From the abstract of the study [0]:
> No statistically significant associations were found in females.
So, there’s a significant gender difference here, possibly with diagnosis but likely a deeper connection. Alternatively, it might impact both but this study didn’t have enough statistical power to notice the correlation.
What is interesting here is that drinking 'diet soda' actually decreased the odds for girls (though not reaching statistical significance) - that strikes me as an extremely odd finding. Their discussion of 'why' was not very compelling. I have a hard time thinking there's anything causative with such a disparity in sex.
I also noticed that adjusting for some of the larger confounders for autism (maternal age, SES) didn't move the needle much. I would expect there to be a much larger difference between adjusted/not-adjusted OR. Maybe there's other confounders lurking or the adjustment was insufficient.
The paper (https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3772) claims this is the first time somebody has looked for an association between autism and maternal consumption of aspartame during pregnancy / breastfeeding.
Who remembers what they had to eat yesterday? What about last week? What about over the course of 8 months, *literally years ago*? What, you don't remember how much soda you drank in 2020? That's weird. All 300 study participants here probably have better memories than you, I guess.
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Many very different things fall under the label of science, but not all of these things are the same. The confidence we can have of our models and understandings in particle physics is very different than the confidence and understanding we can have with vaccine trials is very different than the confidence and understanding we can have with nutritional epidemiology. Personally, I think the last falls outside the realm of science [1], and closer to "here's something I thought of. There's some data attached too. Misled yet?"
Aspartame has been exhaustively studied since the 1980s! The odds you _don't find_ correlations between consumption of a novel compound (that has the most explicit healthy-user bias you could imagine) and medical conditions is 0.
(A reminder that is _not_ a pro-aspartame comment. I don't drink diet soda (unless I get snipped by Diet Coke), or much regular soda for that matter. But a single, *non-randomized, retrospective, recall-based (!!!!) study* making it to the front page is really surprising to me.)
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Edit: even a cursory skim of the paper should totally disqualify this from the front page, IMO, *even from nutritional epidemiology standards.* The paper does not even attempt to account for "for maternal overweight/obesity and diabetes, maternal mental health, and other potential confounders in our study." The classic: let's imply a casual variable, ignore the rest of the other possible ones, simply b/c "no covariate data were available."
There is literally billions of dollars to astroturf the safety of aspartame.
I don’t know if there is a correlation with Autism, but it does not seem completely inert either. I also have a hard time believing statements like - it can only do the following things to the body. We were told similar things about mRNA (can’t travel outside the localized muscle area, destroyed by the body in x many days, etc.) that may have been true in a lab, but was not in practice.
I'd never heard that before, but you're right -- "Coke contains 32 mg of caffeine per 12-ounce (335-ml) serving. Diet Coke is higher in caffeine, with about 42 mg per 12 ounces (335 ml)." [1]
I wonder why that is? If people expect an energy boost from Coke, and if sugar isn't contributing to that any more, a little extra caffeine will?
Coke Zero, on the other hand, "contains only 34mg of caffeine per can (12oz)" [2]. So it's more like regular Coke.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/caffeine-in-coke
[2] https://lifeboostcoffee.com/blogs/lifeboost/caffeine-in-coke...
This was overhauled with the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act of 2015, which requires the EPA to make safety determinations of new products hitting the market. It however ties the hands of states. If the EPA rules a chemical as having no unreasonable risk, states have no authority to regulate it [1].
[1] https://theconversation.com/will-the-new-toxic-chemical-safe...
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80 BCE – c. 15 BCE) wrote:
> 10. Clay pipes for conducting water have the following advantages. In the first place, in construction:--if anything happens to them, anybody can repair the damage. Secondly, water from clay pipes is much more wholesome than that which is conducted through lead pipes, because lead is found to be harmful for the reason that white lead is derived from it, and this is said to be hurtful to the human system. Hence, if what is produced from it is harmful, no doubt the thing itself is not wholesome.
> 11. This we can exemplify from plumbers, since in them the natural colour of the body is replaced by a deep pallor. For when lead is smelted in casting, the fumes from it settle upon their members, and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs. Hence, water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes, if we want to have it wholesome. That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life, for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels, yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Books_on_Architecture/Boo...
It is worth noting that this probably had more to do with the awful state of the city sewage system, so the water was well known to be contaminated. Luckily we've improved somewhat with sewage (I think).
Although anecdotally I've had a local lake closed for weeks at least due to toxic red algae blooms related to run off from farms (I believe it's fertilizer runoff that's attributed to these blooms)
Do you think people wake up one day with the bright idea of becoming obese and dying at 45 of heart issues ?
You can only make decisions between the choices you're being provided, and if half of these choices are engineered to be addictive, on a global scale you're fighting a losing battle
> is more responsible for people making bad choices than engineers at facebook.
But... they're the same mentality, don't you see it ? It's been studied and developed by marketing people
Try arguing in good faith for a bit it really isn't that hard. I'm not asking them to see the future, I'm asking them to study their products so we don't discover decades later that "oh snap lead in gas was bad!?", "Oh what, breathing asbestos isn't so good in the end?!"
They have unlimited money when it comes to finding new ways to make more profit but as soon as we talk risk assessment and management the money printing press runs dry, how convenient
Do you think the top behavioural scientists at facebook working on how to make you more engaged don't know what they're doing ? If so why are all people in the loop not giving phones to their kids, not allowing them to access social medias, &c. ?
https://www.independent.ie/life/family/parenting/the-tech-mo...
https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/16t4eyg/drinking_d...
The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/...
edit for those curious about odds ratio https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK431098/#:~:text=The%20....
Many autistic people feel that Autism Speaks is a hate group. Even among those who don't feel quite as strongly, it's still often considered a problematic group. Possibly akin to groups that used to want to "cure" homosexuality.
Among other things, Autism Speaks was a big advocate of the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism [1].
[0] See the funding statement in https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3772.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Resignations_of_editors
In August 2018, 10 senior editors (including the editor-in-chief) of the journal Nutrients resigned, alleging that MDPI forced the replacement of the editor-in-chief because of his high editorial standards and for resisting pressure to "accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.
That’s explained here: https://xkcd.com/882/
I understood enough that this study found a correlation and that this was based on surveys. I thought it was an interesting finding, and concluded that this correlation should be examined more closely with more rigorous studies.
I did not go into the details of methodology and statistics and did not conclude, like you did, that this study has dubious value.
This is a trap that the public find themselves in with science reporting. Many people on HN have technical training to grasp these concepts but not understand them. I my self program, and use many of the same intellectual building blocks scientists use in the execution of my job. But I am not a scientist.
I am not a scientist is the key point because it means that I do not understand science. I know the “process” of science. I’ve read scientific papers. I’ve done toy experiments in school and in university. But I don’t understand it. To draw an analogy, Programming is a perception of reality. There are things that I do that I can never explain to management because they do not have direct experience with it. The “identity a bird in the park” XKCD comic is a meme of this concept [1] notwithstanding advances in AI research.
Like programming, science is a perception of reality. Like my management, I may have taken statistics, I know what confidence intervals are. But I have not lived the experience of building an experiment. Getting results, analyzing them, and constructing the distinctions necessary to reach an interesting and valid conclusion. If you’ve gone though that process, you know where to look for problems in a study. I and many people don’t. We will at best say, further study is needed, and at worst say that diet soda causes autism.
The public depends on experts to enter the conversation and share why things are wrong. This of course gets into the problem of “lies will make it half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. Retractions may be made, but never perceived. This makes us vulnerable to bad faith actors employing the gish gallop and there’s not a general purpose solution to that.
not restricted to the injection site: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...