Huh, i thought it was a great analogy. No analogy is perfect.
It’s a good analogy if sweeteners are actually harmful. Or addictive. The failure to lose weight might surprise many who use it, if true (and it does not seem to be in three months studies, but what is needed is studies lasting decades that reflect use patterns). But this does not represent a proven harm, especially when most people gain weight every decade before sarcopenia supervenes and so keeping the same weight can still represent progress.
Even if the only harm is training people to expect their food to be sweet, i think sweeteners are obviously harmful.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t less harmful than a comparable amount of sugar. That doesn’t mean it’s harmful to switch from sugar soda to diet soda. But yes, i think taking up the habit of routinely eating lots of sweet food (or more likely, beverage) is a bad idea.
Fair enough. But my generation was told juices were exceedingly healthy. Even if you did not consume lots of sugary childhood cereal and confections (which I did), sweetness was considered a reward for many people. I agree it is better not to start and to treat sweetened food as a rarer treat. But this does not apply to most adult people I know.
I don’t stress about sugar. The small amounts in peanut butter and fruit are not worth worrying about. I like my diet soda. For me, a dedicated weightlifter, having low-calorie dessert options is helpful. You can live without them, of course.
This also is not a good comparison.
Good point that, unlike vaping, artificial sweeteners are not proven harmful.
The level of analogy I was aiming at was simply that something semi-bad may still be of benefit to folks already hooked on worse. As long as the semi-bad thing does not itself become an attractive nuisance pulling non-users into it. It’s a tough messaging problem to say “this stuff is bad for non-users, but good for users of worse”
Agree completely that habituating folks to a high-sweetness diet is itself a bad thing.
Public health is a group effort and individual health is an individual effort. In lots of areas the experts have to “pull their punches” to have their advice be palatable enough to the unwashed masses. I am appalled at how much carbs the ADA wants diabetics to eat. But they know if they recommended what’s physiologically optimal, 100 million diseased Americans would simply throw up their hands, say “That’s too hard / impossibe”, and those folks would be eating even more pancreas-killing blood-curdling carbs than they do. The good is often the enemy of the barely adequate where the public is involved.
A decent analogy there was the few years back in the 1980s with so-called passive seatbelts + airbags. The thought process was the combo of automatic seatbelts (shoulder belts really) that automatically deployed across the passenger’s torso when the door was closed, plus air bags, would be collectively safer when everyone was forced to use them by their automatic nature, than the prior lap-belt + shoulder belt that 30% of Americans wore religiously, and 70% never did. Despite the fact switching from properly tensioned lap+shoulder belt to automatic shoulder belt + air bag was a definite, clear, unequivocal loss of individual safety for the people who’d been responsibly buckling up already.
Soon enough that experiment went by the wayside. And somehow we’ve gotten lap+shoulder belt usage up a bunch over the intervening decades.
ISTM the “juices are healthy” thing was also misused / misplaced. Real fruit juices are better than sugar water sodas. Fake “juices” that are sugar water with a hint of “froot” for labeling CYA are just regulatory arbitrage and marketing puffery.
And if juices are made from non-sweet fruits & vegetables folks might get a lot of nutrients per ounce from them. Nutrients it would take an unrealistically large pile of vegetables to obtain if eaten whole.
But from a sugar perspective it amounted to removing all the bulk and concentrating all the sugar. Oddly enough the net effect was that commercially produced juices were mostly evil, and the recipes for home juicing largely included too much of the sweet fruits to make the whole thing taste as sweet as the public has been habituated to expect.
And thus we come full circle. Raise the public to want sweet and sweet is what they’ll want. Even in their “healthy” foods. Thereby rendering those foods unhealthy.
Sweetness is not just considered a reward in the “like” sense. It is a reward in the “want”, dopamine flood, neurological, sense, very much the same as nicotine is. These reward centers evolved for, among other things, identifying natural levels of sweetness that correlated with energy density for survival, are triggered by supranormal stimulation of concentrated sugar added to foods and by NNS, very much as nicotine and many other addictive substances strongly trigger them, and cause similar sorts of brain changes.
Yes your childhood constant exposure to highly sweet stimuli, juiceboxes were a constant accessory for a generation nearly, along with sugar bomb cereals, essentially addicted you to that stimulation. Many adults are in your position.
IDEAL is no longer being addicted. Like you note however harms reduction may be served by subbing out with a less harmful substance or delivery system - methadone, vaping, NNS …
Preferably that is a step towards no longer being addicted. With sweet stimulation differing in that being off completely is not an option.
The analogy, the shared neurobiological basis, is no less valid because sugar in evolutionarily normal levels and, ideally, packaging is required for survival. It is just a more challenging circumstance.