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Scientists Link Popular Sugar Substitute to Liver Disease
(scitechdaily.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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I’m not sure why people expected all these sugar substitutes to be harmless
The entire notion of sugar substitution in the first place should be such an insane concept to everyone but somehow we’ve instead created a diet soda and junk food entitlement
Honest question: what about this makes it obviously "insane"?
Ingesting chemicals to mimic sugar so you can have sweet things with no caloric consequences doesn’t seem insane to you?
i drink chemical called water. i add a bunch of chemicals clumped up in bean form, then roast those beans, and grind them up sometimes and call it coffee. I sprinkle in a chemical, sucrose, we call sugar. It's all chemicals. I love chemicals. You love chemicals. We are all chemicals. You know why? Because you are made of dna. Guess what DNA is made of? That's right, chemicals baby. DNA needs more chemicals to make more copies of itself. Without more chemicals, it would have to break the laws of thermodynamics to replicate itself. More chemicals are needed.
every time you think "they're feeding us chemicals" as opposed to what? use synthetic or naturally occurring as a distinction or something
Sugar is also a chemical. You simply can't just say because "chemical" because that doesn't make any sense. Sugar is actually 2 chemicals, so by that logic a sugar replacement that is only 1 chemical, should statistically be half as risky, based on the "chemical" logic, and by that logic make a lot of sense to use instead.
Just to be a bit more charitable to their point, what word should they use instead of chemical when, broadly speaking about such things?
I’m aware of the fact that sorbitol might be a bad example. Replace it with aspartame. What word should they use to avoid getting told sugar is a chemical?
I’m not looking to argue, I just find the “everything is a chemical” rhetoric to be a bit obnoxious. And I think both sides could be making their points in a less adversarial way.
What things? There is no sub-group of chemicals whose sheer presence automatically makes a food harmful. The replacement is a different argument.
No. This may be obvious to you because you have knowledge that I lack.
Seems pretty ridiculous on face. Everyone is comfortable acknowledging how evil food and chemical companies are, and that is not new info
This is the equivalent of believing tobacco companies about cigarettes and then being super surprised down the line that they either lied or didn’t do enough research
You're not explaining what is obvious about this.
Ingesting chemicals created by known bad actors in the food and chemical industry for the purpose of having those same bad actors sell you unlimited addictive sweets…
I mean come on
WTF are you on about? Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol that is found naturally in fruit, AFAIK all research until now has shown sorbitol to be less harmful than sugar, especially to your teeth. Sorbitol is generally made from starch while normal sugar is a refined product.
What about this makes Sorbitol obviously harmful?
Seems like you are making a giant argument from ignorance.
If your entire argument is "food industry bad", that's not very convincing. Do you somehow produce everything you eat yourself? Do you make your own clothes too, from resources you collected yourself? Did you collect the resources to make the device you post on yourself and put them together?
I do my best to purchase the most sustainable and quality versions of any given offering I can. I’ll also readily acknowledge the harms and where we do and don’t have choices
But I’m not sure how you jumped from the notion that the industries behind artificial sweeteners, who we already know are verifiably bad and overtly acting against the interests of public health to… you didn’t make your own clothes so artificial sweeteners are actually safe and awesome 🤪
Like the other dude said, if your only argument is "OMG, everybody knows that corporations are evil, they must be selling poison", that doesn't rise to the level of obvious.
It's like saying that since the US federal government in the 60s was racist and transphobic, they must have faked the moon landing.
If it were "obvious" that a sugar substitute was dangerous, the sugar companies would have trumpeted that as loudly as they could.
I never said artificial sweeteners are safe and awesome, don't put words in my mouth. What I said was that if your argument is "food industry bad therefore sweeteners bad", you can't trust and buy absolutely anything from any industry.
You make me sad to be part of the same species.
Injecting chemicals just so you can have sweet things power your muscle performance without buildup of acetone doesn’t seem insane to you?
Sugar is a chemical, you dumb fuck.
Injecting chemicals for increased muscle performance DOES seem insane to me
Try again
Is your objection to substitutions? Because that's a very arbitrary line. Why is it that we call sorbitol a sugar substitute instead of calling sugar a sorbitol substitute? Grind up some plums to make juice, remove the sorbitol, add some sucrose in its place. Doesn't sound all that different.
Sugar isn't harmless.
It is if you don’t eat too much
But aspartame will literally damage the DNA in your colon because it’s inherently genotoxic to our cells
The DNA damage comes from the formaldehyde that the body produces when metabolizing aspartame, but guess what? The body makes formaldehyde anyway, just from its natural metabolic processes. As long as you don't consume too much it's fine.
The problem is over-consumption, which is the basis of having a consumer economy. If everyone ate less the food industry would collapse. They need us to overeat and if we ever stopped they'd have to reconcile with the fact that they can't just keep growing their profits infinitely. Plus, when we overeat, they can make even more money by treating the sicknesses it causes. Win/Win!
Don't consume either. Artificial sweeteners are UPFs and sugar in all its forms have no place in the human diet.
If you remove sugar in all its forms from your diet then you'd better forget about eating any plants whatsoever. Cellulose is sugar, carbs are sugar. Where do you think we get our energy from?
Amino acids and fat. Why do we need sugar? It's not an essential nutrient.
You don't understand human biology very well.
Please elaborate. I would love to learn more. Not being sarcastic.
Lipids (fat) also gets converted into glucose before your body can use it. If we're cutting out sugar in all forms then that counts too.
Indeed, we should all be trying to reduce even sugar to 0
If there is a food Overton window it’s a solar system away from a normal diet
I can tell you know a lot about biology.
They have been used for decades without issue.
It takes decades to do the research or develop the issues
Genotoxicity of aspartame
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4235942/
Cancer risk of Erythritol
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250718035156.htm
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/sugar-substitutes-new-cardiovascular-concerns
Hope you dont use salt, that can cause cancer