Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation

I can be a case study. I drink over 2 liters of Coca-Cola with aspartame, per day, every day on an empty stomach. With an energy drink, containing aspartame. I am not bragging, it is an addiction.

There’s strong evidence that all artificial (including “organic non-caloric”) sweeteners disrupt metabolic responses, leading to lethargy and more weight gain than a comparably sweet amount of sugar.

In addition to making you fat, most others have some other bonus side effects like causing cancer, migraines, screwing up gut microbes, etc.

Have you read the abstract? I'm a physician with a BS in human nutrition, and at first glance I find it hard to consider anything about that abstract a "slam dunk" for mice and monkeys, far less for humans.

I'm very open to human data that aspartame is bad for humans in reasonable amounts, if you have any, but I haven't seen it.

I'm looking to avoid erythritol these days though.

There is!

False, read TFA. It says the opposite -- there are effects on insulin secretion and resistance for aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose. Only studies funded by the food industry say there is no effect.

Not the aspartame specifically, but the phosphoric acid in (Diet) Coke can be quite soothing if you have a stomachache. Carbonation + phosphoric acid + a Gas-X or two will cure bloating very quickly... and very loudly :P

Aspartame does not increase insulin, unless I'm not updated on the current scientific consensus.

Also your idea is very american centric, diet sodas are mainstream around the world and most of those countries did not follow the us into the obesity epidemic.

I started drinking too much alcohol during the lockdown era.

I experimented with non-alcoholic mocktails. The one that works for me is diet cola + milk in equal proportions. Somehow provides the combination of richness/creaminess, sweetness, bitterness that replaces the feeling of drinking Irish cream.

Diet cola contains aspartame. Anyone know if there's a safer non-sugar version of or alternative to diet cola that I could use instead?

I'm not overweight, but I observed the following:

- All artificial sweeteners when consumed on empty-stomach, causes very strong feelings of hunger in a short time. My guess is that this can more than cancel out the reduced calorie content.

- Sucralose gives me headaches.

I think the link between diet sodas is more "I am not drinking sugar, so I can eat more" Not so much, "diet soda makes you fat directly"

> Do any of you have any n=1 stories of success or failure using artificial sweeteners?

My N=1 is that I've always liked Diet Cola drinks - a lot. I easily drink more than a couple liters a day and have since at least 1990. I have my own soda fountain at home (along with a flake ice machine). I was significantly overweight for about two decades. I'd tried a lot of different weight loss programs over the years including medically supervised. I approached each diet very diligently and put in a lot of effort - yet none ever worked long-term for me. I'd lose 10 or 20 pounds over a few months but would put it back on. I was always back where I started (or worse) in less than six months.

About seven years ago I decided to try keto. It was definitely the hardest, weirdest and strictest of any diet I'd tried but I did the entire program very diligently - just like the others. Keto worked extremely well for me, where nothing else had. The first 5-6 weeks was hard - not because I was hungry but just due to the degree of change, new things to learn and the rigorous ingredient tracking. All the other diets were much easier but I was constantly hungry. On keto it was the opposite. After the first three days, I was never hungry on keto. The challenge in keto was changing habits, learning new patterns and missing the flavors of familiar carb-heavy foods. But that only lasted about six weeks. After that my palette had been retrained and I didn't miss carb-heavy "comfort foods". I also had gotten used to the new patterns and it didn't take much extra effort or thought. Over the next 8 months I lost close to a hundred pounds, putting me back at a weight I hadn't seen since high school. I went from size 42 pants to 32 and I had abs! I lost weight so fast in the first three months, I heard some people at work suspected I had cancer or something.

To answer your question, I never changed my very heavy Diet Coke consumption during any of this. If anything, I increased it. And I've now stayed at my ideal weight for the last seven years. I stayed strict keto for the first couple years but now I'm not as strict although definitely still low carb by choice - because I feel better mentally, emotionally and physically on low-carb and because I now prefer these new foods and flavors. Doing keto helped put me in control of my weight and calorie intake through managing my blood sugar - and for me that was the key difference and a major revelation. I'm still never hungry and I can easily manage my intake and weight. If I creep up five pounds, I make a minor adjustment and it's gone in a few days.

However, I don't think keto will necessarily do the same for everyone. I've learned different people have different metabolisms as well as different preferences and ability to adapt to different changes. Strict carb management worked long term for me and Aspartame wasn't a barrier. The other counter-intuitive thing about my weight loss experience was I found early on that exercising did make me hungrier - so I stopped all exercise. While I've never been one for exercise or working out, during the 8 months I lost all the weight I became even more sedentary. I'm not suggesting that to anyone else, of course. I'm just sharing it as an example of finding what works for your metabolism, lifestyle and preferences. Interestingly, after I lost all the weight I found I started liking exercise more than I ever had and continue to today, seven years later. The typical advice is "Cut calories and hit the gym." What worked for me was "Cut carbs and hit the couch." My first week on keto I dropped almost all carbs but actually increased my calories (mostly in meat and cheeses). Once I'd weaned myself off carbs and had control of my blood sugar, cutting calories wasn't just easier - it sort of took care of itself. The whole 8 months I just counted carbs and stayed under 20 a day, while eating as much as I wanted. Without carbs driving my blood sugar and hunger, "as much as I wanted" to feel full all the time turned out to be a lot less calories. The key with the keto strategy is it only works if you execute it rigorously. Cheat all you want on calories but if you "cheat" on the carbs and go over 20g/day, even a little, you'll not only fail - you'll put on even more weight than before. I think a lot of people see that as a major downside but, oddly, for me the "all or nothing" aspect of keto turned out to be an unexpectedly helpful "feature".

Here's why everyone is fat in the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

It's not "aspartame". It's eating out twice as much as we did in early 70s [1], rise of fast food consumption, and huge portion sizes.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-consumption-nutr...

Sweeteners are processed food. Timeline shows more processed food hitting the market, period. Obesity rises. Coincidence? Doubt it.

It's not just the sweetener itself. It's the whole shift. More processed crap in everything, sweeteners included. Cheaper, easier, engineered to be addictive. That's the real change that lines up with the weight gain.

Focusing just on sweeteners is missing the point. They're just one piece of the bigger processed food takeover. That's the simpler, more likely explanation.

> This is at about the time the obesity epidemic took off. Correlation != causation.

Average heights continued increasing through the 1980s. This suggests that a not insignificant chunk of the population was still in caloric deprivation until the 1990s. You can't get obesity while lots of people are still continuously hungry. For this one, correlation probably is causation.

In addition, smoking bans took off in the 1990s. Nicotine is a noted appetite suppressant. Correlation might be causation. You may be trading the problems of smoking for the problems of obesity--probably a decent trade.

Mostly, yes: “in the monkey model, owing to technical difficulties and feasibilities, our current work did not include the impact of APM on atherosclerosis”.