Long-term aspartame and saccharin intakes are related to greater volumes of visceral, intermuscular, and subcutaneous adipose tissue: the CARDIA study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Artificial sweetener (ArtSw) intakes have been previously associated with higher BMI in observational studies and may promote visceral and skeletal muscle adipose tissue (AT) accumulation. This study aimed to determine whether habitual, long-term ArtSw or diet beverage intakes are related to greater AT depot volumes and anthropometry-related outcomes. Methods A validated diet history questionnaire was administered at baseline, year 7, and year 20 examinations in 3088 men and women enrolled in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults cohort (CARDIA), mean age of 25.2 years and mean BMI of 24.5 kg/m 2 at baseline. Volumes of visceral (VAT), intermuscular (IMAT), and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) were assessed by computed tomography at year 25. Linear regression evaluated associations of aspartame, saccharin, sucralose, total ArtSw, and diet beverage intakes with AT volumes, anthropometric measures, and 25-year change in anthropometry. Cox regression estimated associations of ArtSw with obesity incidence. Adjustments were made for demographic and lifestyle factors, total energy intake, and the 2015 healthy eating index. Results Total ArtSw, aspartame, saccharin, and diet beverage intakes were positively associated with VAT, SAT, and IMAT volumes (all p trend ≤ 0.001), but no associations were observed for sucralose intake (all p trend > 0.05). In addition, total ArtSw, saccharin, aspartame, and diet beverage intakes were associated with greater body mass index, body weight, waist circumference, and their increases over a 25-year period. Except for saccharin ( p trend = 0.13), ArtSw, including diet soda, was associated with greater risks of incident obesity over a median 17.5-year follow-up (all p trend < 0.05). Conclusions Results suggest that long-term intakes of aspartame, saccharin, or diet soda may increase AT deposition and risk of incident obesity independent of diet quality or caloric intake. Coupled with previous evidence, alternatives to national recommendations to replace added sugar with ArtSw should be considered since both may have health consequences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".