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There is nothing wrong with MSG either
https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/our_innovation/buildupf...
So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just donât eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.
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.
Now youâre 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 doesnât happen to be one for me. However, it is a neurotransmitter that is involved in pain signaling. Itâs 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 donât qualify for most prescriptions. So I definitely understand how trigger management and symptom management are a big deal.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Might cause overeating too, because it's tasty.
That's it.
But the story doesnât 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 wasnât smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic âstrange syndromeâ 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
> When reporters tried to corroborate Dr. Steelâs 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 Kwokâs children and former colleagues were adamant that Dr. Ho Man Kwok had in fact written the letter. Meanwhile, Dr. Steelâs 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 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.
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.
Of course there are other things like coffee that really are not defined by sweetness and can be perfectly enjoyed unsweetened.
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 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.
I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.
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.)
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.
It turns out, drinking a lot of what is essentially just water, is actually pretty healthy.
In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be
https://sodastream.com/products/diet-cola-4-pack
That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.
The answer is no - sucralose, saccharin, aspartame; it doesnât 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.
âIt will crash your blood sugarâ and âit will spike your blood sugar despite not having carbohydratesâ are myths.
(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)
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.
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.
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'?
Is this a genetic thing?
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.
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.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
And itâs 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 âbitterâ vegetable or even a crème brĂťlĂŠe to quantify the difference.
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.
Maybe, as you questioned, there is a genetic component. Or just "something different about you" (not necessarily genetic).
That's great, but it still means I can't have soft drinks any more.
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.
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.
The one weâre 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/
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 donât 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 Iâve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I havenât lost any weight by the change. Itâs also much easier to make a diet work when Iâm not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.
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.
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.)
It's almost like our bodies are designed to crave calories
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 onionsš 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=xV9spqCzSkQAnother 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.
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 arenât broken down at all.
Not all of them do.
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.
Try telling the body builder he can't have a protein shake.
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 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.
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). Theyâre very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/efsa-assesses-new-asparta...
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Everyone in my family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, have the same reaction, too.
Or, you might just be sensitive to phenylalanine.
The sale of this stuff should be prohibited, especially on long intercontinental flights.
-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
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.
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.
Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.
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.
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.
12% of Americans eat half the nation's supply of beef, and members of that group are disproportionately male and disproportionately middle-aged.
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
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.
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 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?
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
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?
Just the simple fact that it has a sweet taste, but contains no sugar, disturbs the body's natural production of insulin.