~4 weeks ago I reposted a submission about Aspartame: Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation (sciencedirect.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313574
My comment tried to put saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose into context. Aspartame is not heat stable, so it's often combined with acesulfame-K. The diet soda industry standardized on aspartame in the 1980's because saccharin has a metallic aftertaste. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313575
I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.
If you want to try saccharin-sweetened beverages, I've noticed that zero sugar tonic waters at my local grocery store (brand name and generic) use saccharin.
A common prank was to put some saccharine pills in one of those mint dispensers, walk up to a sibling and asked if they wanted one while putting a real mint in your mouth. They'd take one of the fake mints, put it in their mouth, and half a second later curse you as they ran to the sink to spit it out.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/RAW-Natural-Sweetener-Erythritol-Suga...
But all of the sugar alcohols can mess with your gut biome. Mine went nasty during the previous recession when I was chewing gum for TMJ related problems.
I love fishermans friend, but I think the sorbitol is guaranteed excessive flatulence.
Do you want to get up from the middle of a movie to go to the bathroom and come back and find that you're not going to find out who killed the leading lady tonight because you're going to spend all night in an animal emergency room getting your dog or cat's stomach pumped?
Anything on a table or in your purse or your jacket pocket is fair game.
Why the hell would you do that? My life time of chewing gum constantly until my 20s is what I assume to be the source of my TMJ.
When I lived in Texas, it was practically universal to open up a cup of iced tea, grab several packs of Sweet'n'Low, rip the tops off all at once, and pour them in.
My friend told me that drinking coffee with a meal instantly identified me as a Midwesterner.
No, isomaltulose(a.k.a Palatinose) is the best. Not very sweet, but it's literally just glucose and fructose connected differently, no other off-products or metabolic consequences, just a sweet carbohydrate with slow metabolism that doesn't cause cavities and is beneficial to the gut microbiota due to the slow release of sugar, just like a good resistant starch would.
It's not as sweet, low calorie, or inexpensive, but health-wise forget being harmless, it's outright better than almost all other carbs.
"Saccharin is absorbed primarily in the stomach, with about 85% to 95% of ingested saccharin absorbed and eliminated in the urine."
If this is the case, then why hasn't the antibiotic effect been previously observed in vivo?
Is the concentration too low?
Some say coffee is good for you (in moderation), some say it's bad for you.
Some say certain alcoholic drinks are good for you (in moderation), some say no amount of alcohol is good.
Some say some artificial sweeteners have benefits, some say all of them are toxic.
Some think fruit juices are good for you, because fruit. Some (most) say they're bad for you.
Some say fruit smoothies are good for you, because the fiber content outweighs the downside of fructose/natural sugars. But some say all fruit sugar is bad for you.
The only thing that we seem to agree on, is that any sort of beverage containing sucrose is bad for you. But maybe I missed some thread where sucrose in moderation actually has health benefits.
I guess I'll stick to drinking water. But I'm sure there's a reason why that's bad for me.
From what I've read it seems likely that any amount of alcohol is bad for you, most of the studies that show moderate as good for you make the mistake of only have 'sober', 'moderate' & 'heavy' drinking, but if you look at the 'sober' folks there's a heavy mix of "I don't drink because I'm in recovery" or other health issues, so if you instead of 'sober by choice', 'sober by recovery/health issues', 'moderate' & 'heavy drinker' the benefit of moderation reverses to being worse than 'sober by choice'.
Almost any "this bad for you thing is actually good for you in moderation" basically seem to come down to:
People who can do common addictive things in moderation tend to also be good at moderating other bad factors too.
Alchohol isn't really good for you - statistically you will probably get away with reasonably low intake but the observational studies showing a benefit were most likely confounding variables - like studies where the 'non-drinkers' category contained those who had been alcoholics and were forced to stop drinking, or demographic distortions where moderate drinkers had much healthier lifestyles in other areas (exercise, access to healthcare, etc.) than heavy drinkers.
Coffee seems to be good for you, as long as it's only up to a few (3-4) a day, and as long as it's not affecting your sleep. But I have read the fines in methods like Turkish coffees could be somewhat harmful, whereas espresso is fine and paper filtered better. Sweetening it with sugar isn't great for you of course.
One that gets me is dairy and milk, I get the ethical concerns, and one can make an argument that it's not super 'natural' to take another species milk and to drink it after infancy, but that doesn't mean it's unhealthy (almost all medicines are 'unnatural' too, while some poisons are fully natural!). There's some evidence of milk/dairy being protective against bowel cancer for instance, and inconclusive evidence of harms so I do wince a bit at the plant-based milk alternatives (which are highly- or ultra-processed, if you do care about that kind of thing!) being so trendy.
I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
If you eat the whole fruit that sugar s bound up with fiber so you don't consume as much as easily and you digest it more slowly. Fiber plays a key role in satiety (feeling full) and stripped of fiber its easy to consume too many calories. A whole orange contains 3-6x the fiber of the equivalent volume of orange juice with pulp.
Not an issue for kids with milk teeth. Not an issue for adults who brush. Restricting diet for dental hygiene always struck me as convoluted.
Sorta? It's not bad, right? But it has not much nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...
(I'll gladly drink whatever water I find, but I'm not a fan of the plastic taste of some bottled waters and definitely a hater of refrigerator-cold water)
From my holidays in the US I recall shops, even small ones, having lots of drinks. Like, shelves and shelves of any alcohol free drink (and some abv ones) one could imagine. Here I go to my neighborhood small supermarket and there's coke, lemonade, Fanta, tonic water, a few local products such as spuma and that's it
No one drinks coffee or tea or beer or wine in Italy? Pop culture has deceived me.
Wine is definitely more prevalent in the older gens, young people drink albeit less. Up until a few years ago - and in some older people is valid for today as well - there was the belief that a small glass of wine a day wouldn't do harm, or that it had a positive effect on your health...
So yeah, alcohol is often on the table, but there's much less choice about the variety of drinks compared in the us. Then, if you have to work in the afternoon you might choose to not drink alcohol, so you're stuck with water or the other more common soft drinks such as coke (...)
Nobody should take advice from nutritionists. It's not a regulated title. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. Take your nutritional advice from dieticians (and licensed medical professionals with relevant training and experience).
I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless you have specific health problems. If a health professional told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for more serious stupid statements)
( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no one understands. )
I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than you've lost the plot.
Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).
Yes they are.
And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber especially when something has been aggressively mashed up, doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical extras is going to make that big of a difference on its metabolic effects.
I say that but I'm not advocating you to not drink juice. Just balance your inputs.
You’re separating liquids from solids. They each have their merits. The problem is industrial fruit produces a juice that is unlike anything in nature vis-à-vis sugar content.
Please explain how the two sugar waters are different.
I said industrialised fruit to refer to the orange. They’re much sweeter now than even in the 60s. There isn’t a practical difference between store-bought and fresh-squeezed juice (that I know of) other than, in some cases, preservatives, and the fact that with fresh-squeezed juice you have a tactile measure of the fruit going into the squeeze and so don’t tend to have e.g. a kid pouring themselves a tall glass of orange juice representing the juice of ten oranges.
Fruit has also been bred to be much sweeter and less nutritious than it was 50 years ago, so there's that too.
Moderation is the key to everything.
A reasonable way to look at it is as a flat, fortified Mountain Dew. Great as a treat. Bad as a habit, at least with modern oranges.
Of course not. But a kid raised on a high-sugar diet, particularly if reïnforced repetitively through habit, is going to have a tougher time eating healthy than someone who learned to see sugary drinks as a treat.
Yeah, that's fine, but a 16 ounce glass of orange juice has way more than one orange in it, and it's got a hell of a lot of sugar.
With juice you're getting lots of sugar but no fiber.
Commercially bottled juices (e.g., Tropicana) are worse but fresh squeezed is still bad.
If it's sweet, spit it out!
generally, processed foods are bad. You just created a processed food - you extracted the sugar and left the fiber and other good stuff behind.
So ... you are on a raw food diet then?
I met some people who managed this for some years, but it sounds not really practical (or healthy) to me. And they were in no better shape in my perception. Rather the contrary.
Humans use fire to process food since a long time.
Micro-plastics, fluoride.. ;)
To be honest, maybe I was lucky, but I drank plenty of wilderness water unfiltered and except for mild stomach problems, I never had any issues.
Tapwater, or artesian well water?
Magnitically left-spun water, or ionically charged crystal-dipped water?
Hermetically sealed water, or Gnostically gestated water?
Distilled or deionated?
Choose wisely.
In all seriousness, I met people that essentially don't drink water. They get water through food. Give them a glass during dinner and it goes untouched. I don't think it's because they're lazy and don't want to get up and fill up their water. It's just that they're not thirsty. It's really quite fascinating
Oooh, I guess I get to throw the wrench in that one. Endurance athletes benefit from the intake of large amounts of sugars during activity. Most sports drinks are primarily a mix of maltodextrin and fructose but the science is increasingly pointing toward something closer to a 1:1 glucose:fructose ratio being optimal at large carbohydrate intake -- in other words sucrose!
Ingested in an appropriate context, it is an excellent and easy to digest fuel source. You get to throw a couple hundred grams of table sugar into a sports bottle and call it healthy.
We don't even know if tiny doses or artificial radiation are good or bad for you.
That's the straw that just pushed me to live my life.
Here's one :)
Too much water also erodes your body of salts. If you already are on a low salt diet this could be a problem. For us Indians eating mountain loads of salt, this is a non issue.
Sugar, salt, kerosene and, for example, ethanol, do the same. What is special about saccharin?
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180328-how-sugar-could-...
Wonder if some megacorp will try to patent some formulation of it.
There have been murmurs on the conspiracy internet about how artificial sweeteners may have been responsible for making gut biomes less effective.
This seems related. The gut biome refers to bacteria in the gut.
This general weakness of the bacterial wall is something to be wary of given they didn’t study its effect on a wider range of important bacteria.
Throwing a lot of anything in your gut that can cause an imbalance, ir serious dybosis is a good reason to treat your stomach like a little fermenting aquarium whose bacteria and skin cells cycle every 3-5 days.
Guess it's all about the usage model..!!
The oral LD50 in mice is 17 g/kg. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Saccharin#section=...
Maybe ok for topical application?
But it is topical. So it may do a treat for MRSA but not for resistant pneumonia.
Health department officials said, "Saccharin is harmful to children especially those under 14 years. It affects bones badly. These ice candies are sold in rural areas and their sale picks up during summer"
Some ice cream producers prefer to use saccharin as it is quite cheaper in comparison to sugar. To earn heavy profits during summer when the demand for ice candies goes up significantly, some of the ice cream producers use saccharin. Officials said that saccharin is more than 300 times sweeter than sucrose (sugar), the officials said.