this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by NightOwl@lemm.ee to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml
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It uncovered eight WHO panelists involved with assessing safe levels of aspartame consumption who are beverage industry consultants who currently or previously worked with the alleged Coke front group, International Life Sciences Institute (Ilsi).

Their involvement in developing intake guidelines represents “an obvious conflict of interest”, said Gary Ruskin, US Right-To-Know’s executive director. “Because of this conflict of interest, [the daily intake] conclusions about aspartame are not credible, and the public should not rely on them,” he added.

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[–] meldroc@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I still wonder if artificial sweeteners mess with metabolism, say by training people to ignore satiety signals, which would be why we saw that study a few days back saying artificial sweeteners are associated with weight gain.

[–] NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

One theory is that the body doesn't know if the sweetness is sugar or sweetener. So it produces insulin to take care of it. When the level of insulin gets too high the body tries to compensate by eating more. If that "more" is more sweetener...

[–] antisoma@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago

While I'm no expert, that doesn't sound correct to me. I'd expect highly specific binding dependent on the chemical structure of glucose would be required to elevate insulin. A quick search seems to support that. I'm sure there are lots of studies on this that you could find if interested.

[–] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

Never experienced hypoglycemia while on keto and using sweeteners lol

[–] doggle@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

Unless I'm missing something this seems trivial to test. Just test blood sugar before and after drinking a diet soda. If bloods sugar goes down then the sweetener likely caused a release of insulin. If it doesn't change then it didn't.

It seems petty far-fetched. If artificial sweeteners caused a runaway insulin spike then I would expect them to cause a lot of cases of diabetic shock.

[–] huge_clock@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

The insulin response you’re talking about is very small and it doesn’t lead to a chain reaction.

[–] Aux@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

Sweeteners are worse than sugar.