The artificial sweetener, aspartame (Equal, Nutrasweet, Sugar Twin), may provoke a variety of negative health effects: headaches, blurred vision, seizures, numbness, insomnia, memory loss, eye problems, hyperactivity, rashes, ear ringing and slurred speech. Some researchers claim that aspartame causes brain tumors. This chemical has been banned or restricted in Italy, Holland, Austria, Belgium, France and Portugal but is still commonly used in the United States.
H.J. Roberts, M.D., author of Sweet'ner Dearest, explains that one of the reasons for the many negative health effects of aspartame is that the digestion of aspartame yields at least 10.9 percent methanol by weight. Methanol is a severe metabolic poison that has poisoned 25 persons resulting in death when wine containing only 5.7 percent methyl alcohol was consumed. Dr. Roberts also explains that "senior FDA scientists vigorously protested the licensing of aspartame-containing products for nearly a decade prior to its approval."
"Saccharin (Sweet'N Low, Necta Sweet) has been found to cause bladder cancer in rats and its use has been restricted in Canada" (Eating Safely in a Toxic World, Sue Kedgley).
The sugar alcohols sorbitol, mannitol, tagatose, and xylitol are better choices than the above-mentioned chemicals. There is a possibility of sorbitol and xylitol causing gastrointestinal upset if used in large amounts because the unabsorbed portion can ferment in the gut. If I had a choice between the possibility of an overly active bowel or the side effects from saccharin and aspartame, I would choose the sugar alcohols.
Sucralose (Splenda) is not digestible so it claims to provide no calories. It is made from sugar that has been bonded to chlorine. While I could not find safety concerns about Sucralose in Consumer Reports, I avoid chlorine and filter it out of my drinking water because chlorine can cause damage to the human body.
Stevia is not an artificial sweetener. It is an extract of a South American plant. There are no known problems associated with the use of this plant. It is about 300 times sweeter than sugar and must be used in tiny amounts, for it can cause a bitter taste if overused. Stevia is my sweetener of choice.
Primates (including our own species) are designed to run on carbohydrates and have a natural 'sweet tooth'. Unfortunately, the majority of people consume processed sugar that actually robs the body of precious nutrients. Even worse, we eat artificial sweeteners that can cause ill health, instead of eating the fruits that contain so many essential nutrients.
Coorg:
ReplyDeleteBS. Your physician source doesn't know what he is talking about.
First consider what you suggested last, that natural is good. This is a meaningless argument; the most natural things around are botulinum toxin (produced by organisms affecting honey) and aflatoxin (found on many grain products, including peanuts) and both are truly lethal poisons at very, very low doses. Natural just doesn't mean anything either. Methyl salicylate, which is most natural contains methanol just like aspartame; you know it as wintergreen (minty) food flavoring and is also used as a liniment for sore muscles.
Second, here is a short course in toxicology (the science of poisons): the essential paradigm of toxicology is that everything is a poison and nothing is non-toxic. But, it is only the dose of a substance that delineates a pharmacological drug from a lethal poison. So, it is pure non-sense to call anything a poison without defining its associated dose. By way of examples consider water, cyanide, and botulinum toxin. Realize, it is the water overdose alone that drowns, yet it is because of it’s low dose that the natural, food-borne cyanide that we all ingest in plant materials doesn’t kill you. Similarly botulinum toxin is one of the most lethal substances known, yet with judicious control of dose, it can and frequently is used to deaden problem nerves in cosmetic procedures. Dose alone determines the poison. Aspartame is no more a poison than water and aspartame is far safer than ethanol.
Third, you should realize that the doses of aspartame consumed as a sweetener are only consumed in small amounts (even multiple sodas) over often considerable lengths of time. This means methanol doses reach nowhere near those leading to acute hospitalization of people with known methanol poisoning. And what is consumed is actually processed and detoxified pretty rapidly to boot. Formate is the only poison in the whole methanol, formaldehyde, formate oxidation pathway. Rarely today is methanol overdose lethal, because of tricks used by ER physicians to directly or artificially diminish the formate concentrations.
Fourth, the vitamin folic acid (folate) detoxifies formate; providing more folic acid directly diminishes formate (and methanol) toxicity. But the body recycles that formate into vital constituents. For your information low but steady state intake of methanol from food sources including aspartame are actually required for good health. It provides formate, which is a vital precuros for conversion by the folate enzyme system into methionine (S-methylhomocysteine) and into thymine (methyluracil). The former not only reduces the extreme excitotoxicity of homocysteine (far more than MSG or any aspartame constitutent), but thymine availability prevents incorporation of uracil into DNA, which produces weak and broken DNA.
All human issues with aspartame most likely involve personal issues such as widespread folate deficiency, different metabolism by their own folate enzyme system (see polymorphisms under methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase in Wikipedia), or issues with homocysteine (many of which can be corrected with folate). While a case can be made for adding warnings to the label for those having these folate issues, how can aspartame be held responsible for any vitamin deficiency issue?
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
(FYI, the author has absolutely no financial or biasing connection with the aspartame, the soft drink or their related industries. The author has a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry (Pharmacy) from the University of Iowa, postdoctoral experience at Yale University (Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry) and at Vanderbilt University and taught nutritional toxicology at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) besides having conducted federally funded research at Vanderbilt, UIUC, and at several other universities before recently entering into retirement.)
Dr. Garst,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be everywhere! You have commented on sooo many sites. You obviously look for anti-aspartame sites so you can post how horribly wrong the posters are in their information. Seriously, what is your vendetta against those who proport the dangers of aspartame? I dont get it. You are evidently on a mission to build up aspartame. How much money are they giving you? or How much money is the University that you work for who gets money from them giving you? What do you get from it? You must spend a lot of time at your computer just blogging about the aspartame internet conspiracy you say exists. I know you deny it, but, maybe you should know, it looks very suspicious. Actually, I'm not so sure you do deny it because I'm not sure you even type that part since you are referred to as "the author."
Even if you are right, I say aspartame would still be poisonous to those who are folate deficient. Does everyone who is folate deficient know they are? (I don't know) If not, isn't that dangerous? Would you blame aspartame for side-effects (including mental retardation) in phenylketonurics, who simply lack the enzyme to breakdown phenylalanine? (regardless of the labels) or Do you blame phenylketonurics because they are enzyme deficient, and figure it is their fault because they should know better? So, I believe aspartame should be held responsible for the many adverse reactions they seem to have caused and reports, which have been submitted to the FDA. To say that these effects are not viable because these people may be folate deficient, so the problem is not aspartame itself, is just spitting hairs. With that mentality I have no idea how a warning for phenylketonurics actually got on labels. However, unless people know that are folate deficient, warning would not make any difference in amount of people getting sick. People should know when something on the market has the potential to make them sick!
Do you continue to deny that many people do become sick or experience brain abnormalites as a result of what aspartame does to their body?
If so, I would tkink aspartame should be held responsible regardless of what people may physically lack in their bodies.
And even though I don't know the scientific definition of a poison--something that may cause adverse reactions in the body or make me sick--works for me!
Maybe I'll make myself a strawberry-banana smoothie made with my SweetLeaf Sweetener Stevia today--does a body good!!!!!!!!!!