News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Co... by jonhohle on Friday August 18, 2023 @12:24PM (#37177965)
Obesity rates start dramatically rising around the time aspartame came to market in 1993. CDC's data isn't very granular[0], but there is a slight upward trend until 1976-1980, the next data point 1986-1994 is significantly higher and continues to rise at a much higher rate. Obviously correlation, but obesity is a contributing factor to a significant number of diseases and health issues.

There's a Quora answer that suggests aspartame was banned in France in 2015, but aspartame searches are so astroturfed on Google that I can't find anything that confirms that. There also doesn't seem to be any obvious obesity studies with data from France after 2010, if that's true.

At least one study suggests artificial sweeteners break satiation leading to increased consumption[1].

Aspartame may not be directly toxic, but there seems to be increasing evidence that it negatively affects dietary habits of some portion of the population, and that it does not contribute to weight reduction in human consumers[2].

0 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/obe... 1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/ 2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7817779/

Re:Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Co... by tptacek on Friday August 18, 2023 @12:34PM (#37178132)
As your own summary of the chart you're reading shows, there doesn't seem to be any causal link between the introduction of aspartame and obesity, since sharp rises in obesity predate the introduction of aspartame.
Re:Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Co... by jonhohle on Friday August 18, 2023 @03:29PM (#37180864)
My original comment should say 1983, not 1993. We apologize for the error.

Edit: Removed my previous diatribe about graph interpretation because I realized it was my mistake that caused confusion.