I can remember when this stuff first came out as Nutrasweet. It was 1983 and I was in the Army stationed at Ft. Carson in Colorado. They put it in Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi as the 'new saccharin.' It tasted awesome and I drank a lot of it because it could help me keep the weight off. You had to wonder how something that made stuff taste so sweet and had zero calories had been kept under wraps for so long! It was the miracle that we fatties and former fatties had been waiting for.It wasn't long before I started feeling unusual. Not sick. Nothing I could put my finger on...just not good. I tried to isolate the cause and I thought the Diet Coke was doing it. When I drank it, I got headaches. So I stopped drinking it. It didn't really click on the Nutrasweet, I thought it might be the caffeine.
Then I noticed something else interesting. When we had barracks parties, I was drinking the new Crystal Light Lemonade and mixing it with Gin. Hey, what could be better than this? Zero calories, no caffeine and something in it literally masked the taste of the alcohol. But with relatively little Gin, I was feeling a little more woozy a lot more quickly. I went back to beer. More calories, but it felt like I was in control. That's when it hit me. Something about the Nutrasweet wasn't right. Headaches, stuff getting to my brain faster...it was almost, chemical.
Now at that time, there was very little research on Aspartame. There was no internet to speak of yet and if you read something on Nutrasweet/Aspartame, then someone must have given it to you or you were lucky to fall on it. Since then, there has been a lot written about the dangers of Aspartame. If you look around the web, you can find volumes on the dangers and also much to counter those findings, but typically, with no test results to back up the rebuttals. They point to the same tests that were run in the early 1980's when this drug, and I use that term purposely, was approved by the FDA for use in foods.
Aspartame is a very weak chemical compound that is made up primarily of Aspartic Acid, Methanol and Phenylalanine. At least, that is the three chemicals that it breaks down to in your body. Methanol converts, in your body, into formaldehyde. Yes, you read that correctly. It converts to the same stuff we embalm bodies with. It also converts very easily when the temperature is above 87 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, many other foods contain Methanol, orange juice is just one of them. Those foods, however, have naturally occurring chemical compounds around the Methanol that keep it from becoming formaldehyde. The same is not true for Nutrasweet aka Aspartame. Exposure to formaldehyde in the body is "known to cause gradual damage to the nervous system, the immune system and has recently been shown to cause irreversible genetic damage at long-term, low-level exposure." Sounds great doesn't it?
So how did this product get on the market? There is an excellent history of it online at this URL:
How Aspartame Became Legal - Synopsis
If you don't read the excerpt, know this much. It was political and Donald Rumsfeld was involved. G.E. Searle hired him around 1979 to help them get the substance approved by the FDA. The FDA would not approve the chemical due to safety concerns. Rumsfeld was a part of the 1980 Ronald Reagan Election Team. When Reagan was elected President, the day after his inauguration on January 21st, 1981, Searle reapplied to the FDA for approval. On that day, Reagan and his transition team, which includes G.E. Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld, replaces the head of the FDA with a handpicked buddy, Dr. Arthur Hayes, Jr. In July of 1981, in one of his first moves as head of FDA, Hayes overrules the FDA approving body and approves Aspartame for use in dry products. In October of 1982, it is approved for carbonated beverages. Sounds legit doesn't it? Especially when the FDA originally classified it as toxic.
Here is what I know from personal experience, and this was my own little experiment. On my diet, I ate the same foods for 7 weeks. I lost 5 pounds each week like clockwork. In week 8, I changed one thing in my diet. I started drinking a couple cans of diet soda each day. Aspartame loaded and no calories. In week 8, my weight loss slowed to 4.5 lbs. In week 9, 3 lbs. In week 10, 1.5 lbs. The ONLY change in my diet was the diet soda. That was when I found an article that explained how Aspartame was processed in the body.
Now, we all know (for those who have been reading this blog site or are on the Optifast system) that you cannot have alcohol on this diet. The reason is that your liver is processing the fat 24/7 and if you ask the liver to start processing alcohol, you could damage it. Also, if your liver is processing alcohol, it will not be processing your fat and you will not lose weight. So given that information, I read the Aspartame article. The chemical compound Aspartame is ALSO processed in the liver. Your liver, when drinking it, spends less time breaking down your fat and more breaking down the Aspartame. It also takes more time to get your fat burning process revved up again. Mine deteriorated over a period of 3 weeks. One other thing that Aspartame does is that it causes fluctuations in your Insulin levels. These unstable blood sugar levels mess with the pre-measured levels that you experience on the Optifast diet and cause both cravings and fluid retention. Now, I experienced this myself. I discussed it with the Doctor and he seemed to think, while not documented, that it made sense.
Here is Dr. Sandra Cabot's article:
Aspartame Makes You Fatter
Once I was armed with this knowledge, I stopped drinking the Aspartame filled products. The result? 5 lbs were lost the NEXT WEEK. This continued until I reached my goal.
Aspartame. It is a chemical killer. It should be outlawed. It makes you fatter. It messes with your diet.
Drink water!
Next: Do it...don't wish it.
You have been snickered by the antiaspartame critics into believing just what they want you to believe. However, aspartame safety has nothing to do with Rumsfeld or politics, but was compromised by a simple scientific error that is far from what you reported. That error indicates that aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed in healthy people.
ReplyDeleteAll aspartame research prior to 2009 is seriously and fatally flawed, because it was all done in a scientifically unacceptable manner. That was established by preliminary work presented at the Society of Toxicology (Seattle, USA) and the American Chemical Society (New Orleans, USA) national meetings in early 2008 and is currently being preparing for regular publication. In those locations it was demonstrated that inappropriate controls were used in all aspartame research starting with the original Searle work and extending through the Soffritti et al work published over the past several years (and even other work thereafter). The standard control-versus-treated animal experiments are invalid for aspartame, because aspartame is hydrolyzed to methanol and methanol has long been known to deplete a vitamin, namely folic acid. No properly done experiment can deplete a vitamin, but all experiments to date claiming problems have done just that! Hence, both controlled and treated groups of animals must be provided either the appropriate amounts of folic acid supplement to counter methanol-induced loss OR both controlled and treated groups of animals must be provided the same intake of methanol, one directly and the other from aspartame. However, the latter is an experimentally more challenging option. Various other studies found “no effect” from aspartame. Such animal studies were either of such short duration that folate depletion was not evident or more likely were performed with corn/soybean or other diets rich in folate and would not be expected to show any effect. While no work to date has done these experiments correctly, you should realize the suggested adverse effects claimed by antiaspartame critics in animals can be shown to stem entirely from an induced vitamin shortage.
The second reality is that this same underlying issue explains human problems attributed by critics to aspartame. Many people are folate deficient, both because some people refuse to take vitamin supplements and avoid folate fortified grain products (donuts, etc), but also because some people (~20%) have genetic problems that increase their need for folate. Folate deficiency underlies birth defects, many cancers, and other conditions. It is these folate issues and not aspartame that explain much of this manufactured controversy, because most of the "symptoms" claimed for aspartame at various web sites are direct or indirect consequences of personal folate deficiency and related problems.
For either animal or man the consequences of the folate deficiency that result are the incorporation of structurally weak uridylate (uracil, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uracil) bases in DNA in place of stronger thymidylate (methyluridylate called thymine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymine) and/or the accrual of toxic homocysteine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homocysteine), most likely because of insufficient methylation of homocysteine to afford methionine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methionine). Much has been written about the “excitotoxic” amino acids in aspartame (phenylalanine and aspartic acid) by aspartame critics. However, those excitotoxic amino acids occur at far greater concentrations in everyday food, so neither of these amino acids are issues for most people. However, what seems to be consistently missed by the antiaspartame critics is that homocysteine is a far stronger excitotoxin than any constituent of aspartame.
In summary, there is no valid science questioning aspartame’s safety, but there is substantial direct and indirect evidence that any personal issues with aspartame reflect not aspartame per se, but a personal folate deficiency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate_deficiency), folate polymorphism genetic issues (for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenetetrahydrofolate_reductase), and/or issues with related biochemistry linked to vitamin B12 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12). There is no data suggesting any adverse effect for aspartame than cannot simply and completely be explained by the folate deficiency, folate genetics, and homocysteine paradigm.
This new information only suggests aspartame is even safer, now that what I have reported above is known to all the regulatory authorities. Given these new, stronger indications of safety, science no longer has any reason to doubt the safety of aspartame. And the European equivalent of the US FDA on April 20 just validated the safety of aspartame again, http://www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA/efsa_locale-1178620753812_1211902454309.htm.
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 and have made not one penny from my opposition, unlike many antiaspartame critics who sell books and offer irrelevant treatment. Their clearly stated goals are lawsuits, where none are justified. The author has an undergraduate degree in chemistry (with emphasis in organic and biological chemistry) from the University of Kansas, a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry (Pharmacy) from the University of Iowa, postdoctoral experience at Yale University (Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry) and two postdoctoral fellowships at Vanderbilt University (physiology-pharmacology (mentor moved), then nutritional toxicology) and taught nutritional toxicology at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, UIUC) besides having conducted federally funded research at Vanderbilt, UIUC, and at several other universities before recently entering into semi-retirement.)
Dr. Garst,
ReplyDeleteNumber One, you claim that no testing done prior to 2009 was done in a correct manner. That would indicate to me that it was flawed. If that is the case, then there is no basis for an improperly tested chemical to be in our food.
Number Two, your claim to Aspartame's safety is based on a knowledge of the human physiology and is not based on testing but on an assumption that symptoms are related to folate deficiencies. You do not address any scientific testing and simply say that previous testing (ALL testing) was not done correctly.
Number Three, you summarize that the new information about there being 'no valid science' questioning the drug's safety is indicative of a suggestion that it is safe. The lack of a thermometer is not indicative that there is no fever.
Number Four, Rumsfeld and politics played no role in this product's safety but DID play a role in putting an untested (YOUR conclusion) and, by many who have ingested it, unsafe and dangerous drug in our food. They did it for money.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment as well as your expert background in medicine and science.