World News

22058 readers

55 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Aspartame sweetener used in Diet Coke a possible carcinogen, WHO’s cancer research agency to say-sources (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by withersailor@aussie.zone to c/news@beehaw.org

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 3 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh my fuck. I hate news stories like this. Aspartame falls into the same cancer risk category as eating red meat sometimes and being kinda lazy. A rigorous systematic review was conducted of dozens of studies of aspartame and they did not find a plausible biologic mechanism by which aspartame could cause cancer. Epidemiologically, it's vaguely correlated, not causative of cancer.

Also, in the Reuters article it notes that a 132-lbs adult would have to drink 12 to 36 cans of diet coke a day for the dose/exposure to become relevant to the risk they're talking about. This article is talking about one study that is at odds with the systematically reviewed data from 40 human observational studies, 12 experimental animal studies, and 1360 assay/experimental end points to look for the supposed link.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691522007475#sec5

[–] nzodd@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait being lazy cases cancer? I'm in a lot of trouble then

[–] medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Being lazy is vaguely kinda sorta correlated with cancer... but that doesn't account for the fact that humans who are regularly active are also less likely to make other lifestyle choices that are more significantly tied to cancer like smoking and drinking.

This is the problem with a lot of population based studies. Obesity is linked with a lot of health problems like cardiovascular disease, but only some aspects of cardiovascular disease have causative links to obesity and others are sequelae of other factors that tend to be associated with obesity. For example, extra weight/adipose puts more stress on your heart by there just being more body mass to deliver blood to and more oxygen demand from muscles to just physically move the weight around (also a cause of joint problems)... but it's the poor diet full of cholesterol that clogs up the arteries (aka atherosclerosis) causing myocardial infarction (heart attack).