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I don't think it's worth going through and providing you links about the mischaracterizations in your post - as you seem to have your own sources - but your depiction of the history of scientific consensus is not accurate. As you say problems caused by sweeteners around weight gain, insulin regulation, etc are long documented. As are the many studies showing that sweeteners cause cancer at doses (100x+ iirc) far above those consumed by average humans.

That said, the topic here was on cancer, and even the WHO announcement about aspartame being possibly carcinogenic clarifies it's not for normal ranges of consumption. I think you're trying to make a boogie man out of scientists and researchers by mischaracterizing the complex work they do. If you feel that things have suddenly reversed course it's because you haven't been following the research.

by ragequittah58 minutes ago|

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Many of the research went under my radar when I was researching it ~15 years ago then. Specifically sucralose was what I was researching, because it's what I drank, and there seemed to be no real evidence of harm that I could come up with or that anybody arguing with me about it could point to. And everyone defending it (including me) always had the line about how extensively studied it was at the time.

But research kept coming in. In 2013 CSPI changed their sucralose recommendation from "safe" to "caution". Then in 2016 it changed it again to "avoid". [1] Insulin sensitivity was more of a concern as of 2018 [2]. Sucralose + carbs causing further insulin problems was added in 2020 [3].

There's several more but I'm not going to make an exhaustive list. The point is the more research done the more the sweeteners go from almost completely benign (which you could easily say about sucralose ~2010) to problematic. So saying "the science is in, these sweeteners don't cause cancer" seems off-putting to me after going through the journey of so much of the science being wrong. It reminds me that we didn't classify processed meat as carcinogenic until 2015. And we only classified nitrates as "probably carcinogenic" in 2010.

[1]https://www.cspi.org/new/201602081.html

[2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30005329/

[3]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32130881/

by lompad2 hours ago|

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The problem here is looking at a substance in isolation, instead of comparatively.

The actual question is: would drinking that stuff with sugar have caused more damage to health? And the answer will likely be yes. Because we _know_ just how bad sugar is for you. Particularly diabetes, microbiome changes, addictive behavior, obesity of course, cardiovascular issues...

If you'd look at sugar in isolation, as a new substance that stuff would never be allowed in any country at all.