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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 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%).

[-] marmo7ade@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"People who are dieting buy products labeled as diet" is obvious and needs no validation. But we live in a time where people will doubt "water is wet" and you need the research to prove it.

[-] gila@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

But then couldn't you just as easily say rather than 'people use diet products because they're overweight', that 'people are overweight because they use diet products' ? I've certainly heard both propositions before. "Never seen a skinny person drinking Diet Coke"

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

I would disagree. We should attempt to validate all such claims. Personally, I'm pretty skinny. In fact, I'd like to gain some weight. I'm also reasonably health conscious. I don't drink all that much soda. When I do though, it's Coke Zero (or equivalent), not regular coke. I recognize that we have too much sugar in our diet in modern life anyway, so I cut it out where I can. However, health consciousness likely leads to people consuming fewer sodas in general (and more water), so the percentage of purchased product will likely skew towards people with a soda addiction/fixation who are searching for an alternative that doesn't require them to change much in their lifestyle.

Life has too many variables to make assumptions like that. We should seek to varify claims instead of assuming our first thought must be true.

this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023

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