Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)

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

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.

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.

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.

That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.

In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be

(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)

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'?

I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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). They’re 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/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.

Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.

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.

"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?