this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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I was expecting yet another aspartame-bashing article, but it's an erythritol-bashing one this time.
Look, it's really simple: all those sweeteners have been in widespread use for a long time. Wanna know if they're harmful? Do some stats correlating release dates in several countries and occurrence of this-or-that disease and death records. If you can't find a statistically-significant correlation, well... it doesn't prove the stuff is harmless, but chances are it is.
That's assuming there aren't already a kajillion inconclusive studies on the particular molecule you're interested in, as with aspartame.
Compare it to sugar while at it. It doesn’t need to be harmless, it needs to be less harmful than sugar.
And that’s a fairly low bar to cross.
Sugar is like water and air: it's fine in reasonable quantities 🙂
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison.
And the same goes for all sweeteners too. In fact, I know for a fact that consuming aspartame in large quantities is harmful, because I used to consume entirely too much of it every day by mistake, and I very much felt the effects when I quit.
I don't need to do hours of graduate level health polling and statistics if I only eat what my great grandparents would have recognized as food. Rules of thumb aren't perfect but they're good enough.
I don’t mean to be argumentative but this is a logical fallacy called “appeal to tradition” where something is argued to be correct because it has been historically accepted.
For example, your great grandparents could have had a diet heavy in saturated fats (bacon, etc) and died prematurely from cardiovascular disease, albeit not before they had children. So just because they recognized it as food doesn’t mean it’s a healthy choice for people seeking a healthy, long life.