Posted by
timothy
on from the new-improved-just-like-the-last-one dept.
guttentag writes: "The FDA has approved a new sugar substitute from the people who brought you NutraSweet. It's 7,000 to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar and unlike NutraSweet (aspartame), Neotame apparently doesn't give rats cancer and is safe for people with phenylkeotonuria."
It's not so much a question of cancer.
by
orthogonal
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's a question of what you've evolved to ingest safely.
If this sugar substitute is sucessful, it will be found in large quantities in a large number of foods. So you won't end up ingesting a little; in all likelyhood, (especially if you're an American) you'll ingest a lot.
Your body (is built by a genome that) has had at minimum some six million years to become adapted to the natural sugars found in fruits.
It's had no chance to adapt to this substitute.
That it has encountered the basic elements that make up Neotame isn't really relevent. You'll die without sufficient sodium chloride (table salt), but more than 1 part per million of straight chloride will harm you (OSHA permissible exposure limit).
Some physicians even raise questions about the health effects of corn syrup, given that it is added in great quantities to almost all processed foods sold in the U.S. It's not that corn syrup is bad in and of itself, it's a question of what the effects are when one ingests so much more than the body could even have become adapted to in nature.
We have no data about long-term use of Neotame; if you want to provide that data with your body, go ahead. I'll stick with sugar, in moderate quantities.
Re:13,000 times sweeter
by
sam_handelman
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are three ways.
1) You take two liters of water, and add fifty grams of sugar to one liter, and fifty grams of neotame to the other (actually, I think they'd start out with less than that, but bear with me) you give people glasses and ask them which is sweeter? Then, you "lower the dose" of neotame until it's a wash (half of your sample says the sugar water is sweeter, half says the neotame.)
2) You could directly measure the rate at which sweet-taste cells fire (signal the brain) when exposed to a given concentration of the stuff, compared with a set amount (1 Molar, say) of sugar. If 1/13,000 M of Neotame gives the same response as 1M sugar, it's 13,000 times sweeter than sugar. I don't know enough about this technically to know exactly what they'd do, but they'd probably remove the taste cells from the rat and measure the response directly/electrically.
3) You could purify the extracellular domain of the sugar receptors in your taste-bud cells. Then, you'd measure the binding affinity for the compound to the receptor. Assuming every binding event gives an equal amount of sweetness, if Neotame has 13,000 times the binding constant of Sugar, it is 13,000 times sweeter (you need 1/13,000 as much to get a given amount of sweetneses.)
Now, my big problem with nutrasweet is the god damned aftertaste, which is foul. If this replacement doesn't taste metallic (whatever you want to call it), I'll drink it by the gallon.
-- The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
But Mother Nature...
by
2g3-598hX
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...is a cruel bitch. There are many natural substances out there which are bad for you.
Artifical != bad && natural != good
Consider this: Many plants don't actual like being eaten. So they evolve to be toxic. Many animals don't like being eaten either. So they evolve to be toxic. At least this sweetener hasn't been evolved for millions of years to be bad for you.
So humans evolved to eat fruit. But recently (20,000 years ago) we adapted to eat grains, something we had never ever done before. And we did it, no sweat.
We are opportunistic omnivores (like bears) that are meant to eat whatever we can - vegetable, animal, mineral. Our systems have evolved to be robust in dealing with toxins. Don't underestimate the body's natural anti-toxin systems: some coyotes simply CANNOT be poisoned... they must be baited with meat with a autofiring projectile syringe in it. (They vomit any poison).
And in all these lab tests they give rats relatively huge quantities of the given drug....but just imagine the rats they tested this on..."God please, just give us something SAVOURY!!!"
Re:But Mother Nature...
by
bsane
·
· Score: 5, Funny
some coyotes simply CANNOT be poisoned... they must be baited with meat with a autofiring projectile syringe in it.
That sounds more like something a coyote would use to catch a roadrunner. Except he would have to use birdseed to bait it.
Obviously they needed to dilute it by a factor of 13000...its almost homeopathy.
Homeopathy would take something bitter, then dilute it down. They'd then claim that the more dilute you make it, the sweeter it gets. Uh Huh. And if you buy that I've got a bridge to sell you.
--
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
The time felt right for a new sweetener.
by
Deagol
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
First saccharine (Sweet-n-Low), then aspartame (NutraSweet, expired 1992), now currently suctralose (Splenda). I'm sure there's more. Industry will crank out a new calorie-free sweetener every time they can get a new patent.
The industry is a crazy one.
I personally use stevia -- a non-patentable, naturally-occuring no-calorie sweetener. Great stuff, if you're into the artificial sweetener thing. We even grow some at home, though we've yet to get a reasonable yield.
I'm no big conspiracy buff, but I've read that big corporate interests (our beloved Monsanto, maybe?) paid off the FDA to disallow stevia to be marketed as a sweetener, paving the way for profits on the patented lab-grown chemicals that we injest in our diet soft drinks.
Note, that I do have a huge box of pink saccharine packets I bought from Costco (a US price club). As Diet Coke once said, "Just for the taste of it!" I can't stand aspartame, stevia is to pricey to use everywhere.
My point? Um... I don't remember. However, if you read up a bit, the sweetener industry is an interesting one. Plus I couldn't not plug stevia.:)
There is a much simpler way of satisfying a craving for sugar: just cut back on it. After a short while, your taste buds will adjust and a little sugar will taste very sweet.
Re:The time felt right for a new sweetener.
by
Deagol
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Good article. When I was researching stevia about a year ago, I didn't find any negative press. Certainly something to keep an eye on. Thanks.
The article says the FDA was petitioned 3 times for use of stevia as a sweetener, and rejected each time. I have to wonder how many timed the other big ones (saccharine, aspartame, & sucralose) had to petition. Funny how aspartame was never recalled after the many negative reactions it caused in people (or I seem to recall a big fuss about it, anyway).
Science aside, I'm still inclined to believe that big monied interests have a lot to do with the holdup. I mean, there's a lot of proven harmful products out there (cigarette, for example) that haven't gone away yet.
Re:The time felt right for a new sweetener.
by
g4dget
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Science aside, I'm still inclined to believe that big monied interests have a lot to do with the holdup.
If it only were a simple as corruption. Rather, it's the way things work around here: herbs don't make much money relative to patented chemicals. That means that people don't have much money for scientific trials involving herbs. Furthermore, it's the drug and chemical companies that (directly or indirectly) train applied chemists and biologists, and they ultimately set the standards; it's not that they want to be biased, it's just that they can't imagine any other way of doing business.
The solution? Increased government funding for drug and herbal research--we can't rely on the market to fix this. The profit motive in medicine doesn't coincide with good patient care: a patented maintenance drug for a common chronic illness is much more interesting financially than a non-patentable cure. The drug companies want the maintenance drug, the patients want the cure.
Re:The time felt right for a new sweetener.
by
sl3xd
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The drug companies want the maintenance drug, the patients want the cure.
Sure the patients may want the cure. However, there's almost never a real 'cure' to most ailments. There's rarely any such thing as a 'magic bullet' for such a thing. On this point, pretty much everybody agrees, from the loudest herbal/homeopathic advocate to the most conservative scientist.
Antibiotics (and many infectious diseases) are the closest thing to a case for the existence 'magic bullet'. And we still get sick, don't we?
There's no getting around this fact. Most health problems are a matter of treatment, because a real cure is utterly impossible. You can't cure old age; we can merely relieve some of its symptoms. We can't cure joint and/or muscle problems. You can't 'cure' chemical depression; the person's brain just can't maintain the right chemistry on its own. Treatment (or as you put it, maintenance) is required
Which suits health care professionals just fine. All want your repeated business. From herbalists, to acupuncturists, to doctors, and pharmaceutical companies.
I used to work for a company that markets 'nutritional supplements,' including herbals. I worked in the lab. The company spends millions on research every year, into ways to maintain or improve health. One thing they researched vigorously: If herbs had the properties its advocates claimed.
In nearly every case, there were no particularly unique compounds, organic or inorganic. In clinical studies, the result was no better than a placebo. The exceptions are very conditional at best (ie. slight improvement in memory of a small percentage of alhzeimer's patients (and only among alhzeimers patients); the claim was it substantially improves memory for all)
Drug companies do the same; an astounding number of drugs are biological in origin, they haven't forgotten that. Aspirin (willow bark tea), penicilin (mold), opiates, and coca derived drugs among them. They're still finding benefits to aspirin. And just because it's bilogical in origin doesn't mean it's not patentable. (You can patent the use of this chemical, found in (komodo dragon saliva, cow feces, this plant... whatever) for the treatment of (whatever ails you, so long as you can prove it is safe and effective to your government's equivalent of the US's FDA)
So it's not that herbal solutions aren't being looked at seriously, or that there isn't funding. It's just that in nearly every case, the actual facts of an herbs properties do not back up the claims of its advocates. For that matter, many herbs touted as 'good' are in fact rather dangerous. (I even remember reading about the healing properties of Hemlock).
If an herb has good properties, we study it, and find out how it works. In nearly every case, it's easiest (and cheapest and safest for everyone) to isolate the compound(s) responsible, and synthesise them. (Which can then be patented)
-- --
Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I'll take the research of proven scientists at places like MIT over some crackpots running a website with who knows what credentials to make any of the claims that are made.
--
"And like that... he's gone."
Re:The effects of artifical sweeteners.
by
Jakosky
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, we all die sometime, but this isn't about death, this is about the rest of your life.
I'd rather experience the searing pain of a quick heart attack than have my life drawn out like a cancer patient's over many years, finally culminating in several months of extreme agony only aided by a slow morphine drip leaving me unintelligable to visiting family.
And long before the beginning of the end, there are many more quality of life issues. Say I have carpal tunnel, a common geek issue, and I've been eating Neotame or Aspartame or some other neurological damager, will the combination prevent my hand and fingers from healing? Will the lingering pain and numbness be mine for life? Why? So I could have fewer calories?
For some rediculous reason, people figure that life is life and death is death. Look around you. Not everyone ages the same way. How do you want to grow old?
By the way, this isn't simply genetics. By comparing cultures throughout the world, genetics is considered far less important than 1) diet 2) activity 3) outlook (including religion).
you might think that, but you would be wrong
by
g4dget
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Fructose has a glycemic index of 22, sucrose of 64, and glucose of 100. Many fruits are close to fructose. The reason is that there is an active transport for glucose, while fructose gets absorbed by diffusion. The presence of fiber (in fruit), minerals, fat, and protein also affects the glycemic index.
Re:13,000 times sweeter
by
PacoTaco
·
· Score: 3, Funny
but they'd probably remove the taste cells from the rat
Ah, the glamorous life of the lab assistant.
$%$##@ing chemists
by
Chris+Canfield
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?" Most sugar-free sweeteners are A: much less tasty than sugar and B: hideous chemical combinations designed to be unprocessable by your body. When I put something my VCR isn't designed to handle into the little slot in front, it generally voids the warantee. Why are we surprised when, say, Olestra / Olean gums up our little internal sewage systems?
It says quite a bit about this culture that we'd rather be dead than fat, and we'd rather get cancer than think about what we are eating.
Sugar only rots teeth if you eat it pure with a gum base and a coloring (AKA candy) and then don't clean them. Coke can dissolve a tooth overnight, a feat that sugar water can't replicate. How is Diet Coke supposed to protect your pearly whites? Even then viable replacements exist for people's teeth. I really don't know why everyone comes down on sugar these days (except for it's abusability as a cheap addition to many foods). It's natural, healthy in normal doses, and glucose / fructose is the basic ingredient for glycolysis, which is the body's ATP (a form of stored energy) production cycle. You can get fat from sugar because you are producing more energy than your body needs. In effect, your body will utilize the sugar given, and this is seen as bad. Nutrasweet isn't causing cancer in rats because it is too useful for them.
Sorry to go on a rant, but it just p!$$es me off the kind of irresponsibly researched junk chemistry that is pushed upon the worlds population as "healthy." There is NOTHING healthy about Nutrasweet, Saccarine, Neotame, or the other laboratory sweeteners developed and patented with profit in mind. Many "healthy" and "diet" drinks consist of nothing but carbonated water, aspartame, and "natural flavors" (which consist of nothing but trace amounts of compounds developed from a base class of living ingredients but whose final output bares no resemblance to the source material). Maybe there should be an administration of some sort that would regulate companies producing the things we ingest... like food and... drugs? Geeze, I still have nights spent in the smallest room in the house thanks to the random unlabeled proliferation of Olestra into the foods we eat. Thanks FDA!
I would be proud to burn a few karma here if anyone knows how to mod a comment down as "bitter"
-Chris
-- This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Sugar causes LOTS of cancer (indirectly)
by
texchanchan
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?"
Because sugar does indirectly cause cancer. Fat is a carcinogen. Not just the grease you eat, but the flab you carry around, that your body makes out of refined sugar, or any sugar (including fructose) if you eat more than you burn.*
Reference Reference "Early studies noted the association of obesity and kidney cancer among women; however, more recent studies have also found an increased risk among overweight men."
How fat can be a carcinogen:
Your body fat doesn't just sit there. It makes estrogen-like hormones. Even in guys. The more of these you have circulating, the more likely your prostate (or your breasts--yes, males too) will develop a tumor.
It correlates with colon cancer. Cause unknown.
Fat-soluble anything gets stored in your fat. If you have lots of fat, any fat-soluble poisons (natural or man-made) that you consume have a place to stay. Less fat, less room for stored fat-soluble molecules.
Long article on diet as a factor in cancer. Interesting related transcript of a meeting about a weight-loss drug. *"Once the... monosaccharides [get] into the blood circulatory system they can pass directly into the liver, where fructose and galactose are converted into glucose....Excess glucose will be stored as glycogen mainly in liver and muscle cells or in form of metabolized fat in adipocytes." here and plenty more sources.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a question of what you've evolved to ingest safely.
If this sugar substitute is sucessful, it will be found in large quantities in a large number of foods. So you won't end up ingesting a little; in all likelyhood, (especially if you're an American) you'll ingest a lot.
Your body (is built by a genome that) has had at minimum some six million years to become adapted to the natural sugars found in fruits.
It's had no chance to adapt to this substitute.
That it has encountered the basic elements that make up Neotame isn't really relevent. You'll die without sufficient sodium chloride (table salt), but more than 1 part per million of straight chloride will harm you (OSHA permissible exposure limit).
Some physicians even raise questions about the health effects of corn syrup, given that it is added in great quantities to almost all processed foods sold in the U.S. It's not that corn syrup is bad in and of itself, it's a question of what the effects are when one ingests so much more than the body could even have become adapted to in nature.
We have no data about long-term use of Neotame; if you want to provide that data with your body, go ahead. I'll stick with sugar, in moderate quantities.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
There are three ways.
1) You take two liters of water, and add fifty grams of sugar to one liter, and fifty grams of neotame to the other (actually, I think they'd start out with less than that, but bear with me) you give people glasses and ask them which is sweeter? Then, you "lower the dose" of neotame until it's a wash (half of your sample says the sugar water is sweeter, half says the neotame.)
2) You could directly measure the rate at which sweet-taste cells fire (signal the brain) when exposed to a given concentration of the stuff, compared with a set amount (1 Molar, say) of sugar. If 1/13,000 M of Neotame gives the same response as 1M sugar, it's 13,000 times sweeter than sugar. I don't know enough about this technically to know exactly what they'd do, but they'd probably remove the taste cells from the rat and measure the response directly/electrically.
3) You could purify the extracellular domain of the sugar receptors in your taste-bud cells. Then, you'd measure the binding affinity for the compound to the receptor. Assuming every binding event gives an equal amount of sweetness, if Neotame has 13,000 times the binding constant of Sugar, it is 13,000 times sweeter (you need 1/13,000 as much to get a given amount of sweetneses.)
Now, my big problem with nutrasweet is the god damned aftertaste, which is foul. If this replacement doesn't taste metallic (whatever you want to call it), I'll drink it by the gallon.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
...is a cruel bitch. There are many natural substances out there which are bad for you.
...but just imagine the rats they tested this on..."God please, just give us something SAVOURY!!!"
Artifical != bad && natural != good
Consider this: Many plants don't actual like being eaten. So they evolve to be toxic. Many animals don't like being eaten either. So they evolve to be toxic. At least this sweetener hasn't been evolved for millions of years to be bad for you.
So humans evolved to eat fruit. But recently (20,000 years ago) we adapted to eat grains, something we had never ever done before. And we did it, no sweat.
We are opportunistic omnivores (like bears) that are meant to eat whatever we can - vegetable, animal, mineral. Our systems have evolved to be robust in dealing with toxins. Don't underestimate the body's natural anti-toxin systems: some coyotes simply CANNOT be poisoned... they must be baited with meat with a autofiring projectile syringe in it. (They vomit any poison).
And in all these lab tests they give rats relatively huge quantities of the given drug.
Homeopathy would take something bitter, then dilute it down. They'd then claim that the more dilute you make it, the sweeter it gets. Uh Huh. And if you buy that I've got a bridge to sell you.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The industry is a crazy one.
I personally use stevia -- a non-patentable, naturally-occuring no-calorie sweetener. Great stuff, if you're into the artificial sweetener thing. We even grow some at home, though we've yet to get a reasonable yield.
I'm no big conspiracy buff, but I've read that big corporate interests (our beloved Monsanto, maybe?) paid off the FDA to disallow stevia to be marketed as a sweetener, paving the way for profits on the patented lab-grown chemicals that we injest in our diet soft drinks.
This paper is a good reference.
Note, that I do have a huge box of pink saccharine packets I bought from Costco (a US price club). As Diet Coke once said, "Just for the taste of it!" I can't stand aspartame, stevia is to pricey to use everywhere.
My point? Um... I don't remember. However, if you read up a bit, the sweetener industry is an interesting one. Plus I couldn't not plug stevia. :)
Method of processing duck feet
but some experts believe
Uhhh, would these be the "experts" at holisticmed.com?
How do you know they're experts?
I'll take the research of proven scientists at places like MIT over some crackpots running a website with who knows what credentials to make any of the claims that are made.
"And like that
Yes, we all die sometime, but this isn't about death, this is about the rest of your life.
I'd rather experience the searing pain of a quick heart attack than have my life drawn out like a cancer patient's over many years, finally culminating in several months of extreme agony only aided by a slow morphine drip leaving me unintelligable to visiting family.
And long before the beginning of the end, there are many more quality of life issues. Say I have carpal tunnel, a common geek issue, and I've been eating Neotame or Aspartame or some other neurological damager, will the combination prevent my hand and fingers from healing? Will the lingering pain and numbness be mine for life? Why? So I could have fewer calories?
For some rediculous reason, people figure that life is life and death is death. Look around you. Not everyone ages the same way. How do you want to grow old?
By the way, this isn't simply genetics. By comparing cultures throughout the world, genetics is considered far less important than 1) diet 2) activity 3) outlook (including religion).
Fructose has a glycemic index of 22, sucrose of 64, and glucose of 100. Many fruits are close to fructose. The reason is that there is an active transport for glucose, while fructose gets absorbed by diffusion. The presence of fiber (in fruit), minerals, fat, and protein also affects the glycemic index.
Ah, the glamorous life of the lab assistant.
Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?" Most sugar-free sweeteners are A: much less tasty than sugar and B: hideous chemical combinations designed to be unprocessable by your body. When I put something my VCR isn't designed to handle into the little slot in front, it generally voids the warantee. Why are we surprised when, say, Olestra / Olean gums up our little internal sewage systems?
It says quite a bit about this culture that we'd rather be dead than fat, and we'd rather get cancer than think about what we are eating.
Sugar only rots teeth if you eat it pure with a gum base and a coloring (AKA candy) and then don't clean them. Coke can dissolve a tooth overnight, a feat that sugar water can't replicate. How is Diet Coke supposed to protect your pearly whites? Even then viable replacements exist for people's teeth. I really don't know why everyone comes down on sugar these days (except for it's abusability as a cheap addition to many foods). It's natural, healthy in normal doses, and glucose / fructose is the basic ingredient for glycolysis, which is the body's ATP (a form of stored energy) production cycle. You can get fat from sugar because you are producing more energy than your body needs. In effect, your body will utilize the sugar given, and this is seen as bad. Nutrasweet isn't causing cancer in rats because it is too useful for them.
Sorry to go on a rant, but it just p!$$es me off the kind of irresponsibly researched junk chemistry that is pushed upon the worlds population as "healthy." There is NOTHING healthy about Nutrasweet, Saccarine, Neotame, or the other laboratory sweeteners developed and patented with profit in mind. Many "healthy" and "diet" drinks consist of nothing but carbonated water, aspartame, and "natural flavors" (which consist of nothing but trace amounts of compounds developed from a base class of living ingredients but whose final output bares no resemblance to the source material). Maybe there should be an administration of some sort that would regulate companies producing the things we ingest... like food and... drugs? Geeze, I still have nights spent in the smallest room in the house thanks to the random unlabeled proliferation of Olestra into the foods we eat. Thanks FDA!
I would be proud to burn a few karma here if anyone knows how to mod a comment down as "bitter"
-Chris
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Because sugar does indirectly cause cancer. Fat is a carcinogen. Not just the grease you eat, but the flab you carry around, that your body makes out of refined sugar, or any sugar (including fructose) if you eat more than you burn.*
Reference
Reference "Early studies noted the association of obesity and kidney cancer among women; however, more recent studies have also found an increased risk among overweight men."
How fat can be a carcinogen:
- Your body fat doesn't just sit there. It makes estrogen-like hormones. Even in guys. The more of these you have circulating, the more likely your prostate (or your breasts--yes, males too) will develop a tumor.
- It correlates with colon cancer. Cause unknown.
- Fat-soluble anything gets stored in your fat. If you have lots of fat, any fat-soluble poisons (natural or man-made) that you consume have a place to stay. Less fat, less room for stored fat-soluble molecules.
Long article on diet as a factor in cancer.Interesting related transcript of a meeting about a weight-loss drug.
*"Once the