Lemmy is one of the most intense echo chambers out there. It’s very funny that a self-professed anti-hierarchical, decentralized message board site like this falls in line so neatly behind whatever candidates the corporate media tells them to and then browbeats anyone who dares to consider alternatives. Americans’ refusal to vote third party plays a big role in why the two major parties are so completely unresponsive to the public’s interests and desires. They won’t win, of course, thanks to FPTP, but voting for them pressures the two parties to change their platform to win over their voters.

This is precisely why the corporate media is so invested in vilifying third party voters. Every election from now until the end of recorded history will be “the most important election ever” (or “the last election ever,” as they’ve been painting it recently) and anyone who refuses to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils candidate is a willful apostate who’s worse than a Trump voter. And the masses buy into it, and then it’s naked tribalism and hysteria from there.

The 125 can figure came from the methodology used in some of the low quality rat studies frequently cited to demonstrate the dangers of aspartame back in the day. I’ll see if I can find the specific studies.

This page by the National Cancer Institute provides a pretty decent overview of research on a variety of artificial sweeteners. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/artificial-sweeteners-fact-sheet

One very recent study (Debras et al., 2022) suggested a link between aspartame consumption and cancer, which I suspect is behind the recent hysteria. Pretty much every other high quality study over the past 50 years found no correlation. If aspartame is indeed a dangerous carcinogen, that fact should be clear through epidemiological data alone, like the 2013 study by Marinovich et al. cited in the article. I lend that study and those like it much greater credibility than one-off cohort studies like Debras.

Total nonsense. If you consume enough of any substance, it will eventually kill you. Aspartame is THE most heavily studied food additive in human history and every well-conducted study has found it to be harmless. You need to consume the equivalent of 125+ cans of Diet soda per day to see an even slightly elevated risk of cancer or any other serious disease. This is disgusting, misprepresentative fear-mongering that will steer people away from low-calorie alternatives to sugary soft drinks, thereby contributing to increasing rates of obesity and diabetes and playing right into the sugar lobby’s interests.