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's are much larger elephants in the room.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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]
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.
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.)
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.
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'?
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.
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!
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?
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.
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 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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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 all 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 (albeit no effect of aspartame).
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.
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: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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's 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/
> 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.
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.
> 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.)
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
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.
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.)
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
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.
Bias?
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'?
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.
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.
I much prefer sucralose to aspartame
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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's an acquired taste.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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
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.
There's nothing wrong with HFCS either, at least not that isn't also wrong with sugar. This is all just naturalist fallacy stuff.
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?
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.
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.
Most people don't suffer from IBD though. IBS is very common, IBD isn't
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 believe in you.
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
>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 all 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 (albeit no effect of aspartame).
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.
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.”
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: in the one about 5G they expose rats for more than 20 hours to a radio power more than 10 the law limits.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a reliable migraine trigger for meyself, and my nephew. That makes it bad for us.
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.
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.
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.
I have tried multiple times to find this article after reading it a year or so ago ! thanks for sharing again
It might not be bad for you, but it tastes like crap
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."
Did you even read the article?
I think it's just human nature. We assume anything good has to have a catch. Diet Coke feels like that to me
migraine trigger for me too
I don't like aspartame because it's sickeningly sweet. I could care less if it's healthy or not.
> 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.
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.