There's not "nothing" wrong with MSG. But msg is fine in moderation, just like salt, fat and sugar are all fine in moderation too

Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]

[1] https://www.self.com/story/what-is-msg-and-is-it-bad-for-you

Indeed. It turns out that “MSG headaches” are just high sodium level headaches, either through dehydration, unbalanced electrolytes, elevated blood pressure or whatever else higher than normal sodium levels cause headaches. The same headache could be caused by salt. MSG actually makes recipes require less of other flavor ingredients, including salt. It’s also often found in dishes that still contain relatively massive amounts of salt.

So a little MSG to get your taste buds extra sensitive to other flavors is a net good. Just don’t eat too much sodium altogether, balance your electrolytes, and stay hydrated.

The argument for MSG is that it's "naturally occurring in food anyway" and that it is a substitute for worse things - which sounds like the same argument for aspartame.

The bottom line is you don't know for sure and it's developed under commercial incentives.

It's probably ok carries just as much weight as you probably don't need it.

I think most things aren't great if you have them in quantity. Variety in your diet is a good thing

Maybe. I doubt most consumers of sugar free soda are drinking more than 4 (which is already a lot). I have to imagine that, like most things, most people consume them in moderation and have no ill effects.

That said, I have to imagine if you go from drinking ten sugared sodas a day to ten diet sodas a day, your life will change in a very positive way. That would be removing 1500 calories of pure sugar from your diet and that's gotta change people's lives.

Not that I always follow it.. but my general advice is to keep sweetened drinks to with meals, and to reduce/eliminate snacking altogether. Sweetened drinks, even zero calorie, sugar free causes some glucose mobilization and insulin response... this insulin response likely contributes to insulin resistance over time.

That's just my not a doctor, observational, take on it.

> dozens of cans of sugar free soda every day

In that case phosphoric acid is a bigger problem than aspartam will ever be

I want to say a "well duh", but it seems it's not common sense that too much of anything is generally bad for someone.

(For science, I'll be a willing test subject to test whether "too much money" is bad for me though)

Why not?

You have to be supremely dumb (or just a child) to take any sort of advice from influencers (I hate even that word with passion, and whom it represents I despise even more). They are out there to influence you, to change your opinions to ones suiting them and not you, and their wallets. Nothing more there. Their revenue stream is mostly paid ads or their merch (more ads towards their own profit).

Its the same as taking advice from usual ads - does anybody think its a good idea? Do you even need to say to anybody but a child or mentally impaired person - 'don't make your decision based on ads'?

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But why does everything need to be sweet? Most things don’t need sweetened and shouldn’t be sweet.

Of the things that do benefit from sweeteners, they always need like 1/5 the level added.

Americans have been trained to love saccharine levels of sweetness. People can easily handle and enjoy lower levels of sweetness if they just do it for a few weeks to recalibrate from candy land.

And as always, too much of anything isn't good for you either. A sugary soda on occasion won't do much harm, but some have several a day or it's the only thing they will drink.

I much prefer sucralose to aspartame

Sugar please. I can't stand the taste of aspartame. They've started using Dextrin to replace sugars in confectionary (Mars Galaxy minstrels) and they taste awful.

I liked Pepsi more than Coke but now that in the UK is using Aspartame in Pepsi it ruins the taste tenfold.

It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.

Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.

And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.

I felt the same way, they used to taste awful to me, now I only notice a slight difference between Dr Pepper zero and regular. Maybe I just got older and my taste buds degraded?

What I find weird is the assumption that everyone would like soda with artificial sweeteners, but I guess other don't taste it the same way. There are restaurants where I just give up and just get water. Strange because I assumed much of their profit came from drinks.

I know a few people like myself, that won't drink artificially sweetened soda, but we are the minority. Mostly people are confused when you tell them you don't like the taste, and that you drink so few sodas that the sugar doesn't make any difference in terms of health anyway.

I am convinced that something weird is going on with Pepsi Max though, the about of that stuff being consumed is absolutely insane. At events it not even close, it's Pepsi Max that people primarily consume.

It might be.

I felt this same way all my life, until 6-months ago, when I found a flavored sugar free mix I actually liked.

I returned from vacation in Mexico, where I was drinking Coke with sugar. When I returned home, regular Coke, made with Corn Syrup in the U.S., tasted off. I decided to take the opportunity to stop drinking it.

I tried dozens of low calorie drink mixes and found one I could tolerate. I did some research and all things pointed to that being healthier than my Coke habit.

My tastes have changed again since starting this, but I don’t drink Coke anymore.

One thing that might have helped was drinking aspartame in my coffee, where its aftertaste is harder to detect.

I should mention the only good side effect I’ve had is a little less bloating, probably a result of avoiding carbonation. I haven’t lost any weight by the change. It’s also much easier to make a diet work when I’m not consuming 800 calories from Coke everyday.

It's an acquired taste.

Maybe, while I can relate to this feeling when it comes to some sweeteners commonly used in baked goods, I genuinely habe a hard tile distinguishing between sugar and sweetener containing beverages at this lokng.

I actually hate the taste of sugar in sodas after switching to diet for long enough. Taste is subjective and your preferences can change. That being said, saccharine is probably the better tasting of all of them, and the most maligned.

Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.

I've wondered this myself. The aftertaste on some of them is vile. The disappointing thing is that so many products use them when they reduce sugar, but sometimes I just want a reduced sugar product without any additional sweeteners. That seems hard to find these days.

It's an acquired taste. I felt the same way, but when I started trying to get fitter a lot of protein supplements (protein drinks, protein bars, etc) contained artificial sweeteners. After eating these for a bit I got used to the flavour profile and even started to like some aspects of it.

The best comparison is beer. The first time I had it, I thought it was kind of gross. After trying it a few more times you get used to the bitter and fermented notes and the taste becomes more pleasant.

It tastes disgusting to me.

> It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it

Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.

Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.

As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.

I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.

Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.

My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.

What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc

Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?

Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.

As the article mentions, this is a false dichotomy.

If you're an ordinary person driven to be healthy, drink water. Water is great. If you're already drinking water, you should absolutely not replace it with whatever bottled crap that Coke or Pepsi is peddling, be it "smart water" or otherwise.

But for people with sugar cravings bordering on addiction, which describes a depressingly enormous proportion of the population in the developed world, replacing sugary drinks with zero-calorie artificially-sweetened drinks can be a net health benefit. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are bad for your health, and consumption of sugar water is a significant driver of these. Yes, you could be even healthier by drinking water instead; see above. But sugar is an addictive chemical (sugar withdrawl is, in fact, a thing), and not everyone is going to quit cold turkey.

(And for the record, I fully agree that people should be more cognizant of their gut biome and how their diet affects it, including being skeptical of aspartame and other random synthetic ingredients.)

How would that work? It's hydrolized into its constituents, which are present in higher quantities in apples and chicken and other foods, in the upper GI. Do you have a cite for this?

Does aspartame cause intestinal inflammation, or do artificial sweeteners sans aspartame cause intestinal inflammation? Or which specific ones do?

Cause reading the blogpost, it explicitly calls out that most other artificial sweeteners do not get broken down "at all", suggesting their in-body lifecycles are quite different. I'd expect this not to apply to aspartame as a result, and thus it not being a missed angle at all:

> Incidentally, this same logic does not apply to other artificial sweeteners which mostly aren’t broken down at all.

I have had a long diagnosis of IBS before being diagnosed with crohns. You can drive yourself crazy chasing spurious diet/symptoms corolations. Alot of people drive themselves into disordered eating habits trying to control symptoms with diet. Ultimately your mental state has more to do with how you feel then any specific dietary input taken with moderation. Most people with autoimmune diseases also have high amounts of anxiety and stress. If you put more focus on the mental component, you'll likely find more symptom relief.

I get what you mean, but do remember that pretty much everything humans eat (fruits, vegetables, grains, meats) did not exist before humans cultivated them.

Most people don't suffer from IBD though. IBS is very common, IBD isn't

There's no harm to doing that if you can do it. But advice like "just eat healthy, natural food" is not really something most people can stick to long term. I know I can't!

When I find myself in a stressful situation the craving for sweets is very strong and artificial sweetners at least mean I have options that won't dump a bunch of calories/refined sugar into my body.

>An important missed angle is the effect of artificial sweeteners on gut microbiome.

Everything affects the gut microbiome. Every single type of food you eat alters it. Taking a walk alters it. Taking a flight alters it.

The whole "but it changes the microbiome" thing needs to be qualified by whether that change is meaningfully relevant in some direction, and evidence thus far, for most sweeteners, is unconvincing. 10.1016/j.cell.2022.07.016 is the only mildly legitimate research on this (a seemingly well executed RCT), but even it shows a rapidly fading effect, and no effect for aspartame given it's the subject of this submission.

But researchers who want a bit of attention (and a remarkable amount of research is plied not for useful results, but knowing that certain topics are easy mass media coverage) know it's gold to write a paper saying a sweetener changed the microbiome, because it plays into a fear people have (people are always susceptible to the "too good to be true" aha moment). Or worse still the garbage observational studies that conflate that people with metabolic issues are more likely to use sweeteners, so flip cause and effect and claim that sweeteners cause metabolic issues.

>What's the harm in sticking to a balanced whole diet of ingredients that were available to our ancestors 200years or more ago.

If people ate calorie-restricted, balanced diets, and limited simple carbs and sugars, most food problems fade away (presuming they aren't eating overtly poisonous things, which many of our ancestors did). But that isn't reality. In reality sugar is one of the greatest health crises of our times, and finding some mechanism of reducing that problem is beneficial. Better still people should tame the sweet tooth, but we live in reality.

And FWIW, you can do the reductionist thing that wellness grifters do with most any food. Loads of "balanced whole diets" are full of crazy, scary constituents, many of which are known carcinogens. Spices and herbs are full of deleterious ingredients. And so on.

n = 1 but I clearly feel the effect when I start drinking aspartam drinks a few times a week. So much so that I just stopped drinking them.

I didn't use to. But I stopped rafined sugar for a year and compensated with coca zero. After that, guts never been quite the same and it took some copious amount of probiotics with regular doctor checks to feel better.

Even then, it's still no back up to baseline, and now drinking aspartam more than once is upsetting.

I'm going to start a research lab that releases dubious conclusions so I can then be hired by other companies to "bad mouth" their product just so people on the internet can link the two and conclude that their product is actually good.

I know this lab! Ramazi Institute or something right?

We covered it in this podcast I used to produce (not explicitly the subject, they came up re: artificial sweetener studies and we explored them a bit). They’re very good at appearing legitimate while pushing wild claims.

“ However, a number of major issues with the study were identified by the Panel which made interpretation of the findings difficult. Notably, a high background incidence of chronic inflammatory disease in the lung and other organs was observed in all the animal groups including controls which did not receive aspartame, as reported by the European Ramazzini Foundation. This was considered to be a major confounding factor.”

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/efsa-assesses-new-asparta...

I have a similar negative response to legumes... but billions of people eat them without issue every day.

But a lot of people don't have that effect. So maybe it's not harmful for everyone.

Same here. People keep telling me it's not, but it is, even when I happen to ingest it while unaware I've done so.

Similarly, it makes me dizzy/sick a little like travel sickness

I'm still expecting the cause to be HPV and increase in anal sex. Some studies seem to point that way (and other studies that say it might not), but it hasn't been proven yet. However it would make sense, considering that it leads to cervical cancer, throat cancer, etc.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9610003/

Not an expert on this by any means, just went down this rabbit hole when deciding if I should be asking about my son getting the HPV vaccine when it was first made available to males, and before it was broadly recommended for men.

Did we just start adding this chemical in the ast five years? I can think of any other widespread roll out of a new technology in the same period.

Nothing else explains the observed cultural confidence in putative harm than this "puritan streak", combined with sugar industry lobbying. It's gotten other sweeteners like cyclamate and saccharine banned (or voluntarily withdrawn pending a ban) over the years. The same comments are repeated about every new sweetener coming on the market.

Same here. Very little amounts already give me a weird tummy feel. A normal amount (ex. Half a can) gets my tummy turned around for a few hours.

Some people are super tasters and they'll always have that problem. But most people stop noticing the aftertaste after a week or two of regular consumption. But I agree, when I started sugar free that aftertaste was nasty.

Now, the aftertaste of sweetened drinks is nasty, the lingering coy sweetness is vile.

Fresh fruit has gone through selective breeding over the decades to increase sweetness. This was discovered by a zoo in Australia IIRC, when it was noticed that animal dental issues had increased despite diets remaining the same over a long period.

Yes it is ever-escalating, I found that after weaning myself off sweetness for a while, when I did try a sweetened product like a typical piece of chocolate it tasted sickly sweet and unappealing.

Not sure how you get to that conclusion from the article when it ends with the conclusion from 5 health agencies that it's safe (and then more references from the scientific community that it's safe).

> So basically there's no scientific consensus either way

"The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion."

Did you even read the article?

Assuming, of course, that one's body _does_ naturally produce insulin. I'm glad it and other artificial sweeteners exist and are as prevalent as they are.