Do you believe aspartame is dangerous?

geepondy

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Although I think from personal symptoms, it is most likely a yet only semi-diagnosed cataract, I have been researching information online for possible reasons of my compromised vision of my only good eye. While looking, I came across quite a few sites that claim aspartame (nutrasweet) causes significant health risks including loss of vision. Here is just one site I came across.
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/

I have been using aspartame ever since it first came out in the early to mid 80s with it's introduction to diet Pepsi. Although it varies, I probably average consumption of a couple of cans a day of diet soda containing aspartame.

Anyhow I'm going to stop using it for awhile to see what happens. It can't hurt. I gotta think though, it's been out for 20 years. If it really was that bad, wouldn't there be more case studies and it would be pulled from the market?
 

Marty Weiner

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I get very sick when I ingest products with Aspartame.

I don't eat or drink any diet foods containing this stuff and, if I'm in doubt, I pass on it.

Lately, I've been buying products sweetened with Splenda and have had good results. Diet Rite cola uses Splenda and it tastes great with no side effects.

If you see the Splenda label on foods, read the ingredients to see if it's mixed with other artificial sweeteners or not. Some companies use a blend which I get a bad reaction from.
 

MrMimizu

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I think I remember reading that you had to drink a case of 24 or more aspertame laced beverages before it got bad for you. However, I personally don't like to take anything in which there is a warning on it saying to take only on the advice of my doctor.
Besides anything with aspartame taste like crap. if you have to drink diet anything, i think you're better off getting off your butt and doing some walking atthe very least.
 

James S

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Personally I agree that it tastes pretty much yucky /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

It does have the distinction now of being the single most tested food additive in the history of testing food additives and it's just not dangerous to you unless you have the genetic abnormality that makes you unable to metabolize the stuff and it builds up to toxic levels in your system. This is a very rare condition, you probably don't have it. The facts about aspartame are this: You digest it into 3 parts, phenylalanine and aspartic acid which are amino acids and methanol, which is what frightens some people as thats obviously a poison. Hard to google any actual facts about the thing as about a bazillion anti-aspartame sites come up first /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif But I have the figures, a can of diet soda results in 20mg of methanol being produced in your digestive tract, but digesting a glass of apple juice produces twice that, and a glass of wine produces over 100mg. The phenylalanine from a single can is 100mg, you get 400 from eating an egg, 500mg from a glass of 2% milk and nearly 1000 from a hamburger. No study has shown an increase in your blood level concentrations of any of those chemicals until you drink more than 17 cans a day of the stuff.

A couple of years ago I tried switching from the daily dose of real sugar I was getting to some artificially sweetened products. They tasted horrible and I was convinced that they gave me headaches. turns out the headaches and other symptoms were due to low blood sugar that set in quickly after I didn't get my sugar fix and now I can, and do very occasionally drink a diet something with no ill effects having weaned myself from the needs of timed sugar fixes during the day.

So you are left with a very chemical tasting substance that doesn't make you feel good and fails to give you the sugar high you expect from a soda /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif But it just won't hurt you. There were over 200 studies showing the exact same results the last time I checked which was several years ago now.

Splenda is a step in the right direction, but still tastes lousy as far as I'm concerned.
 

AnotherDaveH

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Aspartame is the methyl ester of a simple dipeptide (phenylalanine-aspartic acid). The peptides are a naturally ocurring part of every protein (they are two of the twenty amino acid building blocks) and your body (and a lot of the food you eat) already contain a lot of both. Unless you have a specific amino acid related disease (i.e. PKU), your body is well equipped to handle these compounds. A very small amount of methanol will also be liberated by the metabolism of aspartame, but the amounts are way less than what is contained in beer or fruit jucies.
I'm not aware of anything specific that has been traced to dietary aspartame. If you are finding that consumption of something regularly makes you sick, remember that even simple beverages contain natural flavors, etc. which have a lot of interesting chemistry in them.
Dave, R.Ph. (ret)
 

Frangible

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Aspartame is bad, if you don't like essential amino acids you need to live. Because that's what it is. I don't see how our education system could have failed so badly in basic biology that you see all these crazy aspartame conspiracy theories on the internet... but I guess it did. Just goes to show, don't believe everything you read.
 

ACMarina

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Didn't the Nutrasweet (aspartame) folks just start accusing Splenda of being dangerous?

My guess would be that it's one of those neat tricks you can do in statistics. You can prove anything with statistics if you swing the numbers correctly, because people generally don't look at the deciding factors to understand what things are about.

Of course, just about everything is bad for you in some quantity. Diet cola is bad, but is it that much worse than regular??
 

James S

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The other thing that you have in Oz that study doesn't say if it takes into account is a whole lot more UV light than you used to have. i don't know what else causes it, but a lifetime of exposure to sunlight not filtered through UV blocking sunglasses is well known to cause the condition.

I'll try to read that actual study about vegetable oil. My initial reaction is one of skepticism but I don't know anything about it yet. Have to make sure it wasn't funded by the butter lobby against the margarine lobby /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 

Kanai

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My 2 cents... I used to have really bad headaches. My doctor had me keep a diary of the things I ate and drank. This went on for almost a year. At least once a month I would get this really bad headache. Sometimes so bad I would end up in the emergency room. On my last visit there, the ER Doc asked if I drank a lot of diet stuff. I said "yup". she said to stay off it for a few weeks. Headaches gone, that was over a year ago. Aspartame is not only in diet drinks but suger free candy, gum, yogurt, etc. gotta check the labels. I'm a believer that Aspartame is dangerous. Maybe I just drank it too much. But no more.
 

chmsam

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I work with food. I'm still not an expert but I have done some web research on artificial sweetners and find that most of them have two camps, each on the far end of the spectrum. Splenda is a good example -- their website suggests that it is totally benign and other websites seem to claim it's the work of the devil.

This proves one thing, and that is that anyone on the web can pretty much say anything and have someone, somewhere take it as the only source of legitimate source of information, when it is really neither. The bigger problem is a cultural one. We eat a poor diet, too high in fats and sugars, and are not willing to adjust. If you doubt it the next time you go to a fast food choke & puke, I'd be willing to bet that within 5 minutes you'll see someone order a small salad with triple bleu cheese dressing, a humongo burger with extra cheese, the giganto bucket o' fries, and a small diet drink.

So, I can only go by my own experience, and that is that while I still have a bit too much sugar in my diet, the artificial sweetners to me have a very bad chemical taste and some give me headaches. Therefore, I do not use any of them, but I also am working to lower the amount of sugar I consume, and I drink plain water or water with electrolytes more and more often.
 

Flying Turtle

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I didn't know about possible vision problems, but it for sure gives me gas. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

Geoff
 
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