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WHO says soda sweetener aspartame may cause cancer, but it's safe within limits (www.cnbc.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Pips@lemmy.film to c/world@lemmy.world

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[-] gila@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

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

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] gila@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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%).

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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023

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