GoKawiildynomight · updated Jun 2023 · science health effort
Look, I get it. Diet Coke tastes sweet because it has aspartame in it. Aspartame is a weird synthetic molecule that’s 200 times sweeter than sucrose. Half of the world’s aspartame is made by Ajinomoto of Tokyo—the same company that first brought us MSG back in 1909.
If you look on Wikipedia, you’ll see that aspartame is a methyl ester of the aspartic acid phenylalanine dipeptide, which isn’t, like, comforting.
It’s normal to have a prior that aspartame might be bad for you. Certainly, that was my prior. Without looking at any evidence, any reasonable person would think like this:
aspartame is… odds …good for you very unlikely …harmless plausible …bad for you plausible
This makes the decision theory pretty simple: Consuming aspartame has little upside, but substantial downside.
The thing is, we do have evidence. We have a lot of evidence. The FDA calls aspartame “one of the most exhaustively studied substances in the human food supply”.
The other thing is, the alternative to aspartame often isn’t no aspartame but rather sugar or corn syrup or even perhaps even alcohol.
I don’t want to convince anyone to consume aspartame. But if we’re choosing between aspartame and other risky things, we should evaluate the relative risks.
What happens to aspartame after it goes into your body
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