Is there any evidence that modern low calorie sweeteners have deleterious population-level effects, and what are they compared to high calorie sweeteners?

> "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.

sadly, they still are today sometimes, in areas with a lot of 125+year old infrastructure :/

Beer was also widely prevalent, right? Even if it's just small beer (<3%ABV), it's not exactly making you smarter. It's hard to hit the Ballmer peak, after all

Whoops, typo—I meant nutritionally deficient.

Hunter-gatherers had a varied but volatile diet. Agriculture solved the volatility at the expense of variety. Most agricultural humans across history were nutritionally deficient.

Enrichment (a/k/a fortification) started to solve for the lack of variety, though it’s been historically stymied by our lack of understanding what e.g. vitamins are; modern farming, biology and logistics enable us to actually solve for the problems agriculture introduced to society for the first time.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nate+the+hoof+g...

Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.

This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.

Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.

I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.

My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"

They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.

Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.

Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.

Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea

This is the functional medicine fallacy: That “real doctors” are “shoving pills” that are secretly bad for the patient, while functional medicine doctors are also “shoving pills” but they’re a laundry list of supplements and traditional remedies.

In my experience, the functional medicine practitioners push far more pills and unnecessary tests than anyone else, but they’re given the benefit of the doubt because they’re operating under the alternative medicine fallacy that primary care doctors are the ones doing the bad things.

> (but may require more effort from the patient).

This is another concept used to justify the ineffective alternative medicine treatments; If they don’t work, it’s the patient’s fault for failing to do some effort. Another common explanation for when they don’t work is to “discover” yet another thing that needs to be treated. The additional demands of the patient are also designed to create buy-in which amplifies any placebo effect. The more rituals and supplements you can get a patient taking, the more they believe it’s going to work.

I went to Swedish Hospital's Pain Services Clinic. https://www.swedish.org/services/pain-services Transformative.

Funny thing: the techniques and skills they teach work, even if you don't think they will.

I think most (all?) new age stuff -- naturopathy, chiropractics, reiki, whatever -- is BS. But I can't argue with my lived experience of using tai chi, mindfulness, education, and other new skills to proactively manage my disease.

This is my first time hearing (reading) the phrase "functional doctor". WebMD defines them as specialists in digging deeper, seeing the whole picture. Perfect.

--

YMMV. Consult your doctor, etc. Most treatments don't help with treatment resistant conditions. Beware adverse effects. Yadda, yadda.

Erythritol is commonly found in sugar-free or keto-friendly products like beverages, desserts, and snacks. A single serving of an erythritol-sweetened product (e.g., a sugar-free soda, keto ice cream, or protein bar) often contains 10–30 g of erythritol.

Studies, such as the 2023 Nature Medicine study, used a 30 g dose in intervention experiments to simulate typical consumption (e.g., one sweetened beverage or dessert). This dose raised plasma erythritol to 5–7 mM within 30 minutes, a level linked to increased platelet reactivity and clotting risk.

Peter Attia has a blog entry about the weak xylitol-cardiovascular disease research. For Xylitol, see https://peterattiamd.com/xylitol-and-cvd/

  The problem with interpreting these results as a condemnation of xylitol consumption is that diet isn’t the only source of circulating xylitol. This compound is also produced by our own bodies through a process known as the glucuronate pathway, one of the pathways by which we metabolize glucose. So how did the authors ensure they were investigating the relationship between dietary xylitol intake and MACE risk?

  They didn’t. ...

  The rapid rate of xylitol excretion observed in healthy volunteers with return to near baseline (fasting) levels within hours following ingestion of a significant dietary exposure suggests that the plasma levels observed in our observational (validation) cohort represent variations in endogenous production/levels and not food intake.

Correlation has no causation direction so you are absolutely right.

What I meant is that ED can be caused by hypertension, so if you get ED you should start checking your blood pressure. AFAIK chronic bad sleep doesn’t CAUSE high blood pressure in the same way. Not sleeping well will elevate your blood pressure, but not make it chronically worse. Put differently, if you have trouble sleeping at night, that doesn’t mean you have elevated risk of high blood pressure when rested.

But yeah, if you have high blood pressure (as I do), getting good sleep makes a huge difference in your numbers.

Reading up on juices, I've only heard of experts not being fans of 'em.