly identical to the glutamic acid in other foods. If it were true they'd be unable to tolerate parmesan cheese, soy sauce, aged meats, tomatoes, mushrooms, and seaweed.
Glutamate is considered a migraine trigger, though. Many people do avoid or limit those foods for that reason. Thankfully it doesn’t appear to be a trigger for me, because I love all those things.
There is some controversy about dietary glutamate being directly responsible for migraine. It’s common in the brain already. It’s only allowed selectively through the blood-brain barrier. However it could trigger other types of headache, and those can trigger migraines. Also, apparently more of it is formed in the brain when there are high levels of lysine and ornithine in the body. Many of the foods with high levels of glutamate also have high levels of those aminos.
High levels or low levels of sodium in the body can also be a migraine trigger. MSG is lower in sodium than table salt, but it is additional sodium. Many of the issues blamed on it though are after eating foods that contain MSG and a high amount of salt as well. That’s also true of many of the glutamate-containing foods for that matter (gravies, miso, soy sauce, aged meats).
Doctors recommend eliminating one single ingredient at a time to find your triggers. However, I’m sure many people don’t control for salt when eliminating MSG or natural food glutamate.
Elevated brain glutamate levels are associated with migraines, but there’s no solid evidence that dietary glutamate is a trigger for migraines.
The number of people avoiding it is not evidence of anything other than public perception.
Elimination diets are also super impressive.
I agree on all your points. If someone suffers from migraines, though, it’s worth trying figuring out plausible triggers even if the evidence isn’t really solid.
It’s important not to conflate ingredients when doing an elimination diet, though. Separating restaurants or prepackaged foods at home that use MSG from those that use a lot of salt (or preservatives, or artificial dyes, or “natural flavors”, or any number of other things) is pretty difficult. I’ve seen several instances over the years of people assuming a restaurant used MSG based on getting a migraine, even when that restaurant doesn’t use MSG in any of their dishes. I’m not even a doctor, just an interested person with migraines. I’m sure a nutritionist or headache specialist could tell us stories.
There's a pretty good finding here[1] about elimination diets being inappropriate for most patients. Basically without any diagnosis of something like celiac, allergy, etc you have a high risk of misidentifying foods as causes because the co-occur with non food triggers. The literature just seems super weak for most alleged dietary triggers.
[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12609589/#sec8-nutr...
> This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this
Nevertheless, it continues to give her migraines even in small portions where other foods don't. I don't doubt it could be some byproduct from the process of MSG salt's synthesis or cooking with it rather than the actual glutamic acid, or some allergy as others have suggested.
I wouldn't be so strong as to categorically say that MSG can't cause migraines in any of the human race as you so claim though. There's so much we don't know about human biological mechanisms in niche cases; even water can cause allergic reactions in certain individuals (see Aquagenic Urticaria). What is true generally is not always true specifically when it comes to human health.
I'm curious: have you done a (single or double) blind test where you prepare dishes (selected at random) with or without MSG/aspartame/yeast extract and record the effects?
To be clear: not saying you should, just wondering how you came the conclusion that those ingredients are the trigger.
Why are you arguing when the internet expert already stated that is impossible.
MSG is the salt form, wherre the glutamate is bound to a sodium atom. In food, my understanding is that MSG will split into two things: sodium ion and glutamate ion. The difference between adding MSG to food and food being already high in glutamate would be the salt content.
I don't recommend telling people their subjective experience isn't true- you don't know for sure that they don't actually get migraines from MSG. I think it's fine to tell people that often their subjective experiences can be colored by prior knowledge, and people often ascribe causes to unrelated factors. (My personal belief is that most people who say they got a headache from MSG experienced a headache, but consuming glutamate was not the cause).
For some people, migraines can be triggered by things like light or certain smells. It's not at all impossible that a certain taste can also trigger them.
That's very interesting because cheese, paneer and cured meats do trigger wife's migraines. I had not considered that richness is n glutamic acid is a common factor.
The personal, anecdotal relation seems strong on the cheese and paneer component. Even if she had something not aware that it contains either of those it would trigger a migraine, sometimes not immediately though, seems to take a few to several hours.
Will have to try a blind testing with MSG.
Oh she/you should check out mast cell activation syndrome (mcas). Basically different foods increase histamine levels in the body or prevent its degradation. Old proteins and fermented foods are particularly problematic because microbes break down the protein and release histamine precursors.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Well, my dad got migraines from everything° on that list bar tomatoes - though he did from dried tomatoes, so does that count as everything on the list? I don't know the biological pathway, but it was neither self-diagnosed, self-derived, nor made from woo; he visited several real-MD neurologists before someone identified the chemical(s) at fault, and gave him a list of foods not to eat.
°In fact it was all cheeses, not just parmesan; the more aged the worse. And also chocolate, and olives. Basically anything aged or fermented. I don't know how that lines up with MSG's chemistry, but he was careful with MSG, though nothing like as avoidant as he was with soy sauce and cheese.
Migraines are complicated enough that I'd buy a psychosomatic trigger, maybe?
Migraines can possibly be triggered by cause and effect chains several intermediate causes long. It could help explain for example why certain things are triggers for certain migraine patients and not others.
Aspartame is also a trigger, but the fact that one person has multiple triggers doesn’t mean they are related at all.
Now you’re right that MSG is more than sodium. Sodium can be a headache trigger, including migraines. Glutamate is also a migraine trigger and a fairly common one. It doesn’t happen to be one for me. However, it is a neurotransmitter that is involved in pain signaling. It’s understandable how it could easily trigger a migraine or make the pain worse.
Some triggers for some people actually help other people with migraines, like caffeine. Migraines are such an incredibly complex topic that there are medical specialists for them. Mine can be fairly debilitating, but are rare enough I don’t qualify for most prescriptions. So I definitely understand how trigger management and symptom management are a big deal.
For me aspartame only just recently started giving me headaches, and it happens every time now, but not MSG or salt. No idea why.
Sounds like an allergy.
I definitely wouldn't be surprised if that were the case
Or psychosomatic.
It's possible she believes that those items all trigger her migraines therefore her body gives her a migraine when she believes she's had one of her triggers.
A big tell would be her getting a migraine and blaming it on "hidden MSG" in a food item that doesn't have it.
Or her not getting migraine from foods that have MSG naturally but is never pointed out. Like tomatoes.
It's funny... reading this thread, I'm reminded of a friend of mine who indeed gets migraines from tomatoes. That was actually what she figured out first; the MSG connection came later.
This effect is very obvious on me. I consistently get headaches when my sodium intake is too high. I don’t even use MSG in my own cooking but occasionally I add too much salt.
Might consider a mix of electrolytes instead of just salt. I usually keep a container mixed with "snake juice" ratios for electrolytes and use that to season with instead of salt alone. I'll also sometimes put a pinch in my water, not nearly snake juice amounts, when I get a bit off and start getting leg cramps.
I drank sodas with aspartame just fine for many decades. Then one day they suddenly started giving me migraines any time I had one, so I had to quit cold turkey. No other amount of caffeine, regular sodas, salty foods, MSG-laden meals etc. seem to trigger it though, and I have no idea why.
It triggers a headache for me as well. Happens whether I'm previously aware of its presence in the product or not. I'm fine accepting that it's a generally safe chemical that has been thoroughly studied and I just have a quirk, but I also don't want my quirk to be dismissed because studies don't validate it.
The headaches are replicable and severe enough that it's turned me off of all artificial sweeteners, although I doubt they all have the same effect. I don't want to risk it.
> So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good.
Salt and MSG are sometimes said to strengthen existing flavors, but I'm pretty sure they mainly just contribute their own unique taste: salty and umami.
(There could of course theoretically be some interactions with other taste receptors, similar to how sweet things make things taste much less bitter, e.g. cocoa, but that is a relatively specific effect and not one that acts as a general flavor enhancer.)
If you lick plain MSG, it tastes bitter. Add it to something very sweet and it just tastes bizarre. Sprinkle it on fried chicken and it tastes like you just dumped chicken gravy on it and pumped up the taste. It really does mainly amplify flavors.
And while MSG tastes very wrong in sweets, sweets generally always taste better with a bit of salt. Salt is its own flavor and a flavor amplifier.
Plain MSG absolutely does not taste bitter. I just tried some (again) to confirm, it's not salty & not bitter. Just a strong flavor of its own.
Yeah it just tastes like straight up "savory."
Almost tastes like fat more than anything.
> Almost tastes like fat more than anything.
Probably because a lot of fat sources have high levels of glutamates in them. You're not tasting the fat, per-say, but the other stuff that isn't fat. It's why beef tallow is so much tastier than neutral oil. Same level of fat.
Yeah, I also just tried it, it doesn't taste bitter at all. It tastes like clear soup broth, which usually contains a lot of MSG.
Doesnt all sodium chemicals like salt and baking soda increase taste perception?
Ajinomoto is also the worlds largest (95% market share) supplier of build up film necessary for integrated circuit packaging.
https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...
Wild. I had no idea.
There's not "nothing" wrong with MSG. But msg is fine in moderation, just like salt, fat and sugar are all fine in moderation too
If there's anything wrong with MSG that isn't simply due to sodium intake, I think it's unknown to science (at least in the sense that there's no theory about it with any wide uptake). MSG is also intensively studied and has a very similar mechanistic story to aspartame.
One thing that is "wrong" with MSG is that a lot of restaurants overuse it as a condiment. So you're paying money for a good food experience, but you're getting the taste equivalent of instant ramen noodles.
I actually _like_ instant ramen noodles and MSG, and I use MSG when cooking. But it feels like cheating when fancy restaurants also use it.
> So you're paying money for a good food experience, but you're getting the taste equivalent of instant ramen noodles.
Restaurants, even nicer ones, cut corners. This especially flared up in the news a couple of years ago when a posh UK restaurant served a cheese plate at a decently high price, where the label was still on the cheese and revealed it had come from an ordinary supermarket’s house brand.
I’ve seen this personally, too. I ate sushi today at a sushi place where the menu said “crab sticks” were an ingredient of some rolls, but these were surely the imitation crab meat called surimi.
Or another Asian place in my area is known for offering “duck” on the menu, but what you get is mock duck[0] wrapped around the meat, to make people think it’s the duck skin, but the meat itself is chicken.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_duck
Sure, but it feels like a silly distinction. The famous example is water, which fits those same criteria. Would we that that there's not "nothing" wrong with water?
*Would we say that there's not "nothing" wrong with water?
What's wrong with it?
It contributes to sodium intake, if you're watching out for that. Probably at about a third of table salt's sodium by mass, though.
Might cause overeating too, because it's tasty.
That's it.
Tasty food will be my downfall.
And water
But they were involved in price fixing lysine. And that was wrong.
Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):
But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]
[1] https://www.self.com/story/what-is-msg-and-is-it-bad-for-you
The same This American Life episode raised serious doubts about Dr. Steel's claims, which is mentioned in the article you link:
> When reporters tried to corroborate Dr. Steel’s claims, however, holes started appearing, according to the This American Life episode. Chief among them: There actually was a real Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, and his biographical details seemed to match those provided in the letter, like his professional title, the name of his research institute, and the date of his move to the US.
> While both Dr. Steel and Dr. Ho Man Kwok had died by the time the digging began in earnest, their surviving family members were able to shed some light on the situation. Dr. Ho Man Kwok’s children and former colleagues were adamant that Dr. Ho Man Kwok had in fact written the letter. Meanwhile, Dr. Steel’s daughter said her father was a lifelong prankster who loved pulling one over on people. With this testimony in mind, the reporters came to the conclusion that Dr. Ho Man Kwok was most likely the true author and Dr. Steel had taken credit for years as an elaborate practical joke.
The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.
The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.
It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.
Yeah, it's a frequent target of the naturalistic fallacy. But to me the most honest criticism of it is not liking the taste. Health-wise, almost certainly better than the sugar it's replacing.
But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.
Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.
Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.
It's not that everything has to be sweet, but rather that, for example, Coke really isn't Coke without sweetness and people just happen to enjoy Coke. And if you're going to enjoy a Coke, Coke Zero or Diet Coke is better for your health.
Of course there are other things like coffee that really are not defined by sweetness and can be perfectly enjoyed unsweetened.
A guy on the Internet recently reverse-engineered the Coke formula and published the recipe. I always liked Diet Coke, the regular one is just too sweet for me.
So I replicated the recipe, and I actually liked unsweetened Cola! It feels a bit tea-like, but also more acidic. Kinda like coffee but without the bitter undertone.
If you like Coke drinks, I highly recommend it.
I've seen a number of attempted coke replicas, but this one sounds like the best. Would you kindly share the link?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc
There are lots of cola recopies, why is this guy confident he has Coke's?
He used chromatography and mass spec to match the chemical composition, along with taste tests.
Many people also tried this recipe and can't tell the difference in blind tests between it and various types of Coke.
The Japanese diet, which people in the west sort of accept as default-healthy, is also heavily sweetened; that is, it uses "sweet" as a flavor component probably even more than Americans do. Japanese home cooking adds sugar to savory dishes the way Americans add black pepper.
I think it's obvious that Japanese people generally consume less sugar than Americans do, so it's not my argument that sugar is fine or that the western diet isn't problematic.
Rather: the idea that there's some moral/health advantage to avoiding sweetness is unfounded, kind of culturally blinkered, won't hold up under scrutiny.
And as always, too much of anything isn't good for you either. A sugary soda on occasion won't do much harm, but some have several a day or it's the only thing they will drink.
Sugar please. I can't stand the taste of aspartame. They've started using Dextrin to replace sugars in confectionary (Mars Galaxy minstrels) and they taste awful.
I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.
Sounds like aspartame is a boon for your health if its addition means you eat fewer Mars bars and drink less sweetened bubbly water. Hooray for aspartame!
freedom is unhealthy
It certainly can be. You're free to jump off a cliff but you'll have to suffer the consequences.
maybe I like the consequences
In that case feel free to jump. Eat candy bars, drink sweetened coloured preserved bubbly water and do all those other things you want. Isn't freedom great? As long as your freedom does not curtail another's feel free to do what you want within the bounds of the law. I'll even go so far as to add that some laws can be violated without consequences because they're outdated, superfluous, bought and paid for by those who stand to profit from their establishment or otherwise not conducive to a thriving society. Of course there is that problem with the consequences of your and my freedom: if you decide to indulge in too much freedom and as a result of that incur large medical bills from cliff-jumping, the mentioned candy bar and sweetened water diet and other similarly unhealthy habits it would not be fair to limit my freedom to do what I want with my hard earned money by claiming the tax payer (where I live) or insurance customer (where most people on this forum live) need to pay for your habits. As it stands this is the case but it doesn't have to be that way. Maybe there should be extra insurance premiums for habitual cliff jumpers and candy bar customers? Of course this is not easy to implement since it would not be fair to those eating one of those bars every other month or people who jump from 2 m high cliffs.
I much prefer sucralose to aspartame
Sucralose is a genotoxin: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
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It's probably not great if you're drinking dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day.
All I really know is don't take health advice from influencers, especially if they're selling something, and don't take health advice from people who support deregulation (less industry transparency, oversight, and consequences won't make food or anything safer.)
Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.
That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.
I lost a lot of weight using diet soda in the evenings as an alternative to snacking.
It turns out, drinking a lot of what is essentially just water, is actually pretty healthy.
The small Coke Zero cans make it tough to have just one. I typically will have 2 small cans with a meal which feels roughly equivalent to one regular sized can
Except that four cans of soda is not much more than a single 44oz soda fountain drink at QT and folk gobble down those often 3 times a day.
44oz? That's huge. I couldn't imagine drinking one of those a day.
I think most things aren't great if you have them in quantity. Variety in your diet is a good thing
> dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day
In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be
Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
Would this insulin response be detectable with a CGM?
The answer is no - sucralose, saccharin, aspartame; it doesn’t matter, diet soda and artificial sweetener does not affect blood sugar in any detectable way, at least for me. It was one of the first things I checked when I got my CGM.
“It will crash your blood sugar” and “it will spike your blood sugar despite not having carbohydrates” are myths.
There is no meaningful insulin response to noncaloric sweeteners.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7014832/
Did you read this paper? Do you really think this is good evidence for the claim? I'd love to hear why.
I could give a fulsome critique of it but I think the simpler thing to say just to kick this off is that I could give you a PubMed cite to back basically any claim, true or otherwise.
You really need a large volume of repeated results by different groups doing the experiment/research so you get the proper regression to the mean. Individual papers are more important at saying "here is something interesting that others should also check out".
Right, but what about this particular paper? What do you think of it?
You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).
Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?
If people didn't make their decisions based on ads they wouldn't exist.
For those who want diet cola without aspartame, there's an alternative:
https://sodastream.com/products/diet-cola-4-pack
If you’re concerned with aspartame, why wouldn’t you be concerned about sucralose and acesulfame potassium?
If someone feels aspartame makes them feel bad, they can try something else, and see how it makes them feel.
That was the point behind my comment.
I want to say a "well duh", but it seems it's not common sense that too much of anything is generally bad for someone.
(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)
Health outcomes of lottery winners suggest it's not great.
Why not?
The larger the impact of the information you are sharing, the more clicks and follows you will get.
People trying to become content creators quickly realize that pointing out a 30cm rock headed towards Earth gets no money, err, attention. So they drop the 30cm part, call it a massive chunk of rock that will rip through the atmosphere, and suddenly they are getting much more money, sorry, attention.
This is what makes social media so depraved, any idiot who makes a good word salad can profit from being an idiot.
Is it really so "depraved" if they are simply smart enough to notice what generates revenue and acting on that?
Of course we could argue that making money off people is wrong, but I think that is a losing battle in a capitalist society, which is most of the world right now from what I understand.
Bias?
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I don't understand how prevalent Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners are when they taste so bad. They don't even taste sweet to me, just "wrong" in a way that permeates my entire mouth.
Is this a genetic thing?
It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.
And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.
Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
They all have variations of a bitter aftertaste to me. It’s not sweet or pleasant at all.
And it’s a different form of bitterness than the one you get from kale/collared greens, brussel sprouts, etc., whichi quite enjoy. I _almost_ want to drink a diet drink along with one of the “bitter” vegetable or even a crème brûlée to quantify the difference.
None of them do with the exception of Stevia, which sort-of kind-of tastes a bit like rum, if I could describe it.
I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.
You're conflating two different things. Unless you have some very weird genetic condition, it does taste sweet to you. That is, it activates the same sweet receptors on your tongue and in other parts of your mouth that sugar activates - and more or less to the same extent (relative to concentration).
However, sugar isn't simply a sweet taste. It also has some amount of flavor, and so do the artificial sweeteners, and it is these flavor differences that you (and many others) dislike. Flavor is something that happens in the air tract, and is far more complex than taste.
It absolutely does not. The places on my tongue that taste sweet and the places that taste aspartame are completely different (the latter strongly at back of my throat, sugar strongly on my tongue).
It's a long standing myth that there are different taste regions on the tongue.
Fair enough. It's certainly not like that for most people though; which falls back to the _to you_ issue.
Maybe, as you questioned, there is a genetic component. Or just "something different about you" (not necessarily genetic).
No, this is pretty common in folks who don't drown their taste buds and systems in tons of it every day. Then you feel it anytime its there, since its pretty rare and its disgusting chemical bleh, one feels it fully.
Its a bit like smoking cigarettes - to many non-smokers, its disgusting beyond description, smearing face with old feces wouldn't be worse. To many smokers its mild, pleasant, they enjoy it with lunch etc.
I almost never drink artificial sweetened drinks.
But when I do, I barely notice a difference, and it doesn't really bother me.
Why is it so hard to believe that people's taste perception vary?
> It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
That's great, but it still means I can't have soft drinks any more.
Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
At this point I think it almost definitely is "most" in USA at least, going by volume/count/shelf-space.
Like >90% of energy drinks use at least one (normal red bull is a rare exception), and diet sodas typically have more shelf space than regular from what I see, often by a huge margin.
Almost all gatorade-likes have it now too (I typically can't find even a single counter-example in a store, unless they're one of the oddballs carrying regular gatorade (most do not)), often also including regular sugars. Even stuff you'd hope would be maximally-simple like pedialyte has it in almost every variety.
Almost literally every single water-flavoring in stores uses them, I go years without seeing unsweetened or sugar only. skratchlabs.com is sometimes in expensive bike or running stores though, yay.
Stuff like Liquid Death used to be just low amounts of sugar, but now has stevia in it too. The same happened with Bragg's drinking vinegar(???!).
It's wild to be someone who dislikes the flavor of these things and read labels, and watch the massive rise in use in despair. They're in lots of candy bars now too! That was a rather nasty discovery.
> Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
All soft drinks are contaminated with artificial sweeteners.
What artificial sweetener is in regular Coke?
Don't know, I don't like Coke but that's a separate issue.
If you keep drinking them, you'll likely acquire a taste. I didn't used to like any artificial sugar flavors, but now I've grown accustomed to them.
It's not "I don't like the taste".
It is "these taste like they're contaminated with antifreeze".
They taste like they've been intentionally adulterated with the stuff they use to stop people drinking poisonous things.
Aspartame has a pretty strong, weird metallic flavor to it, and a lot of the sugar alcohols taste... idk, like a belch after a slightly sweet chemical cocktail? Some taste... airy, or dusty, like an absence of flavor, like there's a gap where you'd usually taste something. Hard to describe but very unpleasant. And the flavor lingers for quite a while. Xylitol is mostly alright tho, sadly it's usually blended with other stuff nowadays.
Personally though I think stevia might be the worst, and it's getting added to everything lately, even stuff with more than enough regular sugar.
Honestly I'd prefer to not taste that, since I think most probably are pretty safe and fine (though I would be glad to see a reduction in sweetness in general). But it's really not a choice, nor have I "gotten used to it" in 40 years, despite it being extremely common.
This summarizes pretty well the three main problems I have. Most things are already way too sweetened, the trend of adding artificial sweeteners to something already naturally sweet ruins something that could be good, and many artificial sweeteners taste metallic and have weird aftertaste.
Its one thing for soda or other sweet items, I get the reduction in sugars there. Its just boggling how many foods people, particularly americans cant eat unless its sweet enough to be dessert
That's exactly my experience. What's interesting is that the taste is also very similar to the taste/sensation I get when I have a viral infection.
You know what, it's exactly what everything tasted like the week that I discovered that grown-ups could catch hand, foot and mouth from their children and also what my toddler was so upset about.
When I drink a non-diet cola, it tastes awful to me; sickeningly sweet. I don't have any problem with diet colas (though I don't like Diet Pepsi, it's slimy to me).
The main point is that it's not that X has an awful taste. It's that different people have different reactions to different Xs. It's not that X tastes bad unless you happen to get used to it.
You're underestimating how gross it was to me at first.
I also found it super gross but after a few weeks of tough endurance, the chemical taste subsided and disappeared. It comes back after a week or so without Diet Coke.
But yeah I could hardly swallow it in the beginning.
Did it taste like the bitterest thing you've ever tasted in the world that made you want to vomit your insides out?
It's an acquired taste. All alternative sweeteners taste differently from sugar. These days, I appreciate that such beverages don't leave a film in my mouth and have a little extra bite compared to sugar.
I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.
It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.
It's an acquired taste. I felt the same way, but when I started trying to get fitter a lot of protein supplements (protein drinks, protein bars, etc) contained artificial sweeteners. After eating these for a bit I got used to the flavour profile and even started to like some aspects of it.
The best comparison is beer. The first time I had it, I thought it was kind of gross. After trying it a few more times you get used to the bitter and fermented notes and the taste becomes more pleasant.
What I find weird is the assumption that everyone would like soda with artificial sweeteners, but I guess other don't taste it the same way. There are restaurants where I just give up and just get water. Strange because I assumed much of their profit came from drinks.
I know a few people like myself, that won't drink artificially sweetened soda, but we are the minority. Mostly people are confused when you tell them you don't like the taste, and that you drink so few sodas that the sugar doesn't make any difference in terms of health anyway.
I am convinced that something weird is going on with Pepsi Max though, the about of that stuff being consumed is absolutely insane. At events it not even close, it's Pepsi Max that people primarily consume.
I felt the same way, they used to taste awful to me, now I only notice a slight difference between Dr Pepper zero and regular. Maybe I just got older and my taste buds degraded?
A lot of the “zero” soft drinks are sweetened differently from the “diet” ones. There’s often a mix of different sweeteners so you don’t get too much of any one aftertaste.
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
Dr pepper zero doesn't use as much aspartame as dr pepper diet. It uses more of a mix of different sweeteners
It might be.
I felt this same way all my life, until 6-months ago, when I found a flavored sugar free mix I actually liked.
I returned from vacation in Mexico, where I was drinking Coke with sugar. When I returned home, regular Coke, made with Corn Syrup in the U.S., tasted off. I decided to take the opportunity to stop drinking it.
I tried dozens of low calorie drink mixes and found one I could tolerate. I did some research and all things pointed to that being healthier than my Coke habit.
My tastes have changed again since starting this, but I don’t drink Coke anymore.
One thing that might have helped was drinking aspartame in my coffee, where its aftertaste is harder to detect.
I should mention the only good side effect I’ve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I haven’t lost any weight by the change. It’s also much easier to make a diet work when I’m not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.
For me it was a persistence thing. Keep drinking and you don't really notice it any more. If anything sugared drinks now feel overly sticky or caramel-like to me. I can no longer enjoy non-diet coke.
Soldier on!
Maybe, while I can relate to this feeling when it comes to some sweeteners commonly used in baked goods, I genuinely habe a hard tile distinguishing between sugar and sweetener containing beverages at this lokng.
For root beer, I can't tell the difference. For colas, the difference is staggering to me.
It's an acquired taste.
Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.
I actually hate the taste of sugar in sodas after switching to diet for long enough. Taste is subjective and your preferences can change. That being said, saccharine is probably the better tasting of all of them, and the most maligned.
I've wondered this myself. The aftertaste on some of them is vile. The disappointing thing is that so many products use them when they reduce sugar, but sometimes I just want a reduced sugar product without any additional sweeteners. That seems hard to find these days.
I've been curious about the just-less-sugar idea myself. Like how would a Coca-Cola "dry" taste? Maybe the fact that nobody is offering this just means it doesn't taste good.
Some other countries have products with less sugar than the US's version. Fanta is a noticeable one. I just want a late afternoon beverage that isn't alcohol, doesn't have a crap ton of sugar, has no sugar substitutes, and isn't too heavy on the caffeine. Might go back to decaf.
Coca-Cola tried at least twice to market half-sugar Coke (C2 and Life). But instead of just doing half-sugar, they added aspartame and stevia respectively to compensate...
It tastes disgusting to me.
An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome. They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers. My take is that I don't miss out on much by being conservative with food, as we still don't understand these complex interactions well enough. What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
As the article mentions, this is a false dichotomy.
If you're an ordinary person driven to be healthy, drink water. Water is great. If you're already drinking water, you should absolutely not replace it with whatever bottled crap that Coke or Pepsi is peddling, be it "smart water" or otherwise.
But for people with sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population in the developed world, replacing sugary drinks with zero-calorie artificially-sweetened drinks can be a net health benefit. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are bad for your health, and consumption of sugar water is a significant driver of these. Yes, you could be even healthier by drinking water instead; see above. But sugar is an addictive chemical (sugar withdrawl is, in fact, a thing), and not everyone is going to quit cold turkey.
(And for the record, I fully agree that people should be more cognizant of their gut biome and how their diet affects it, including being skeptical of aspartame and other random synthetic ingredients.)
> sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population
It's almost like our bodies are designed to crave calories
Our bodies are designed to crave calories, but habitually ingesting too much sugar is more about hijacking dopamine release pathways than about fulfilling your body's basic need for satiation.
Or... you know, there could be some little actual effort in shedding such addiction (sugar ain't that hard), build a bit of character and walk off better off in many regards. Winning against addiction won't kill you, break you or similar damage but makes you (much) stronger and healthier as a bonus. Why do people shy away from such things?
But no, lets do everything possible just to keep the comfortable crappy couch lifestyle, no sweat, no effort, miserable health, miserable life. Then there are articles how US population (which suffers the most these shit HFCS addictions and resulting obesity problems) is depressed... for many reasons of course, but this sort of helpless victim mindset is one of them.
> Why do people shy away from such things?
Have you ever met someone with a true addiction to food? I'm not talking about someone with a habitual craving for sweets. I'm talking about someone who consumes food compulsively like a chain-smoker; someone who, in the absence of whatever their favorites are, will consume and consume with little regard for what the food is: an entire jar of pickles, multiple pounds of grapes, a whole rotisserie chicken, et al.
I used to be one. I once ate six baked white onions¹ in one sitting before vomiting everywhere and rethinking my life.
I broke through naturally, but I wish GLP-1s had been prevalent at the time. Want to know what made breaking it so challenging?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV9spqCzSkQThere's nothing wrong with HFCS either, at least not that isn't also wrong with sugar. This is all just naturalist fallacy stuff.
The HFCS stuff always feels weird to me. Like sure, there's glycemic index impact, it is measurably different, etc... but I feel like people don't realize that "high" fructose is different only by a few percent from table sugar, and is "high" only because it's being compared to regular corn syrup.
Like... HFCS-42 is 42% fructose. That's lower than cane / table sugar, which is 50%. If you really think fructose is the problem, HFCS-42 is an improvement. Or even better, embrace regular corn syrup because it has little to no fructose normally! It's nearly 100% glucose! (This is why 42% is "high")
And if it's glycemic index that people are worried about, throw in a tiny amount of dissolvable fiber in your drink and it'll lower that by more than the sugar balance affects it.
None of it makes sense.
I don't believe it is measurably different! Apart from what you noted (HFCS is "high fructose" relative to normal corn syrup, not table sugar), ordinary sugars are broken down instantly by the human body.
The subtext and I think valid concern about HFCS is that it drastically reduces the cost of calorically sweetening foods and especially beverages.
But people routinely cruise past that to claims that HFCS itself is uniquely harmful to humans, and it isn't, at least no more than sugar is.
I think it's fairly safe to say there's a measurable difference - fructose generally (afaict) has noticeably lower insulin responses compared to glucose. Though it's still very minor compared to the total change vs none of course, and I haven't seen much of anything showing evidence of a benefit compared to the other - just "technically different".
Definitely agreed that there's a weird demonizing of HFCS in particular though. Maybe because it sounds technical? It's easy to point to because it's common, and it doesn't sound "natural".
And personally I don't think HFCS's clear manufacturing benefits really affect much, it's just the most convenient so it's the most used. The addictive qualities of sugar are much more valuable, IMO They™ would continue to sweeten things at the same level even if it were completely banned. They'd just use something else, and sucrose is also very cheap.
On the other hand, allowing people to feed their sweet addictions only re-enforces and desensitizates them further. So while you are probably safe drinking ungodly amounts of aspartame water, you won't find equivalent substitutes for sugar in other foods and you might suffer rebound consumption there, perhaps to a much higher total caloric intake versus just drinking sugary water in moderation.
Another thing to watch out for is caffeine input which is often associated with sweetened drinks. Caffeine is a diuretic and you will see yourself drinking can after can of diet coke while not quite quenching your thirst or properly hydrating yourself. This is documented to lead to intense muscle pain and unexplained migraines for people who do physical work and abuse these types of drinks, and can't be good for your kidneys long term, even under the assumption that sweeteners are 100% safe.
Overall, just drink plenty of water and use everything else in moderation seems like a solid advice.
How would that work? It's hydrolized into its constituents, which are present in higher quantities in apples and chicken and other foods, in the upper GI. Do you have a cite for this?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39475342/ - mouse colitis model
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41137210/ - inflammation pathways
Did you read the second paper carefully? It seems to model direct gut exposure to aspartame under experimental conditions. In reality, aspartame is quickly broken into its constituents in the upper GI. Capsaicin will also quickly damage epithelial cells in a petri dish! It's still widely and uncontroversially present in ordinary foodstuffs.
Does aspartame cause intestinal inflammation, or do artificial sweeteners sans aspartame cause intestinal inflammation? Or which specific ones do?
Cause reading the blogpost, it explicitly calls out that most other artificial sweeteners do not get broken down "at all", suggesting their in-body lifecycles are quite different. I'd expect this not to apply to aspartame as a result, and thus it not being a missed angle at all:
> Incidentally, this same logic does not apply to other artificial sweeteners which mostly aren’t broken down at all.
>An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome.
Everything affects the gut microbiome. Every single type of food you eat alters it. Taking a walk alters it. Taking a flight alters it.
The whole "but it changes the microbiome" thing needs to be qualified by whether that change is meaningfully relevant in some direction, and evidence thus far, for most sweeteners, is unconvincing. 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016 is the only mildly legitimate research on this (a seemingly well executed RCT), but even it shows a rapidly fading effect, and no effect for aspartame given it's the subject of this submission.
But researchers who want a bit of attention (and a remarkable amount of research is plied not for useful results, but knowing that certain topics are easy mass media coverage) know it's gold to write a paper saying a sweetener changed the microbiome, because it plays into a fear people have (people are always susceptible to the "too good to be true" aha moment). Or worse still the garbage observational studies that conflate that people with metabolic issues are more likely to use sweeteners, so flip cause and effect and claim that sweeteners cause metabolic issues.
>What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.
If people ate calorie-restricted, balanced diets, and limited simple carbs and sugars, most food problems fade away (presuming they aren't eating overtly poisonous things, which many of our ancestors did). But that isn't reality. In reality sugar is one of the greatest health crises of our times, and finding some mechanism of reducing that problem is beneficial. Better still people should tame the sweet tooth, but we live in reality.
And FWIW, you can do the reductionist thing that wellness grifters do with most any food. Loads of "balanced whole diets" are full of crazy, scary constituents, many of which are known carcinogens. Spices and herbs are full of deleterious ingredients. And so on.
I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.
There's no harm to doing that if you can do it. But advice like "just eat healthy, natural food" is not really something most people can stick to long term. I know I can't!
When I find myself in a stressful situation the craving for sweets is very strong and artificial sweetners at least mean I have options that won't dump a bunch of calories/refined sugar into my body.
Also, what is a natural food? Wheat, maize, oranges, bananas, broccoli... those are human made.
And there's plenty of unnatural, ultraprocessed food that's good for us.
Try telling the body builder he can't have a protein shake.
There’s also the cost element on top of the realities of sugar addiction
I believe in you.
I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.
Look up CDED (Crohn's disease exclusion diet) which is the first line of treatment for pediatric Crohn's and now it's increasingly being used for adults. So don't dismiss the diet link despite the facts and research.
n = 1 but I clearly feel the effect when I start drinking aspartam drinks a few times a week. So much so that I just stopped drinking them.
I didn't use to. But I stopped rafined sugar for a year and compensated with coca zero. After that, guts never been quite the same and it took some copious amount of probiotics with regular doctor checks to feel better.
Even then, it's still no back up to baseline, and now drinking aspartam more than once is upsetting.
People say this about MSG too, but when you blind-test them the effect vanishes, which is unsurprising because the constituents in MSG are, like aspartame, widely prevalent in traditional foodstuffs.
Since I'm mostly cooking fresh food, I wouldn't know.
I do use MSG, though, and don't feel anything off about it.
> They cause intestinal inflammation which is relevant for IBD sufferers.
Not all of them do.
Most people don't suffer from IBD though. IBS is very common, IBD isn't
In Italy we have an "indipendent research lab" that become really famous for a study that demonstrates that aspartame may cause cancer. The same institute published few years later a study about 5G emissions that may cause cancer.
“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding factor.”
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/efsa-assesses-new-asparta...
Not a medical professional, but inflammation is something different from cancer that they mentioned in their website. And we need to understand also the trial scenario: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
I think you and I agree. This is about the Italian cancer aspartame study you referenced (Ctrl-f on cancer). This is EFSA saying the study has major issues and reiterating that aspartame is safe.
I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.
lol pseudoscience as a service ha!
I know this lab! Ramazi Institute or something right?
We covered it in this podcast I used to produce (not explicitly the subject, they came up re: artificial sweetener studies and we explored them a bit). They’re very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.
There is a waste area in the Italian society that is very prone to the conspiracy theory. Some famous journalists and some TV shows are very good in spreading this news. In the past, a party (M5S, now pivoting to a left wing, populistic, pro Putin movement) took 34% at the election, just taking advantage of those crazy ideas.
Not mentioned in the article: there is a really obvious biological effect of aspartame: it triggers your sweetness receptors. And you have them in your mouth (duh!) and elsewhere in your body including in your gut.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6288399/
One might imagine that aspartame triggers the receptors in the gut and that this has some effect. Maybe different sweeteners have different effects, too, since they are metabolized differently.
There's not much question that there's some linkage between perception and chemical processes in the body, but there's also no real evidence that those pathways are causally linked to significant metabolic impact.
Your upper GI system quickly transforms aspartame into constituent substances that are widely present in ordinary food.
Different sweeteners certainly have different impacts, but this thread is about aspartame, the best studied and probably the safest of all of them.
I'll impart my n=1 experience, since I've been using powdered Aspartame (in combination with Stevia) in drinks and baking for almost 20 years, and I've tried almost all available sugar substitutes over the years.
We already know from glycemic index charts that almost all sugar substitutes impact blood glucose to a certain degree, and there are only a few that have no impact. When sucralose became widely available, I bought some to try to bake with, but the carrier was maltodextrin - a starch, which prevented me from using it. Undeterred, I purchased pure sucralose drops in a neutral liquid. The sickly-sweet mouth feel after consuming sucralose is a bit tough to take [0], but that wasn't the worst of it. It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it ("Several studies have shown that sucralose is not physiologically innocuous").[1]
Then I read how sucralose is produced; literally thousands of pounds of sugar is used and converted to produce a few pounds of sucralose. It's being pushed hard by the industry, and I can only think of the 'vilification' of cheaper sweeteners such as Aspartame by industry, much in the same way that saccharin was vilified by flawed [2] studies in the 1970s - just as Aspartame was being developed as a commercial product.
Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, and sugar causes irreparable damage to millions of people around the world. I find it somewhat odd how people react to what appears to be a flawed and dubious Aspartame study, when there are much larger elephants in the room.
[0] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/after-sales-plummet-diet...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7155288/
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3185898/
> It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it
Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.
Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.
As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.
This is an article of faith on the Internet, but I haven't seen a credible cite to back up a material, meaningful insulin response to the mere taste of sweetness. Worth remembering: insulin response to aspartame has always been a major research focus, like a day-one concern; it was tested fasted, unfasted, in great quantities and small, with food and in beverages.
From personal experience (sorry, n=1), I can eat pure Aspartame powder and have zero reaction - no increase in glucose, no "anticipatory" response - nothing.
When I have other sweeteners such as taking a swig of a stevia-laden diet iced tea, I have a reaction. I used to be able to drink the exact same iced tea when they used Aspartame with no effect. I don't think your body is "fooled" by sweet tastes - it only reacts when there is actually something to process.
The fact sucralose is being added into all kinds of products has removed many choices for me, which is unfortunate as the selection was quite small to begin with.
Edit: should have read: "sucralose-laden diet iced tea". Stevia-only drinks don't taste all that good to me, but they don't affect my blood glucose.
I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.
Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.
My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.
What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc
Those are excellent choices; pure monk fruit drops are great, but they cost a small fortune compared to others, and the affordable version is usually mixed with erythitol, which increase blood glucose, so that's a non-starter. Amazon and local health food stores sell a "tub" of stevia for a decent price, and that's my main go-to, but the bitter aftertaste is off-putting, hence Aspartame.
Prepared food is pretty much a no-go; there's only a single energy bar I purchase that uses stevia only, but I make my bars from whey protein isolate, cocoa powder, and peanut butter powder, plus roasted flax, almond flour, almond milk, and sweeteners. I did skip sweeteners completely for some time, thinking that I'd "get used to it", but I really didn't - we're programmed for something sweet!
Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?
Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.
The sweetness in stevia is very different from sugar/hfcs... it has a flavor of its' own and is somewhat off-putting if you aren't used to it. Using a mix of sweeteners is often better overall flavor than any single sweetener (stevia, aspartame, ace-k, etc) on its' own.
I really wish Coke Life had better marketing and was more popular... It was a much smaller amount of real sugar combined with stevia for sweetness. It was lower calorie, but not zero, and probably a much better option than either full sugar or zero sugar.
It's a reliable migraine trigger for meyself, and my nephew. That makes it bad for us.
I keep getting people telling me this doesn't happen. GAH. Instant migraine trigger for me too, along with sucralose and several other artificial sweeteners.
Same here. People keep telling me it's not, but it is, even when I happen to ingest it while unaware I've done so.
I can tell when a mixed drink uses a soda with Aspartame in it. My mouth instantly feels like it's covered in a thin film of plastic and the migraine is usually just around the corner.
Everyone in my family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, have the same reaction, too.
Similarly, it makes me dizzy/sick a little like travel sickness
That’s probably because 10% of ingested aspartame breaks down into methanol.
Or, you might just be sensitive to phenylalanine.
A six-pack of aspartame-sweetened Diet Coke has about as much methanol as a single apple.
But crucially, it has no ethanol.
When I drink a single can of Diet Coke or anything with aspartame, I get crippling stomach aches and then sudden diarrhea, all within about 2 hrs and very predictable. It's definitely not harmless. This doesn't happen to me with stevia or sucralose, and I know sucralose isn't good for your either.
But a lot of people don't have that effect. So maybe it's not harmful for everyone.
I have a similar negative response to legumes... but billions of people eat them without issue every day.
Funny, I have this with Coke Zero (which I believe uses stevia), but not with aspartame.
The sale of this stuff should be prohibited, especially on long intercontinental flights.
Coke Zero is sweetened with aspartame and phosphoric acid. It's just formulated differently to avoid the taste associated with Diet Coke, which some find unpleasant.
Strange, Google says this:
> Coca-Cola updated the recipe for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar in the US, quietly adding stevia to the existing blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium (Ace-K) in late 2023/early 2024
Did they change it back?
Well, from the comments we see:
-possible disruption of gut microbiome
-possible trigger of migraines
as well as from other places:
-those with phenylketonuria (PKU) must avoid it
-there are concerns that aspartic acid which is produced "can act as an excitotoxin, overstimulating nerve cells and potentially leading to neuronal injury and cell death" with chronic exposure or high doses
-potentially carcinogenic
-no nutritional value (thus no "need" to consume it)
Fruit, honey, or maple syrup in contrast are natural without some of these concerns in the same way
The one we’re trying to avoid the most in my household is sucralose. Genotoxicity and upregulating inflammation and oxidative stress are bad things. Accumulating unchanged in the environment and resisting biodegradation is a bad thing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12251854/
There's also an ever-escalating sweetness issue. When fresh fruit was plenty sweet enough and you get used to this level of sweetness, everything else seems to taste pretty bland. If this becomes the normal (I suspect it kind of has), everything gets sweetened; yogurts, crackers, bread, etc. The method those things get sweetened could be aspartame, but many will not be.
Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.
Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.
It might not be bad for you, but it tastes like crap
Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.
I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.
Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.
Even so, it has a weird aftertaste that lingers on the palette. All sugar-free elixirs I have found to be subpar.
Some people are super tasters and they'll always have that problem. But most people stop noticing the aftertaste after a week or two of regular consumption. But I agree, when I started sugar free that aftertaste was nasty.
Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.
Fact 5 is a false fact. Taking facts 1-4 into consideration with the (0th?) fact that it is considered the most studied ingredient is enough evidence. This is how scientists come to a consensus. Going beyond that is obscene to science.
I don't drink things with Aspartame because it makes me feel queasy. I don't know of any mechanism that causes that effect. Occasionally I encounter something that I would not have expected to contain Aspartame that I notice the feeling before I have even considered the possibility that it might be present. I take that as a sign that it is not psychological.
Same here. Very little amounts already give me a weird tummy feel. A normal amount (ex. Half a can) gets my tummy turned around for a few hours.
Sucralose-6-acetate, however, an impurity found in sucralose and produced in vivo from sucralose, is genotoxic.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37246822/
I would avoid sucralose. I have a suspicion it may be responsible for the observed increase in colon cancer in younger age groups.
Did we just start adding this chemical in the ast five years? I can think of any other widespread roll out of a new technology in the same period.
The increase is cancers in younger age groups was noticed earlier than that, and the cancers can't be expected to occur instantly upon exposure to a carcinogen.
Where does the confidence that it is due to sweeteners come from? This isn‘t about your comment in particular, more of a general observation.
Many people instinctively attribute this rise in colon cancer to diet products, almost pretending as if it is the only thing that has meaningfully changed over the past 40 years or so. Others like to point to changing consumption habits in people drinking more sugary beverages.
It is almost as if everyone is projecting their personal believes into this. But the truth seems frustratingly simple: we really just do not know yet
> Where does the confidence that it is due to sweeteners come from?
Probably from your inability to read what I actually wrote. The word "suspicion" does not connote confidence.
I'm still expecting the cause to be HPV and increase in anal sex. Some studies seem to point that way (and other studies that say it might not), but it hasn't been proven yet. However it would make sense, considering that it leads to cervical cancer, throat cancer, etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/
Not an expert on this by any means, just went down this rabbit hole when deciding if I should be asking about my son getting the HPV vaccine when it was first made available to males, and before it was broadly recommended for men.
A rise in meat (esp red & cured meats) consumption and a drop in vegetable consumption would also do it, particularly if it were disproportionately occurring in certain cohorts.
12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.
This was a really well written article, I enjoyed it. I had always assumed there were a bunch of hidden cons but it sounds safer than I had assumed
The right response is "we need to profile phenylalanine and glutamate metabolism better"...
I think it's just human nature. We assume anything good has to have a catch. Diet Coke feels like that to me
I have tried multiple times to find this article after reading it a year or so ago ! thanks for sharing again
migraine trigger for me too
instant migraine ingredient. Mind so's sucralose and some others for me. shrug as long as they're not universal, will be ok.
How does saccharin held in this case?
phenylalanine is DLPA which many people use to deal with chronic fatigue and mild pain management
there's a reason why the President guzzles gallons of it per month
I'm not convinced large amounts of Methanol is harmless but DLPA is harmless, maybe even beneficial
> The history of aspartame and the FDA is contentious and sort of infuriating
Is it? They've been dealing with conspiracy theorists on this topic for more than half a century (it was initially approved as a tabletop sweetener back in 1974), including extensive public hearings in the 1980s. There is no more thoroughly studied or litigated food additive in the department's history.
I don't like aspartame because it's sickeningly sweet. I could care less if it's healthy or not.
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So basically there's no scientific consensus either way, there's no tradition of using it and there are extreme commercial incentives for harm so it's a no from me
Not sure how you get to that conclusion from the article when it ends with the conclusion from 5 health agencies that it's safe (and then more references from the scientific community that it's safe).
What in your view is the single strongest scientific conclusion supporting your statement that "it's safe"?
Are you moving the goal post? I generally trust health agencies, more so when they all agree.
No I'm asking what language/sentence you are referring to that says "it's safe"
60 years of research have not revealed any dangerous effects in reasonable consumption of aspartame. Hence it is overwhelmingly likely to be safe.
> So basically there's no scientific consensus either way
"The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion."
Did you even read the article?
"While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"
There is no such thing as "it's just a normal chemical". Sugar is "just a normal chemical" that doesn't mean refining it and injecting it into products with a commercial incentive to habit form hasn't helped create a health crisis
> "While informative, this does not prove aspartame is safe"
You just cherry-picked this from where they are only talking about the chemicals it breaks down into which yes, does not alone prove it's safe. But then it (right after in the section titled "The scientific consensus") goes on to list the science from most major health organizations and concludes with the quote I shared. Did you just ignore all the evidence presented because it doesn't fir your confirmation bias?
It is bad. Don't belive the hype.
Just the simple fact that it has a sweet taste, but contains no sugar, disturbs the body's natural production of insulin.
Assuming, of course, that one's body _does_ naturally produce insulin. I'm glad it and other artificial sweeteners exist and are as prevalent as they are.