I 100% agree with you on the "signal feedback inside an analog signalling system".
I've done a lot of tripping, and I've come to this same hypothesis independently. I believe this explains a great deal about the visual geometric and fractal patterns you can see on psychedelics and also that analogous things happen within the auditory processing system, memory, emotions, and so on when you trip.
So much of tripping comes down to turning up the gain on signalling in your brain, which causes feedback pathways to start resonating. This results in colour saturation, tracers, geometry, exaggerated patterns and edge detection, echoing, reverbs, increased impact of thoughts, and following thoughts down deep rabbit holes etc.
None of this is to reduce the experience, I love psychedelics and think they are super important. But that's whole other discussion.
If this topic lights you up, you have to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn0itlgBZAA.
It dives deep into the geometry of hallucinations, the mechanics of feedback loops in the brain, and how altered states might just be us tuning into the signal of ourselves. It bridges neuroscience, pattern recognition, and philosophy in a way that makes the whole psychedelic experience feel less like “woo” and more like elegant system dynamics.
Whether you’re team “signal feedback” or leaning toward the mystical—this video gives both sides something to chew on. I promise, it’s not just trippy visuals—it’s insightfully grounded.
I wonder if the similar molecule Xylitol has the same problem. It seems like so many artificial sweeteners have dangerous health effects, I don't trust any of them. Unless you're diabetic or something, regular sugar seems to be the healthiest choice (in moderation!)
"Too many calories" is a simpler problem to solve: increase physical activity, take less sugar, or take sugar less frequently. The signal to watch out for to tell that you are taking too much (increasing weight) is straightforward as well.
The possible artificial sweetener issues implied by the article ("may be poison") are ultra scary.
No, the GP is correct. The solution is simple. Calculate your daily passive calorie requirement, take in less calories and/or up active calorie requirement. Simple.
Now, implementing this is hard or maybe impossible for many individuals, I'm not denying this. The solution is simple, but for some it is not easy to implement.
This is word play on the meaning of word simple in "simple solution" that can mean both easy to do or easy to understand. This is orthogonal to the point being made.
Fair enough. To me, simple and easy are not the same thing. Chess is a simple game that's not easy to play. In the same vein, to me, "take in less calories than you burn" is a simple concept, but not easy to do. It doesn't make the concept wrong, though.
It is a simple problem to solve. Eat less, exercise more. Tons of people have done it successfully. Tons of people do it without even thinking about it.
It’s just that some people have mental addictions or whatever problems that makes them want to overeat or not exercise enough. But the solution itself is simple and straightforward.
If the "tons of people" in the first paragraph were multiples more than the "some people" in the second paragraph, then I would agree that the solution is simple. But the thing you describe in the second paragraph is what makes actually solving obesity hard. Using artificial sweeteners is one of the ways in countering the latter half of the puzzle.
One problem is that for some people, the daily calories used by the body lowers when you reduce the calories intake (mostly by adjusting NEAT). So for some people it's harder to lose weight than for others.
Sweeteners don’t solve the obesity epidemic, they make it worse. Bodies are complex systems with feedback, you cannot focus only on the amount of calories. If one is overweight, and keep reinforcing their dietary patterns by eating sweet food, caloric or not, they’re never gonna adapt to healthy eating which is barely sweet if at all. I’m speaking from an holistic point of view; the American idea of healthy food is twisted by commercial interests and only calories seem to count.
Also, you forget that sweeteners still cause an insulin release and some research shows that their effect on metabolism might be even worse than sugar itself because, being zero calories, they do not contribute to the sense of “caloric satiety,” so for the same volume of food your body has released more insulin.
It’s convenient for companies to claim sweeteners are safe and sugar is the devil, but consumers should take such a claim with a grain of salt. There is no silver bullet, and dietary sciences is a field of bad science and enormous commercial incentives to lie. A good rule of thumb is whatever we have consumed for thousands of years is likely not that bad. Sugar in quantities should be avoided, but elsewhere you have claimed that it is bad for you and I have to disagree with such hyperbole, compared to something we’ve eaten for less than 50 years created by food lobbies.
> "Too many calories" is a simpler problem to solve: increase physical activity, take less sugar, or take sugar less frequently.
From Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories:
> “To attribute obesity to ‘overeating,’” as the Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer suggested back in 1968, “is as meaningful as to account for alcoholism by ascribing it to ‘overdrinking.’”
Obesity etc are hormonal issues. It is not simple calorie-in, calorie-out math. I have been on a diet, off-and-on, for 15 years, and I can notice craving for carbs increase after "slipping/cheating" by consuming sugary food. While I generally manage to avoid reaching for snacks, I can only imagine how people can struggle with this, more so when others around them are stuffing themselves with food rich in sugar.
For me, it's calories-in calories-out. I've been counting calories for two decades and learned a couple things about my particular case:
- If I consume more than 2,300 kcal per day, I gain measurable weight in weeks.
- If I consume less than 2,100 kcal per day, I lose measurable weight in weeks.
- Physical activity has little effect on my weight change.
- Age has little effect on my weight change.
- When losing weight, I must work out to retain strength. Moving around an extra 10 kg takes strength that is lost when the weight is lost.
In my case, any hormonal effects are secondary to the above. I've changed what I eat over the years and my weight didn't change if I consumed the same kcals. There are likely subtleties I am missing, but eating less works for me. YMMV
Sugar, carbs in general, is particularly problematic.
I know of diabetics who cannot give up on sugary treats with full knowledge of the consequences of their behavior, people who have seen others in the family lose eyes, limbs, kidneys and life to the disease. Not a single one of them will consume a block of cheese or butter if one were to set these in front of them. Or a plate of diced carrots or cucumbers. It is always the chocolates and chips and the cookies and the ice cream and the biscuits.
Over the last two decades, I have been 128 kg at my peak. I have also been 93 kg. I have noticed that carbs absolutely wreck my ability to maintain weight. You lose the will to say no to food.
I am in India. Festivals start in September and continue for the next few months. It is an unending caravan of carb-heavy food. I can very easily put on 10 kg in those months. 70K excess calories in 2-3 months is not a lot. This does not happen with high fat food, because you cannot eat those in large quantities. They have high satiety value.
> Physical activity has little effect on my weight change
The human body is insanely adaptive. The natural impulse, I believe, is to conserve energy. For different people, it will respond to continuous over- and under-eating as well as over- and under-exertion in different ways.
I sometimes binge on cheese and nuts or peanut butter when I'm not at my best, but even when I do this for weeks, and I'm talking an extra 2000 calories in a day which is easy with those things, I haven't gained weight (fat). I don't feel as good and I don't recommend it, but I think it's safer than eating sugar if one is going to binge. I had a couple years 10 years ago where I ate sweet things most days and did gain noticeable weight (fat). So it's not like I'm genetically not going to gain weight either.
As an aside, physical activity might not affect weight change as much but it will affect the fat/muscle ratio.
You are very lucky to be able to eat like that without weight gain!
The extra 200 calories would be more of the same, just bigger portions. I record everything by weight when eating at home, and have a good feel for calories per unit weight, but double check often. Cheeses are about 100 cals per oz, breads or snacks with little fat (pretzels) are 80-100 cals per oz, nuts are dangerously calorific at 160-180 cal per oz. Peanut butter is the same. I eat nearly everything, both good and bad for me, but keep track of calories and it's been working for me. I do eat ice cream occasionally, with full awareness of how much. My calorie limit is a target, but I enjoy life. The only thing I've eliminated completely is alcohol.
It means how much I eat has a much larger effect than physical activity. I can eat more calories in 5 minutes than I can work off in two hours of brisk walking.
I'm quite convinced humans, unless in an environment that restrict their food intake (e.g. being working outside in the fields), are just generally not able to manage the hunger of the sugar-induced insulin crash.
I've switched to the keto diet for other health reasons --I never had any weight issues, and my weight didn't change-- but I never feel as hungry as I used to. But eat a square of chocolate and the hunger comes back.
While this looks simple on the surface, what I've found is that there's a missing component to what you describe: the effect sugar has on the perception of satiety: when I eat sugar, I always have a hunger-like feeling, which incites me to keep on eating. I don't get this with sweeteners.
This happens with sugary drinks, but also with solid food, such as cake.
Sure, once you see your weight go up, you can adjust. But adjusting is difficult, and I think this is a contributing factor to the weight problems people have.
I've noticed this happens even after desert. If I have a steak or similar and end there, it's fine. If I have something sweet, I'll feel hungry in two hours.
If you're asking me personally, it's because I don't have any problems with eating too much sugar so I would never want to introduce an artificial sweetener into my diet when it carries potential strange health risks.
I think people get hung up on finding sugar substitutes when the root is eating sweet things constantly. You don't have to eat and drink sweet all the time. Many modern diets (not just n. Amer) are totally overindexed on sweetness.
Drink water, eat good foods, enjoy a bit of jam on your toast or whatever here and there and get lots of exercise and you'll be fine. You don't need aspartame and xylitol and stevia to be healthy.
I second this, and would add that taste buds are more elastic than many assume. Drinking less sweet drinks can be underwhelming at first but your tastes do adjust fairly quickly and can often get to the point where mildly or unsweetened drinks taste as good or even better than the sugary stuff does, and the stuff that used to taste normal will be too sweet. Drinks like tea and coffee have a lot of flavor that that comes out without so much sugar.
One issue is that if you're buying drinks there are very few intermediate options. I don't mind a little sugar but if I'm traveling and stop at a store the drink options are usually 97% super sweet (artificial or otherwise) and 3% zero sweetness, with nothing in between.
It is still wrong, though. Physical state and calorie expenditure are also very, very important context.
If your blood sugar is low, then eating/drinking stuff with a high glycemic index can be very good for you. For instance after heavy exercising.
You might think it is obvious, but people like simplistic things, so "sugar is bad for you, mmkay" is what most people believe nowadays rather than having a basic understanding of such fairly simple aspects of nutrition.
Nope, still bullshit. The world does not consist of Americans. For billions of people it is very very easy to get their body into a low blood glucose state. No 'super heavy physical activity' required.
Don't get me wrong: In most of those cases eating something else would be better, but that does not make sugar 'bad in general'. Nutrition discourse does not benefit from such bad and misleading vilifications and simplifications. It causes people to think in 'silver bullets' and distrust science and government when that silver bullet turns out not to work.
I don't "dislike the word bad". It simply does not apply here and is semantically different from "worse than". One is relative and the other (subjectively) absolute.
Getting hit on the foot with a sledgehammer is bad for you. But it's better than getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer. Using "better than" here does not make the former good for you, however.
That's how language works. It is important to be precise, for earlier mentioned reasons.
I think what I mean by "bad" is that removing sugar (or at least food with added sugar) is like a low-hanging fruit on the road to a better diet.
White bread is not too far away from sugar, like alcohol, actually. Replacing white bread with something full grain would also be something "good" for your diet – although in some places it's really hard to find full grain bread that doesn't taste like parchment, so maybe a not-so-low-hanging fruit ;)
Finally, I think I am compounding the refined sugar and the sugar lobby itself, who has been pushing for decades that what is bad for health is fat, whereas study after study proved otherwise.
There is no dosage where alcohol is beneficial/useful to your body.
Just a dosage where its detrimental effect is somewhat minimal.
There is definitely a healthy/beneficial/useful dosage of sugar. Especially while exercising, sugar is not stored and is used as litteral fuel by the body.
I'd argue that processed or refined or concentrated sugar (not talking about berries or vegetables) is similar to alcohol in being a net negative impact on the body in 99% of cases. Sure if you are otherwise starving then it may have a benefit. But if you trade calories from some real food for calories from sugar, you're worse off.
Studies have shown artificial (and non-nutritional organic) sweeteners are much worse than sugar for decades.
For instance, they disrupt your metabolism, so equivalently sweet amounts of sweeteners cause more weight gain than sugar. (Due to increased hunger vs. eating nothing, decreased metabolism and decreased calorie burn.)
The study in the article isn’t surprising at all. Links between nutrisweet and migraine headaches have been well understood for a long time. It’s not surprising other similar chemicals have similar negative side effects.
There’s no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners (other than diabetes, but even then, gaining weight from the sweeteners is a problem if the diabetes is weight related.)
Anecdotal but I have experienced body ache from drinking diet soda with aspartame. I drank regular soda when younger but switched over to watch my weight as I aged. A year on during a more sleep deprived week I went heavy on the caffeinated diet soda and ended up with all muscles feeling like I had done some major exercising. Thinking back, I had been experiencing regular aches. I stopped for a week, felt better. Tested again by going heavy for a week and the aches returned. Tried regular soda and no aches. I just stopped soda all together at that point. I check labels now and avoid anything with aspartame in it.
Direction of causation would be very relevant here.
Sugar is still the cultural default; artificial sweeteners are something you explicitly choose due to health concerns (worried about being or becoming diabetic, or overweight, or worried about sugar being unhealthy in general, or about the mood/motivation angle, etc.).
I imagine becoming overweight itself is linked to anxiety both ways, as eating or snacking is a common reaction to stress, a way to relieve it in the moment.
>Sugar is still the cultural default; artificial sweeteners are something you explicitly choose due to health concerns
If only. Check the ingredients (usually near the bottom) of some energy drinks some time. Monster, NOS, AMP, half of the Rockstar flavors, Bang, and so on will add sucralose to the normal versions with sugar or HFCS in them. It's hard to find one without artificial sweeteners. This is especially crazy as Monster already has their sugar-free (Ultra?) line. They're forcing normal people to consume sucralose, and it's awful. Luckily Red Bull seems fine for now (Blueberry flavor is really good). Guru in its original flavor only also has no sucralose, but I think all the other flavors have it. I first noticed this trend one of the times they brought back Mtn Dew Game Fuel and it tasted disgusting. Now I'm scared of any new drink, or that they'll ruin one I like.
Also, I think water is fine, caffeine pills are fine, I know some people are against energy drinks, but I don't think that's a reason to ruin them (preempting replies saying not to drink them at all). I've been drinking black coffee all week but I still have some Blueberry Red Bull in my fridge for when I feel like it.
Is it the taste of sucralose which is ruining the drink or do you feel sucralose makes an otherwise healthy drink like red bull unhealthy?
(Full disclosure: I consider red bull very high risk of being unhealthy, considering the stuff they put in, the artificial flavours, etc. – sucralose is a mere detail to me)
Jumping in, but sucralose tastes very clearly weird to me. Aspartame I had too long ago but probably tastes weird too since I avoided it afterwards. Monk fruit tastes a lot better but it can get overwhelmingly sweet to me. I tend to avoid sweeteners though, partially because of the taste and partially because they are new chemicals and potentially unhealthy.
Sweeteners are definitely an acquired taste. The few times I went on or off of them, it took about two weeks for my body to adjust, after which artificially sweetened beverages started tasting good, and those sweetened with sugar felt off - and then also two weeks to readjust the other way around.
Ultimately, sweeteners won me over, and I've been "on" them for the past 12 years. For me it's a simple matter: I dislike pure water, and have been drinking black tea instead ever since I was a single-digit aged kid - but I also can't stand unsweetened tea. Sweeteners save me from ingesting stupid amounts of sugar through drinking some 10 mugs of tea every day, as I used to long ago.
It's the taste, yeah. Frankly I don't care much about what's "healthy" and I consider that to be a bit of a buzzword as well as a rabbit hole. I do eat a lot of veggies, don't eat meat/dairy anymore, don't drink alcohol, but in my mind I'm not doing this to be some health-freak. Alcohol tastes bad, for example, and I have very low tolerance for that sort of thing. A lot of people will assume I'm religious (I'm not) or otherwise ascetic, but I'm actually just doing what I want. It keeps life more interesting. If we're to look at an energy drink as a fun thing, a pleasurable treat, I think sticking sucralose in there completely defeats the point. I can drink water if I'm thirsty, I can get caffeine from other sources. I wanted the energy drink because it was good. If you make it not good, I'm not going to drink it.
> Studies have shown artificial (and non-nutritional organic) sweeteners are much worse than sugar for decades.
What? No they haven't. This is just straight-up misinformation.
Aspartame is completely safe to consume. It's not carcinogenic, it doesn't mess up your metabolism, it doesn't do anything. At worst, it can cause some people stomach upset in large quantities.
We can't just lie and make things up because they sound intuitively true. Zero-calorie sweeteners sound too good to be true, sure. That doesn't mean they actually are, that's not science.
> There’s no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners (other than diabetes, but even then, gaining weight from the sweeteners is a problem if the diabetes is weight related.)
"There's no valid reason to use artificial sweeteners" -> proceeds to list valid reasons.
Yes, people use these for weight control because they're very effective and safe. Also: it's impossible to gain weight from artificial sweeteners like Aspartame. There's no calories in them, what would make you gain weight?
I know multiple people that have had problems on the "other" list, and a few people have mentioned their own problems on this list.
According to the summary, the studies showing those side effects are universally on the list due to lack of funding on follow ups, not due to the effects disappearing when the studies were repeated with larger sample sizes.
Witholding funding and spamming inconclusive results is a common playbook for industries that are trying to slow down scientific consensus. The tobacco industry did the same thing to get an extra 50-100 years of "cigarrettes are probably good for you" to be the public consensus, despite scientists calling for additional study.
Are you aware you've sent a link of side-effects, including interactions with medicine? That doesn't mean a substance is unsafe, all substances, including water, have side-effects. I've never known anyone to have any side effects from aspartame. I've never known anyone who has known anyone who has had side-effects from aspartame.
> "cigarettes are probably good for you"
The difference is Tobacco is a Group 1 Carcinogen - definitely carcinogenic. Along with processed red meat and alcohol.
Red meat is group 2B, possibly carcinogenic. This is also where Aspartame resides. Which means there are SOME studies showing carcinogenic effects, and other's which do not. Please note that the studies which showed carcinogenic effects in Aspartame used many hundreds or thousands of times the dose found in human food and beverage. The great thing about Aspartame is that it's not actually zero calorie - it's just very potent, so we put next to nothing in our food and beverage.
For all intents and purposes, Aspartame is completely safe. When compared to sugar, Aspartame is much, much safer. I mean, it's not even close.
Regular sugar isn’t bad for you in and of itself, it’s just extra calories as you say. Consuming it in large quantities can be bad though, in the sense that you can become obese with all the health risks that involves.
Sweeteners have been researched quite extensively. If there are problems with regular typical consumption, the effect size is very small.
Small as in "the alternatives are most likely worse" or as in "you are consuming already a dozen other things that are known to be more problematic by an order of magnitude and you should focus on them instead".
While I'm most familiar with evaluating pharmaceuticals, the same principles apply to food additives. The issue arises that certain adverse effects occur infrequently or only after an extended interval from the time of exposure. Safety of drugs, food additives, et.al., are evaluated in relatively small premarketing samples. For uncommon (or delayed) effects to become evident it requires a much larger population to be exposed to the drug or additive.
"Years of experience" means an increasingly larger population has been subject to use of the compound. It may take 10's of millions of exposures for the problems to become clear enough to elicit action.
A surprising number of drugs (and food additives) have been used for decades before their adverse effects were recognized and the offenders removed from the market.
We should regard initial or early claims of safety as preliminary statements. Indeed skepticism is warranted. Ongoing monitoring/reevaluation is necessary. Certainly utmost caution is needed before allowing products to be widely used.
"lots of studies" also showed other things like smoking were ok once upon a time.
The few times I've looked in depth at the studies about the safety of a particular thing, I have found that each study has at least one obvious major flaw that makes the study not necessarily support the conclusion. You could have 10 such studies or 100 and say that lots of studies show that X is safe or Y is dangerous, and the conclusion could be wrong.
This especially common when there's a financial incentive for the people doing or controlling the study to get the result they want, which there usually is. Or for studies that don't get the desired result to not be published.
> "lots of studies" also showed other things like smoking were ok once upon a time.
Some of the same scientists who were paid off by the tobacco industry to lie to the public about the safety of cigarettes are now working for the food industry to convince the public that food additives are safe.
That's not at all supportive of the claim that was made. All it does is support that Tobacco companies attempted to discredit science suggesting it was bad. Which was never in question.
It is however not "lots of studies" saying that opposite, that smoking is in fact ok for you. Which was the claim that was made. It would be fantastic if someone could point me in the direction of all these "lots of studies" where these studies are credible, indepedent scientific studies showing that smoking was ok for you.
>> I'm guessing the downvotes are for the tone of your comment and not the substance. What you say is true.
> I think you are right and the Upton Sinclair quote might have cut too close to home.
I think you might be taking the wrong lesson from GP. While they were agreeing with you on the substance, they were pointing out that your way of presenting your point was undercutting your message.
Your response comes off as roughly, "Yeah, the truth hurts," which continues that tonal problem GP was talking about.
If your taste buds aren't completely fried by years of abuse you really can't eat any significant amount of sugar without being disgusted. More and more often I find some types of apples too sweet for my taste to the point I barely can finish them.
If you don't change the underlying habits it simply doesn't work, like yo-yo diets, like antidepressant, it only works if you actually want help and put in the work, if you just take it as a magic pill you will for sure fail again
That's good, and I hope that one can get off glp 1 quickly too. For anyone with the discipline I'd highly recommend doing it the natural way but if one really can't then I might consider that option.
There aren't any really long term studies of it to show what other effects it might have, though.
Easy to get off. I have a feeling they are actually life extension drugs, even for normal weight people. Just reading many studies and some intuition from taking them (and not being much over).
I am partial to Allulose [1] and Stevia [2]. A lot of people find their taste bad, but I've grown used to them, so much that I don't "taste" them anymore.
Vimeo hasn't been a real alternative for like the last 10 years. It's meant for very specific kind of content and they really clamped down on that, stuff like game related videos gets taken down. Only person I know that uses Vimeo is a guy that works in more traditional video (making ads, short films, trying to get funding for his indie movies etc)
For a replacement, Rumble is the best for "general" content for its video quality without paying
- Bandcamp - a bit off-topic but the music industry has become an exponentially distributed winner-takes-all game. I resist by buying underground music on Bandcamp - it's an exemplary web platform, gives generous cuts to the artist, and you own the files. Even if I only listen to the song a couple times it feels good knowing 80% of the money is going straight to talented artists and 20% is going to a beacon of hope on the internet. Money spent on Bandcamp feels good.
I will second what you say about Bandcamp which I've also been supporting for years.
They also have Bandcamp Fridays, usually once a month, where 100% of the proceeds go to the artists (granted, there are a lot of labels on BC these days too, but still seems to be underground music in my experience).
A lot of those labels are really good and underground and fully worthy of support too imo. I think the smaller labels are really important to keep alive.
My being able to run Linux in a corporate environment doesn’t function well without LibreOffice (even with office 365 online being more prevenlent). Plus it’s a champ at handling csv files.
If they don't cash out directly to an off-ramp there might not be a way to connect a crypto address to a person. If they use the crypto to buy illegal shit and sell that on the black market for cash - or sell the crypto directly on the black market for cash, they could evade detection.
I wonder how much crypto is changing hands off-market in shadier corners.
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