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WHO says soda sweetener aspartame may cause cancer, but it's safe within limits

116 comments

  • Of the basis WHO is using here, most if not all longterm studies (the kind you'd want for assessing things like cancer risk) are based on observational evidence. That is, a study where the participants typically aren't asked to do anything they don't already normally do. For this topic, that means generally speaking the participants are going to be people that already normally drink low calorie sweetened beverages.

    It doesn't really seem like they're accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

    I can't really make sense of their recommendation. The data required to recommend for or against just isn't there. The totality of short term data is all very showing a very strong association between sweetened drinks and weight loss. Wish they'd just explain this stuff properly so we didn't have to rely on the dumbass media to interpret advice meant for medical professionals

    • To be fair the vast majority of scientists will take other factors into account. If you thought of "this could also be because of that" then you can be sure that the scientists and the ones reviewing the publication also thought about it and addressed it. There are exceptions, sure, but don't just assume everyone is bad at their job.

      • My assumption isn't completely absent of context. From the article: "The FDA reviewed the the same evidence as IARC in 2021 and identified significant flaws in the studies, the spokesperson said."

        But that's not really what I meant. The issue I have is about language and presentation of info, not research methodology. Most people aren't going to read WHO's ~100 pages of recommendations on aspartame. We get CNBC's interpretation, and some clickbaity editor has left their stink on it.

        "WHO says soda sweetener aspartame safe, but may cause cancer in extreme doses" is both a more pertinent headline for countries in the west and from what I can tell, closer to being in alignment with what the WHO are actually saying.

      • This is absurdly stupid. I'm sorry... But it is. The naivety involved in this comment is staggeringly rough.

        Even if we pretend what you're saying is true, it suggests that scientists are not prone to error or tunnel vision. What do you believe scientists are funded by? Knowledge? No... Not in this shitty world... They're funded by money here, something Coke has plenty of.

    • Do you have data suggesting overweight people are more likely to drink sugar free sodas? You could just as easily intuit that health conscious folks drink less calories.

      • I didn't, but I just found a few papers showing a relationship between awareness/use of nutrition claims/labels and obesity.

        https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7622-3

        https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214001328?via%3Dihub

        That second one sums up my logic pretty well:

        The analysis revealed that people with excess weight display a high level of interest in nutrition claims, namely, short and immediately recognised messages. Conversely, obese individuals assign less importance to marketing attributes (price, brand, and flavour) compared with normal weight consumers.

        Generally people that engage with products marketed as "diet" options are more likely to be people that want to improve their diet. In turn those people are more likely to be overweight. And people that are not overweight are more likely to select based on other product attributes.

        Edit: The use of low-calorie sweeteners is associated with self-reported prior intent to lose weight in a representative sample of US adults - https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20169

        In cross-sectional analyses, the expected relation between higher BMI and LCS [low calorie sweetener] use was observed, after adjusting for smoking and sociodemographic variables. The relation was significant for the entire population and separately for men and women (see Table 1). The relation between obesity (BMI ⩾30 kg m−2) and LCS consumption was significant for LCS beverages, tabletop LCS and LCS foods (see Figure 1a). Individuals consuming two or more types of LCSs were more likely to be obese than individuals consuming none (42.7% vs 28.4%) and were more likely to have class III obesity (7.3% vs 4.2%).

    • It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

      You say this based on what exactly? Because that's a trivial thing to correct for in an observational study.

      • I'm talking about the WHO's recommendations in their capacity as an advisory body on public health following their analysis of IARC research, not the research itself. Many of the studies do make substantial corrections for the participant candidates. I don't think that's necessarily translated through to the recommendations, which should be given in the context of existing public health outcomes.

        The WHO agrees that two thirds of adults in countries like USA and Aus are overweight. They agree that obesity is an extreme risk factor for cancer. They agree that non-nutritive sweeteners confer at least a short term benefit to weight loss. They agree that the cancer risk associated with those products is comparatively insignificant. So they should be careful not to potentially mislead media and the the public about that specific causal relationship. It has directly resulted in the misleading headline of this post.

116 comments