Keep drinking your diet soda!

Naturally, you knew I was going to have to weigh in the latest artificial sweetener nonsense, it just took me a bit.  As with the last bad science on the matter, “Health Nerd” is all over it:

Also, a bunch of people are convinced that anything artificial is basically poison, and that diet soft drinks are probably killing us all.

This has hit the headlines recently, because apparently the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a World Health Organization body, is preparing to declare aspartame a class 2B carcinogen. This has caused a huge uproar, because aspartame is one of the most commonly-used artificial sweeteners in the world, and also because cancer is very scary.

Fortunately for people like me, who really like our diet drinks, the evidence really isn’t that compelling. Aspartame probably isn’t giving you cancer.

IARC Categories

The first point to consider in this discussion about aspartame is the way that the IARC classifies things that could potentially cause cancer in human beings. They have four categories:

1 — Causes cancer

2a — Probably causes cancer

2b — Possibly causes cancer

3 — Unclassifiable as a cancer risk

There are a few interesting points to make here off the bat. Firstly, the IARC doesn’t ever consider the magnitude of risk. There are class 1 carcinogens that cause cancer in every person exposed to them, and other class 1s that almost never cause cancer even in massive, lifelong doses. For example, both processed meat and plutonium are considered class 1 carcinogens, even though the risk from bacon is decidedly lower than that posed by nuclear explosions… [emphases mine]

Now, as the headlines state, the IARC is moving aspartame up to a class 2B carcinogen, which means it “possibly” causes cancer. For context, I downloaded the IARC database of human carcinogens, and the class 2B also includes:

1. Coconut oil soaps
2. Aloe vera
3. Pickled vegetables
4. Talcum powder
5. Working in the textiles industry
6. Nickel

And a whole host of other things as well. Class 2B does not mean that something definitely or even probably causes cancer — it means that there is some suggestion that the thing could plausibly cause cancer, and perhaps a small amount of evidence indicating that it does…

A recent systematic review of epidemiological studies, which also included a review of the toxicological literature, summarized this evidence — over more than a dozen large studies, there is very little evidence that aspartame and other sweeteners cause an increased risk of cancer. In fact, I could only find a single paper, which was published in 2022, that found a reasonably consistent correlation between aspartame intake and cancer, and even then it was not a strong connection…

Take the study I mentioned just before, which found an association between aspartame and cancer. In this paper, researchers looked at the Nutri-Net cohort of people, which includes over 100,000 individuals followed up between 2009–2021, and checked to see whether those who reported having more aspartame were more likely to get cancer than those who had none.

They found that, on average, people who ingested no aspartame got cancer at a rate of about 31 in 1,000 during this period. For people who had a ‘higher’ intake of the chemical, the risk of cancer was instead 33 in 1,000. In other words, going from having no aspartame at all, to drinking it regularly for a decade, increased the risk of cancer by 0.2%.

That’s a tiny risk by any measure. Ignoring all of the potential confounders here, and why it’s unlikely that this is a causal relationship, it’s still a bit of a meaningless risk for the average individual. It might be meaningful to population health workers, but even then possibly not.

And Amanda Mull:

Yesterday, Reuters reported that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer will soon declare aspartame, the sweetener used in Diet Coke and many other no-calorie sodas, as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” I probably should have felt vindicated. I may not feel better now, but many years down the road (knock on wood), I’ll be better off. I’d bet on the right horse! Instead, I felt nothing so much as irritation. Over the past few decades, a growing number of foods and behaviors have become the regular subject of vague, ever-changing health warnings—fake sweeteners, real sugar, wine, butter, milk (dairy and non), carbohydrates, coffee, fat, chocolate, eggs, meat, veganism, vegetarianism, weightlifting, drinking a lot of water, and scores of others. The more warnings there are, the less actionable any particular one of them feels. What, exactly, is anyone supposed to do with any of this information, except feel bad about the things they enjoy? …

The categories are not at all intended to communicate the degree of the risk involved—just how sure or unsure the organization is that there’s a risk associated with a thing or substance at all. And association can mean a lot of things. Hypothetically, regular consumption of food that may quadruple your risk of a highly deadly cancer would fall in the same category as something that may increase your risk of a cancer with a 95 percent survival rate by just a few percentage points, as long as the IARC felt similarly confident in the evidence for both of those effects…

Taken in aggregate, this morass of poor communication and confusing information has the very real potential to exhaust people’s ability to identify and respond to actual risk, or to confuse them into nihilism. The solution-free finger-wagging, so often about the exact things that many people experience as the little joys in everyday life, doesn’t help. When everything is an ambiguously urgent health risk, it very quickly begins to feel like nothing is. I still drink a few Diet Cokes a year, and I maintain that there’s no better beverage to pair with pizza. We’re all going to die someday.

If there’s actually compelling evidence I may reconsider my level of Diet Dr Pepper intake.  But based on what I’ve seen so far, there’s not nearly enough evidence to change artificial sweetener consumption. 

Republicans and race

Great stuff from Ron Brownstein, “The Post-racial Republicans: One of the core beliefs that binds the modern GOP coalition is rejection of the idea that minorities and women face structural bias in American society.”

I had a really engaging online conversation with BB recently about the meaning of “racism” and to best use the term.  We didn’t agree, but we damn sure agreed that there’s absolutely an awful and persisting legacy from historical discrimination and that we need to do more to address the problem.  For Republicans, though, they literally reject that belief.  Seems kind of crazy if you have even only a passing knowledge of not even slavery, but Jim Crow, redlining, and how reinforcing poverty can be.  Anyway, Brownstein:

Scott and Haley have leaned into the criticism from Obama, highlighting it to raise their profile in a Republican presidential race where each has attracted just single-digit support in national polls. But in responding to Obama, they have demonstrated how difficult it has become for any GOP leader—especially one who is not white—to challenge the party consensus that the nation has transcended discrimination against minorities and women…

For a Republican coalition that still relies predominantly on white voters, hearing nonwhite GOP candidates dismiss racism offers “acquittal and absolution,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies American attitudes toward race and culture. Such comments from figures like Scott and Haley, he told me, provide “permission” for other Republicans “to not even have to ask the questions” about whether systemic discrimination still shapes U.S. society…

One of the core beliefs that binds the modern Republican coalition, particularly since the rise of Donald Trump, is rejection of the idea that racial minorities and women face structural bias in American society.

Studies of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections conducted by the Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner and his colleagues used the Cooperative Election Study, a large-scale national poll, to determine the factors that predicted which candidate voters supported in those races. Those studies found that in each contest, the single best predictor of who voted for Trump was the belief that systemic racism no longer exists in the U.S.; the second-best predictor was denial that systemic bias exists against women.

Within the GOP, those views command overwhelming support. In an email, Schaffner told me almost nine in 10 Republicans reject the idea that structural discrimination exists against racial minorities; about three-fourths doubt that women face entrenched bias. Fully two-thirds of Republicans say there’s little bias against either minorities or women. Only one in 20 Republicans, Schaffner found, believes that both groups still face systematic discrimination.

I think it would be interesting to have some focus groups, and push a little harder on people who believe that this systemic bias doesn’t exist at all.  I’m sure there’s plenty of readl bigots out there, but, far from all.  I want to say, “if not systemic racism and if you genuinely believe Black people are just as capable as white people, what accounts for the huge gaps in wealth, income, educational achievement, etc.?”  What’s this missing factor?  Because it seems to me, if it’s not systemic, you are implicitly arguing that, there’s just something about Black people that leads to lower achievement.  

Anyway, lots more good stuff in the article:

In PRRI polling, about two-thirds of Republicans agreed that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities. In a 2022 national survey, PerryUndem, a firm that polls for progressive organizations, found that about seven in 10 Republicans agreed both that “white men are the most attacked group in the country right now” and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.” 

Similarly, in a national 2021 survey conducted by a UCLA  polling project, Republicans believed there to be more discrimination against white people than against other racial groups, more against men than women, and more against Christians than other religious groups, such as Muslims and Jews. “Republicans see a racial order in which historically privileged groups, like white Americans, are now the real victims,” the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck wrote in their book The Bitter End, which cited the UCLA research.

It’s really hard to achieve anything with a party which is in such fabulous denial of the actual reality of America than to think that white people and Christians are the people suffering the most discrimination in America.