andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2018-10-02 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2018-10-02 12:00 pm
Entry tags:
- 404,
- acting,
- age,
- ai,
- augmentedreality,
- bitcoin,
- cars,
- conservatives,
- contracts,
- democracy,
- doom,
- economics,
- edinburgh,
- electricity,
- errors,
- europe,
- fail,
- food,
- funny,
- games,
- gender,
- ireland,
- law,
- links,
- mario,
- marriage,
- merchandising,
- microbiome,
- movies,
- nhs,
- northernireland,
- ohforfuckssake,
- pensions,
- physics,
- planets,
- pokemon,
- relationships,
- russia,
- scotland,
- sexwork,
- society,
- solarsystem,
- space,
- starwars,
- technology,
- uk,
- university,
- web
Interesting Links for 02-10-2018
- Nicolas Cage: ‘If I don’t have a job to do, I can be very self-destructive’
- (tags: acting movies )
- Postman Pat and… the law of merchandise
- (tags: merchandising law contracts )
- NHS to suffer £2.7bn cuts after government miscalculation of public sector pension costs
- (tags: nhs pensions Conservatives OhForFucksSake )
- Edinburgh Council reveal city-wide electric vehicle plan
- (tags: edinburgh electricity cars scotland )
- The Financial Times 404 Error Page is brilliant
- (tags: web errors 404 funny economics )
- Sex worker stall at Brighton university freshers' fairs sparks row
- (tags: sexwork university )
- Magic Leap Review Part 1 – The Terrible View Through Diffraction Gratings
- (tags: augmentedreality fail )
- Ruth Davidson doesn't understand what democracy is
- (tags: democracy Conservatives Scotland UK europe )
- UK will enforce hard border in Ireland if there is no Brexit deal
- (tags: uk Ireland Europe NorthernIreland doom )
- The Conservatives think Blockchain may resolve Irish border Brexit problem. *sigh*
- (tags: ConservatIves technology bitcoin OhForFucksSake uk europe NorthernIreland Ireland )
- Cern physicist suspended over 'highly offensive' presentation on sexism in science
- (tags: gender physics )
- 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Was Targeted by Russian Trolls
- (tags: StarWars russia )
- We won't compromise our principles to rescue the Tory party from Brexit, Guy Verhofstadt warns Theresa May
- (tags: uk Europe doom )
- Traditional societal markers of age aren't applying to millennials, and this is hard for everyone.
- (tags: age society )
- Artificial sweeteners have toxic effects on gut microbes
- (tags: microbiome food )
- ‘Goblin’ world found orbiting at the edges of the Solar System
- (tags: planets space solarsystem )
- Why Can a Machine Beat Mario but not Pokemon?
- (tags: ai pokemon Mario games )
- Civil partnerships: Law to be changed for mixed-sex couples (in England and Wales. Scotland investigating)
- (tags: law relationships marriage uk )
Re: Artificial sweeteners have toxic effects on gut microbes
Some of the well-established not-so-good stuff about sweeteners are very clearly limited to that molecule, or that class of molecule (e.g. sugar alcohols). And some bad effects are really specific to a small class of individuals - like aspartame being very bad news for people with phenylketonuria, or the many that can be a migraine trigger.
But there's such a wide range of sweeteners now, chemically speaking, that it is surprising to get the same results from one study like this. So much so that I find the paper slightly suspicious on those grounds - not that I suspect the authors of bad practice, just of being the unlucky winners in the file drawer effect.
They do all stimulate the human sugar receptors, though (otherwise they wouldn't taste sweet), so they must all have some molecular similarity. So some direct effect like this is not completely implausible biochemically.
My major hunch for a mechanism whereby sweeteners are bad in general is more about it messing with the human appetite/satiety/set point stuff, but something mediated by the gut flora seems very plausible. I think we're at an exciting stage for research in to our commensal bacteria ... which is another way of saying it's very clear we don't really understand what's going on yet.
And I should admit that some of the stuff that reinforces my hunch about sweeteners being bad is classic correlation/causation mixup stuff. I don't know many skinny people who eat a lot of sweeteners and diet foods, basically. And this, despite my best efforts to disregard it as evidence, still works away at a subconscious level.