Why Aspartame Isn't Scary
Replies
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And this is why a number of scientists believe that Aspartame IS scary:
"Aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine—the latter of which has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group. This is what provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, allowing the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol.
You may have heard the claim that aspartame is harmless because methanol is also found in fruits and vegetables. However, in these whole foods the methanol is firmly bonded to pectin, which allows it to be safely passed through your digestive tract. This is not the case for the methanol created by aspartame. There, it's not bonded to anything that can help eliminate it from your body. That's problem number one...
Problem number two relates to the fact that humans are the only mammals who are NOT equipped with a protective biological mechanism that breaks down methanol into harmless formic acid. This is why animal testing of aspartame does not fully apply to humans.
According to Dr. Monte, the fact that methyl alcohol is metabolized differently in humans compared to other animals has been known since 1940. And according to the featured paper, rhesus monkeys do not appear to have the same defenses against methanol toxicity as mice do. This basically negates much of the animal research that has been used to 'prove' aspartame's safety."
Go!
ETA: Methanol is toxic to the liver and kidneys as well as being neurotoxic.
I already addressed this in my original post but I can cover it again I suppose. Methanol as a metabolic product of aspartame is one-tenth of its total weight which means in a soda with 180mg of aspartame there will be 18mg of methanol. This is a ridiculously small amount. I have no idea what this poster is talking about with regards to pectin I have never heard that claim before and they provide no citation or link to back it up so I cannot comment there. Even if you ignore fruit juice though pretty much any fermentation product is going to contain more methanol than that. That includes things like yogurt or beer or wine or anything with active culture. 18mg is well well WELL below a toxic level of methanol.
What people don't seem to understand here is things aren't just toxic...toxicity is related to dose. Apples contain arsenic, almonds contain cyanide...arsenic and cyanide are deadly toxins...at sufficient doses. Outside that dosage though they aren't a problem and in fact arsenic is actually an essential nutrient believe it or not.
The amount of methanol, 18 mg, is so small that it has absolutely no effect. You can look up the toxicity of methanol in its MSDS:
http://kni.caltech.edu/facilities/msds/methanol.pdf
The LD50 of methanol by oral delivery is 5628 mg per kg. I weigh around 78kg so I would need to ingest 438,984 mg of methanol. There are 18mg in a soda. That means I would have to ingest 24,388 sodas in a short period of time. If I ingested that many I would have ingested 7,316 liters of water which would of course kill me. I would have ingested enough caffeine that it would kill me. In fact name an ingredient in soda ingested at that level and it would kill you, including water.
There is no concern here even if this pectin thing is true which I don't see a reason to believe it is true.
The phrase "X is toxic" is an incomplete statement, anything that is toxic is only toxic at certain dosages and if you consider any dosage then everything is toxic. To have a meaningful statement you have to say "X is toxic at Y dose".1 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?1 -
And this is why a number of scientists believe that Aspartame IS scary:
"Aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine—the latter of which has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group. This is what provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, allowing the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol.
You may have heard the claim that aspartame is harmless because methanol is also found in fruits and vegetables. However, in these whole foods the methanol is firmly bonded to pectin, which allows it to be safely passed through your digestive tract. This is not the case for the methanol created by aspartame. There, it's not bonded to anything that can help eliminate it from your body. That's problem number one...
Problem number two relates to the fact that humans are the only mammals who are NOT equipped with a protective biological mechanism that breaks down methanol into harmless formic acid. This is why animal testing of aspartame does not fully apply to humans.
According to Dr. Monte, the fact that methyl alcohol is metabolized differently in humans compared to other animals has been known since 1940. And according to the featured paper, rhesus monkeys do not appear to have the same defenses against methanol toxicity as mice do. This basically negates much of the animal research that has been used to 'prove' aspartame's safety."
Go!
ETA: Methanol is toxic to the liver and kidneys as well as being neurotoxic.
I already addressed this in my original post but I can cover it again I suppose. Methanol as a metabolic product of aspartame is one-tenth of its total weight which means in a soda with 180mg of aspartame there will be 18mg of methanol. This is a ridiculously small amount. I have no idea what this poster is talking about with regards to pectin I have never heard that claim before and they provide no citation or link to back it up so I cannot comment there. Even if you ignore fruit juice though pretty much any fermentation product is going to contain more methanol than that. That includes things like yogurt or beer or wine or anything with active culture. 18mg is well well WELL below a toxic level of methanol.
What people don't seem to understand here is things aren't just toxic...toxicity is related to dose. Apples contain arsenic, almonds contain cyanide...arsenic and cyanide are deadly toxins...at sufficient doses. Outside that dosage though they aren't a problem and in fact arsenic is actually an essential nutrient believe it or not.
The amount of methanol, 18 mg, is so small that it has absolutely no effect. You can look up the toxicity of methanol in its MSDS:
http://kni.caltech.edu/facilities/msds/methanol.pdf
The LD50 of methanol by oral delivery is 5628 mg per kg. I weigh around 78kg so I would need to ingest 438,984 mg of methanol. There are 18mg in a soda. That means I would have to ingest 24,388 sodas in a short period of time. If I ingested that many I would have ingested 7,316 liters of water which would of course kill me. I would have ingested enough caffeine that it would kill me. In fact name an ingredient in soda ingested at that level and it would kill you, including water.
There is no concern here even if this pectin thing is true which I don't see a reason to believe it is true.
The phrase "X is toxic" is an incomplete statement, anything that is toxic is only toxic at certain dosages and if you consider any dosage then everything is toxic. To have a meaningful statement you have to say "X is toxic at Y dose".
True.
But there could be unknown protective ingredients in fruit that negate the toxic effect of the methanol release--if there is one. Your earlier assertion about aspirin and willow bark extract being equivalent ignores that there could well be protective co-factors in willow bark extract that negate the potential harm of the ASA. 0 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.0 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.
Not sure why you started on a tangent about fructose. The point here is no, I don't think fruit is toxic...the authors of those studies I doubt feel that fruit is toxic, you don't feel that fruit is toxic and yet fruit has considerably more methanol content than a soda with aspartame.
So you have two choices here. You can either admit that methanol is not a reason to consider aspartame toxic or you can claim that 18mg of methanol IS something to be concerned by in which case you need to justify why you aren't concerned by fruit and also why you think that low dose would have a meaningful affect on the body.
Well I suppose you have a third choice which is the choice you have taken thusfar which is just to not acknowledge these points and change the topic to yet another reason you feel aspartame is toxic thus moving the goal post.0 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.
Not sure why you started on a tangent about fructose. The point here is no, I don't think fruit is toxic...the authors of those studies I doubt feel that fruit is toxic, you don't feel that fruit is toxic and yet fruit has considerably more methanol content than a soda with aspartame.
So you have two choices here. You can either admit that methanol is not a reason to consider aspartame toxic or you can claim that 18mg of methanol IS something to be concerned by in which case you need to justify why you aren't concerned by fruit and also why you think that low dose would have a meaningful affect on the body.
Well I suppose you have a third choice which is the choice you have taken thusfar which is just to not acknowledge these points and change the topic to yet another reason you feel aspartame is toxic thus moving the goal post.
I wasn't trying to "move the goal post"--you really should lighten up (getting so annoyed is really not good for your b.p.). My point was and always has been--why expose ourselves unnecessarily to additional synthetic chemicals? Many of the estimated 80,000 synthetic chemicals are not avoidable so why not avoid the ones that we can avoid? I can live quite well without Aspartame (and even added sugar, for that matter). By the way, I did acknowledge at least some of what you said. The dose really does make the poison.0 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.
Not sure why you started on a tangent about fructose. The point here is no, I don't think fruit is toxic...the authors of those studies I doubt feel that fruit is toxic, you don't feel that fruit is toxic and yet fruit has considerably more methanol content than a soda with aspartame.
So you have two choices here. You can either admit that methanol is not a reason to consider aspartame toxic or you can claim that 18mg of methanol IS something to be concerned by in which case you need to justify why you aren't concerned by fruit and also why you think that low dose would have a meaningful affect on the body.
Well I suppose you have a third choice which is the choice you have taken thusfar which is just to not acknowledge these points and change the topic to yet another reason you feel aspartame is toxic thus moving the goal post.
I wasn't trying to "move the goal post"--you really should lighten up (getting so annoyed is really not good for your b.p.). My point was and always has been--why expose ourselves unnecessarily to additional synthetic chemicals? Many of the estimated 80,000 synthetic chemicals are not avoidable so why not avoid the ones that we can avoid? I can live quite well without Aspartame (and even added sugar, for that matter). By the way, I did acknowledge at least some of what you said. The dose really does make the poison.
I'm actually not annoyed, I think people read annoyance into my posts because I am blunt and brusk but I'm not angry or anything so no worries. Why I was concerned by the goal-post move is earlier I took a long time to show where aspartyl-phenylalanine actually WAS very common in natural foods and gave chicken breast as an example after you stated that it did not occur in nature (page 2 of this thread) You just changed the topic and didn't respond and I was concerned you would just be doing that again here.
There is no difference between natural and "synthetic" chemicals. Chemicals are chemicals, what matters is how they interact not where they came from. Whether they are made in the gut of an animal or in a vat in a plant they are both synthesized. If you gravitate towards natural chemicals and try to abstain from synthetic chemicals you aren't really doing much of anything useful. There are "bad" natural chemicals and there are "good" synthetic chemicals and vis versa. Their origin has nothing to do with their mode of action.
If methanol comes from fruit or if methanol comes from a methyl addition to a compound caried out in a large vat it doesn't matter...it is still methanol. Same goes for any chemical. This idea that somehow food isn't just a collection of chemicals0 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.
Not sure why you started on a tangent about fructose. The point here is no, I don't think fruit is toxic...the authors of those studies I doubt feel that fruit is toxic, you don't feel that fruit is toxic and yet fruit has considerably more methanol content than a soda with aspartame.
So you have two choices here. You can either admit that methanol is not a reason to consider aspartame toxic or you can claim that 18mg of methanol IS something to be concerned by in which case you need to justify why you aren't concerned by fruit and also why you think that low dose would have a meaningful affect on the body.
Well I suppose you have a third choice which is the choice you have taken thusfar which is just to not acknowledge these points and change the topic to yet another reason you feel aspartame is toxic thus moving the goal post.
I wasn't trying to "move the goal post"--you really should lighten up (getting so annoyed is really not good for your b.p.). My point was and always has been--why expose ourselves unnecessarily to additional synthetic chemicals? Many of the estimated 80,000 synthetic chemicals are not avoidable so why not avoid the ones that we can avoid? I can live quite well without Aspartame (and even added sugar, for that matter). By the way, I did acknowledge at least some of what you said. The dose really does make the poison.
I'm actually not annoyed, I think people read annoyance into my posts because I am blunt and brusk but I'm not angry or anything so no worries. Why I was concerned by the goal-post move is earlier I took a long time to show where aspartyl-phenylalanine actually WAS very common in natural foods and gave chicken breast as an example after you stated that it did not occur in nature (page 2 of this thread) You just changed the topic and didn't respond and I was concerned you would just be doing that again here.
There is no difference between natural and "synthetic" chemicals. Chemicals are chemicals, what matters is how they interact not where they came from. Whether they are made in the gut of an animal or in a vat in a plant they are both synthesized. If you gravitate towards natural chemicals and try to abstain from synthetic chemicals you aren't really doing much of anything useful. There are "bad" natural chemicals and there are "good" synthetic chemicals and vis versa. Their origin has nothing to do with their mode of action.
If methanol comes from fruit or if methanol comes from a methyl addition to a compound caried out in a large vat it doesn't matter...it is still methanol. Same goes for any chemical. This idea that somehow food isn't just a collection of chemicals
I simply don't think we are smart enough to know the long-term effect of many chemicals, let alone the combined effects of a LOT of them. Since we have been perfectly designed to exist in the natural world (without added man made chemicals) I am inclined to vote with my dollars and opt for the least exposure to added chemicals and I advise others to do the same. We already know that many pesticides have estrogenic activity in the body--why would we want to knowingly consume them? And I'm not trying to "move the goal posts" here--I am honestly trying to discuss whether added man made chemicals of any sort are necessary or desirable. With cancer rates rising among the young (breast, colorectal and oral cancers are particularly striking as they used to be seen almost exclusively starting in the 5th decade), it may be time to strongly question our "better living through chemistry" mindset.1 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.
Not sure why you started on a tangent about fructose. The point here is no, I don't think fruit is toxic...the authors of those studies I doubt feel that fruit is toxic, you don't feel that fruit is toxic and yet fruit has considerably more methanol content than a soda with aspartame.
So you have two choices here. You can either admit that methanol is not a reason to consider aspartame toxic or you can claim that 18mg of methanol IS something to be concerned by in which case you need to justify why you aren't concerned by fruit and also why you think that low dose would have a meaningful affect on the body.
Well I suppose you have a third choice which is the choice you have taken thusfar which is just to not acknowledge these points and change the topic to yet another reason you feel aspartame is toxic thus moving the goal post.
I wasn't trying to "move the goal post"--you really should lighten up (getting so annoyed is really not good for your b.p.). My point was and always has been--why expose ourselves unnecessarily to additional synthetic chemicals? Many of the estimated 80,000 synthetic chemicals are not avoidable so why not avoid the ones that we can avoid? I can live quite well without Aspartame (and even added sugar, for that matter). By the way, I did acknowledge at least some of what you said. The dose really does make the poison.
I'm actually not annoyed, I think people read annoyance into my posts because I am blunt and brusk but I'm not angry or anything so no worries. Why I was concerned by the goal-post move is earlier I took a long time to show where aspartyl-phenylalanine actually WAS very common in natural foods and gave chicken breast as an example after you stated that it did not occur in nature (page 2 of this thread) You just changed the topic and didn't respond and I was concerned you would just be doing that again here.
There is no difference between natural and "synthetic" chemicals. Chemicals are chemicals, what matters is how they interact not where they came from. Whether they are made in the gut of an animal or in a vat in a plant they are both synthesized. If you gravitate towards natural chemicals and try to abstain from synthetic chemicals you aren't really doing much of anything useful. There are "bad" natural chemicals and there are "good" synthetic chemicals and vis versa. Their origin has nothing to do with their mode of action.
If methanol comes from fruit or if methanol comes from a methyl addition to a compound caried out in a large vat it doesn't matter...it is still methanol. Same goes for any chemical. This idea that somehow food isn't just a collection of chemicals
I simply don't think we are smart enough to know the long-term effect of many chemicals, let alone the combined effects of a LOT of them. Since we have been perfectly designed to exist in the natural world (without added man made chemicals) I am inclined to vote with my dollars and opt for the least exposure to added chemicals and I advise others to do the same. We already know that many pesticides have estrogenic activity in the body--why would we want to knowingly consume them? And I'm not trying to "move the goal posts" here--I am honestly trying to discuss whether added man made chemicals of any sort are necessary or desirable. With cancer rates rising among the young (breast, colorectal and oral cancers are particularly striking as they used to be seen almost exclusively starting in the 5th decade), it may be time to strongly question our "better living through chemistry" mindset.
What food do we eat that was produced by nature exactly? Can you name something in the grocery store that you can just find growing out in the wild?
All of the foods we eat have been manipulated to increase their nutritional value or taste for human consumption. For good reason too because frankly what is truly "natural" is usually not that edible, if you doubt that just wander off into the nearest forest and try to eat. I really don't understand the idea of someone who disdains "chemicals" and goes and picks up an apple, like an apple you find at the store is something that wasn't also created by humans.
Are you saying that you only trust things that we have been eating for hundreds of years? Well okay but then you have to avoid pretty much everything you find in a grocery store including the produce section.0 -
I looked up pectin and its metabolism and pectin is metabolized by the bacteria that live in our gut so anything bound to pectin would be released there in the large intestine.
I have not read this study, this is a preliminary look based on a google search of pectin and methanol. The abstract of the study describes that 90.7% of pectin is metabolised by our gut flora which releases methanol into our system.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/5/848.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9267548
"After the consumption of fruit, the concentration of methanol in the human body increases by as much as an order of magnitude. This is due to the degradation of natural pectin (which is esterified with methyl alcohol) in the human colon. In vivo tests performed by means of proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry show that consumed pectin in either a pure form (10 to 15 g) or a natural form (in 1 kg of apples) induces a significant increase of methanol in the breath (and by inference in the blood) of humans. The amount generated from pectin (0.4 to 1.4 g) is approximately equivalent to the total daily endogenous production (measured to be 0.3 to 0.6 g/day) or that obtained from 0.3 liters of 80-proof brandy (calculated to be 0.5 g). This dietary pectin may contribute to the development of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver."
Note that the amount from an apple is significantly higher by several orders of magnitude than the amount you get from a diet soda.
So that is my answer to that. Does that satisfy your concern or did I just convince you that apples are toxic?
Run for your lives---it is that poison apple! That's probably the REAL meaning of the Snow White story! :happy:
Seriously, though, there is at least one researcher who considers fructose toxic because of the way that it is metabolized. Fruit, in normal amounts, is probably not a problem. But taking in a large amount of fructose (through drinking juices and soda pop in addition to eating sweets) probably contributes to NAFLD and eventually cirrhosis in individuals who consume a lot of those substances. Some researchers have already made the connection between "fruitarian" diets and pancreatic cancer. Steve Jobs, as you may know, was a "fruitarian" for many years--he even named his company after his favorite fruit. The excessive amount of fructose in a diet composed exclusively of fruit is probably a risk. A balanced amount of natural foods are likely the best recipe for health.
Not sure why you started on a tangent about fructose. The point here is no, I don't think fruit is toxic...the authors of those studies I doubt feel that fruit is toxic, you don't feel that fruit is toxic and yet fruit has considerably more methanol content than a soda with aspartame.
So you have two choices here. You can either admit that methanol is not a reason to consider aspartame toxic or you can claim that 18mg of methanol IS something to be concerned by in which case you need to justify why you aren't concerned by fruit and also why you think that low dose would have a meaningful affect on the body.
Well I suppose you have a third choice which is the choice you have taken thusfar which is just to not acknowledge these points and change the topic to yet another reason you feel aspartame is toxic thus moving the goal post.
I wasn't trying to "move the goal post"--you really should lighten up (getting so annoyed is really not good for your b.p.). My point was and always has been--why expose ourselves unnecessarily to additional synthetic chemicals? Many of the estimated 80,000 synthetic chemicals are not avoidable so why not avoid the ones that we can avoid? I can live quite well without Aspartame (and even added sugar, for that matter). By the way, I did acknowledge at least some of what you said. The dose really does make the poison.
I'm actually not annoyed, I think people read annoyance into my posts because I am blunt and brusk but I'm not angry or anything so no worries. Why I was concerned by the goal-post move is earlier I took a long time to show where aspartyl-phenylalanine actually WAS very common in natural foods and gave chicken breast as an example after you stated that it did not occur in nature (page 2 of this thread) You just changed the topic and didn't respond and I was concerned you would just be doing that again here.
There is no difference between natural and "synthetic" chemicals. Chemicals are chemicals, what matters is how they interact not where they came from. Whether they are made in the gut of an animal or in a vat in a plant they are both synthesized. If you gravitate towards natural chemicals and try to abstain from synthetic chemicals you aren't really doing much of anything useful. There are "bad" natural chemicals and there are "good" synthetic chemicals and vis versa. Their origin has nothing to do with their mode of action.
If methanol comes from fruit or if methanol comes from a methyl addition to a compound caried out in a large vat it doesn't matter...it is still methanol. Same goes for any chemical. This idea that somehow food isn't just a collection of chemicals
I simply don't think we are smart enough to know the long-term effect of many chemicals, let alone the combined effects of a LOT of them. Since we have been perfectly designed to exist in the natural world (without added man made chemicals) I am inclined to vote with my dollars and opt for the least exposure to added chemicals and I advise others to do the same. We already know that many pesticides have estrogenic activity in the body--why would we want to knowingly consume them? And I'm not trying to "move the goal posts" here--I am honestly trying to discuss whether added man made chemicals of any sort are necessary or desirable. With cancer rates rising among the young (breast, colorectal and oral cancers are particularly striking as they used to be seen almost exclusively starting in the 5th decade), it may be time to strongly question our "better living through chemistry" mindset.
What food do we eat that was produced by nature exactly? Can you name something in the grocery store that you can just find growing out in the wild?
All of the foods we eat have been manipulated to increase their nutritional value or taste for human consumption. For good reason too because frankly what is truly "natural" is usually not that edible, if you doubt that just wander off into the nearest forest and try to eat. I really don't understand the idea of someone who disdains "chemicals" and goes and picks up an apple, like an apple you find at the store is something that wasn't also created by humans.
Are you saying that you only trust things that we have been eating for hundreds of years? Well okay but then you have to avoid pretty much everything you find in a grocery store including the produce section.
I think you exaggerate a bit. The heritage seed movement is all about saving the seeds that our forebears grew. Don't get me started on modern agriculture. Since this thread isn't about that, I will simply say that we will rue the day when we allowed independent family farms to be taken over by Big Ag.0 -
I think you exaggerate a bit. The heritage seed movement is all about saving the seeds that our forebears grew. Don't get me started on modern agriculture. Since this thread isn't about that, I will simply say that we will rue the day when we allowed independent family farms to be taken over by Big Ag.
I'm not exaggerating at all. Agriculture has existed for millenia. Our forebearers seeds are not "natural" either. You think thats what a "natural" apple looked like 2000 years ago? The fruit and veg we have today have been so heavily bred as to be completely unrecognizable compared to what they were breed from.
Its funny when people refer to things as being "wild" varieties of our grocery store foods because those "wild" varieties are just what they used to look like a hundred years ago after only 3,900 years of agriculturual breeding instead of 4,000 years.
For example people thing that maize is "wild" corn. Maize isn't any more natural than corn is, its also a product of thousands of years of agriculture. The natural ancestor of corn, the plant that is actually natural, is tesonite, a grass.
This is teosinte
That look particularly edible to you? Its grass. You know how in a park or your yard when grass goes to seed and it forms those little stalks with all those little seed things. Yeah...thats what corn used to be until we spent thousands of years molding it.
Truth is there is nothing in the produce aisle of a grocery store that wasn't created by us. None of that is natural, none of that can you just find growing out in a jungle somewhere.
I didn't just pick corn because its the one plant that is true of, what I said is not an exaggeration. Any fruit or veg in the grocery store has been manipulated for thousands of years to be edible by us and does not resemble in any way shape or form its natural ancestor. The "natural" versions would be unrecognizable, not particularly edible and in some cases poison. Natural almonds for example, if you ate a handful of them you would be dead.0 -
I think you exaggerate a bit. The heritage seed movement is all about saving the seeds that our forebears grew. Don't get me started on modern agriculture. Since this thread isn't about that, I will simply say that we will rue the day when we allowed independent family farms to be taken over by Big Ag.
I'm not exaggerating at all. Agriculture has existed for millenia. Our forebearers seeds are not "natural" either. You think thats what a "natural" apple looked like 2000 years ago? The fruit and veg we have today have been so heavily bred as to be completely unrecognizable compared to what they were breed from.
Its funny when people refer to things as being "wild" varieties of our grocery store foods because those "wild" varieties are just what they used to look like a hundred years ago after only 3,900 years of agriculturual breeding instead of 4,000 years.
For example people thing that maize is "wild" corn. Maize isn't any more natural than corn is, its also a product of thousands of years of agriculture. The natural ancestor of corn, the plant that is actually natural, is tesonite, a grass.
This is teosinte
That look particularly edible to you? Its grass. You know how in a park or your yard when grass goes to seed and it forms those little stalks with all those little seed things. Yeah...thats what corn used to be until we spent thousands of years molding it.
Truth is there is nothing in the produce aisle of a grocery store that wasn't created by us. None of that is natural, none of that can you just find growing out in a jungle somewhere.
I didn't just pick corn because its the one plant that is true of, what I said is not an exaggeration. Any fruit or veg in the grocery store has been manipulated for thousands of years to be edible by us and does not resemble in any way shape or form its natural ancestor. The "natural" versions would be unrecognizable, not particularly edible and in some cases poison. Natural almonds for example, if you ate a handful of them you would be dead.
From cyanide poisoning? Hybridization has not always worked out very well (and I'm not even going to begin to talk about GMOs). The wild Einkorn wheat that our ancestors grabbed off the stalk and ate was VERY different from the Emmer wheat which was popular during the Roman Empire and it was very different still from the Triticale wheats of today. At each stage the amount of wheat gluten increased and unfortunately, wheat gluten isn't particularly digestible. Now, some scientists believe that there is a "cross-reactivity" between the glyphosate residue that wheat now contains and the wheat gluten itself and that is why we have so much "gluten intolerance" of late. Even though wheat is not "Roundup ready" they spray it with Roundup (glyphosate) before harvest to kill the wheat plant and dry the wheat on the stalk and to make it easier to do "no-till planting". Glyphosate was developed as a strong chelating agent and it wreaks havoc in the gut. We would have been better off if they had left the wild wheat alone. Remember that mummified guy that they dug up in the Alps? The one they figured died about 3000 years ago? (I forget what they named him.) He had a bit of wild Einkorn wheat in his stomach but he had a lot more of other things. They said he was very healthy and strong (they figure he got knocked off by an adversary who got him from behind with an axe or something). We have this idea that our ancient ancestors were sickly and weak because we didn't have modern agriculture. Paleontologists are starting to say that our paleolithic ancestors were actually stronger and more resistant to disease than more modern humans. It appears that most of their children made it to adulthood. When agriculture came on the scene, it was a disaster of major proportions for children---infant mortality skyrocketed. And so it goes coming forward. If it weren't for modern medicine, a lot more of us wouldn't have made it to adulthood.1 -
You said it! *kitten* the millions of people throughout the world who would starve to death if not for modern agriculture and GMO's. Who needs all those people in the Third World anyway?1
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Really? For one thing, gluten intolerance doesn't exist, according to the researchers that originally came up with the idea. They've admitted they were wrong. Celiac disease is real, but it's still as rare as it was back in the time that Hippocrates wrote about it a couple thousand years ago.
I think you exaggerate a bit. The heritage seed movement is all about saving the seeds that our forebears grew. Don't get me started on modern agriculture. Since this thread isn't about that, I will simply say that we will rue the day when we allowed independent family farms to be taken over by Big Ag.
I'm not exaggerating at all. Agriculture has existed for millenia. Our forebearers seeds are not "natural" either. You think thats what a "natural" apple looked like 2000 years ago? The fruit and veg we have today have been so heavily bred as to be completely unrecognizable compared to what they were breed from.
Its funny when people refer to things as being "wild" varieties of our grocery store foods because those "wild" varieties are just what they used to look like a hundred years ago after only 3,900 years of agriculturual breeding instead of 4,000 years.
For example people thing that maize is "wild" corn. Maize isn't any more natural than corn is, its also a product of thousands of years of agriculture. The natural ancestor of corn, the plant that is actually natural, is tesonite, a grass.
This is teosinte
That look particularly edible to you? Its grass. You know how in a park or your yard when grass goes to seed and it forms those little stalks with all those little seed things. Yeah...thats what corn used to be until we spent thousands of years molding it.
Truth is there is nothing in the produce aisle of a grocery store that wasn't created by us. None of that is natural, none of that can you just find growing out in a jungle somewhere.
I didn't just pick corn because its the one plant that is true of, what I said is not an exaggeration. Any fruit or veg in the grocery store has been manipulated for thousands of years to be edible by us and does not resemble in any way shape or form its natural ancestor. The "natural" versions would be unrecognizable, not particularly edible and in some cases poison. Natural almonds for example, if you ate a handful of them you would be dead.
From cyanide poisoning? Hybridization has not always worked out very well (and I'm not even going to begin to talk about GMOs). The wild Einkorn wheat that our ancestors grabbed off the stalk and ate was VERY different from the Emmer wheat which was popular during the Roman Empire and it was very different still from the Triticale wheats of today. At each stage the amount of wheat gluten increased and unfortunately, wheat gluten isn't particularly digestible. Now, some scientists believe that there is a "cross-reactivity" between the glyphosate residue that wheat now contains and the wheat gluten itself and that is why we have so much "gluten intolerance" of late. Even though wheat is not "Roundup ready" they spray it with Roundup (glyphosate) before harvest to kill the wheat plant and dry the wheat on the stalk and to make it easier to do "no-till planting". Glyphosate was developed as a strong chelating agent and it wreaks havoc in the gut. We would have been better off if they had left the wild wheat alone. Remember that mummified guy that they dug up in the Alps? The one they figured died about 3000 years ago? (I forget what they named him.) He had a bit of wild Einkorn wheat in his stomach but he had a lot more of other things. They said he was very healthy and strong (they figure he got knocked off by an adversary who got him from behind with an axe or something). We have this idea that our ancient ancestors were sickly and weak because we didn't have modern agriculture. Paleontologists are starting to say that our paleolithic ancestors were actually stronger and more resistant to disease than more modern humans. It appears that most of their children made it to adulthood. When agriculture came on the scene, it was a disaster of major proportions for children---infant mortality skyrocketed. And so it goes coming forward. If it weren't for modern medicine, a lot more of us wouldn't have made it to adulthood.
Also, I know of nobody in any academic circles who think of our ancestors as weak. Our ancestors had a lower average lifespan, not from disease, but from being killed by predators. We didn't get to be dominant until the agricultural revolution, when we formed cities with protective structures to defend ourselves.
You make a lot of wild, unsubstantiated claims, with generous use of weasel words. None of them are true of course, which is why you can't support them. Please stop making things up and spreading misinformation.0 -
Thank you for the informative critical thinking piece OP! Well written and explained.
You may as well give up arguing with the poster you are banging heads with. They are the biggest woo merchant on MFP and have been for a while.
I see they have presented exactly zero examples of evidence against your original post. Now, that's low calorie!0 -
The lower average lifespan was also attributable to high mortality rates in childbirth; as more women and infants survived the birth process, the average started to go up rather noticeably.
Really? For one thing, gluten intolerance doesn't exist, according to the researchers that originally came up with the idea. They've admitted they were wrong. Celiac disease is real, but it's still as rare as it was back in the time that Hippocrates wrote about it a couple thousand years ago.
I think you exaggerate a bit. The heritage seed movement is all about saving the seeds that our forebears grew. Don't get me started on modern agriculture. Since this thread isn't about that, I will simply say that we will rue the day when we allowed independent family farms to be taken over by Big Ag.
I'm not exaggerating at all. Agriculture has existed for millenia. Our forebearers seeds are not "natural" either. You think thats what a "natural" apple looked like 2000 years ago? The fruit and veg we have today have been so heavily bred as to be completely unrecognizable compared to what they were breed from.
Its funny when people refer to things as being "wild" varieties of our grocery store foods because those "wild" varieties are just what they used to look like a hundred years ago after only 3,900 years of agriculturual breeding instead of 4,000 years.
For example people thing that maize is "wild" corn. Maize isn't any more natural than corn is, its also a product of thousands of years of agriculture. The natural ancestor of corn, the plant that is actually natural, is tesonite, a grass.
This is teosinte
That look particularly edible to you? Its grass. You know how in a park or your yard when grass goes to seed and it forms those little stalks with all those little seed things. Yeah...thats what corn used to be until we spent thousands of years molding it.
Truth is there is nothing in the produce aisle of a grocery store that wasn't created by us. None of that is natural, none of that can you just find growing out in a jungle somewhere.
I didn't just pick corn because its the one plant that is true of, what I said is not an exaggeration. Any fruit or veg in the grocery store has been manipulated for thousands of years to be edible by us and does not resemble in any way shape or form its natural ancestor. The "natural" versions would be unrecognizable, not particularly edible and in some cases poison. Natural almonds for example, if you ate a handful of them you would be dead.
From cyanide poisoning? Hybridization has not always worked out very well (and I'm not even going to begin to talk about GMOs). The wild Einkorn wheat that our ancestors grabbed off the stalk and ate was VERY different from the Emmer wheat which was popular during the Roman Empire and it was very different still from the Triticale wheats of today. At each stage the amount of wheat gluten increased and unfortunately, wheat gluten isn't particularly digestible. Now, some scientists believe that there is a "cross-reactivity" between the glyphosate residue that wheat now contains and the wheat gluten itself and that is why we have so much "gluten intolerance" of late. Even though wheat is not "Roundup ready" they spray it with Roundup (glyphosate) before harvest to kill the wheat plant and dry the wheat on the stalk and to make it easier to do "no-till planting". Glyphosate was developed as a strong chelating agent and it wreaks havoc in the gut. We would have been better off if they had left the wild wheat alone. Remember that mummified guy that they dug up in the Alps? The one they figured died about 3000 years ago? (I forget what they named him.) He had a bit of wild Einkorn wheat in his stomach but he had a lot more of other things. They said he was very healthy and strong (they figure he got knocked off by an adversary who got him from behind with an axe or something). We have this idea that our ancient ancestors were sickly and weak because we didn't have modern agriculture. Paleontologists are starting to say that our paleolithic ancestors were actually stronger and more resistant to disease than more modern humans. It appears that most of their children made it to adulthood. When agriculture came on the scene, it was a disaster of major proportions for children---infant mortality skyrocketed. And so it goes coming forward. If it weren't for modern medicine, a lot more of us wouldn't have made it to adulthood.
Also, I know of nobody in any academic circles who think of our ancestors as weak. Our ancestors had a lower average lifespan, not from disease, but from being killed by predators. We didn't get to be dominant until the agricultural revolution, when we formed cities with protective structures to defend ourselves.
You make a lot of wild, unsubstantiated claims, with generous use of weasel words. None of them are true of course, which is why you can't support them. Please stop making things up and spreading misinformation.0 -
I think you exaggerate a bit. The heritage seed movement is all about saving the seeds that our forebears grew. Don't get me started on modern agriculture. Since this thread isn't about that, I will simply say that we will rue the day when we allowed independent family farms to be taken over by Big Ag.
I'm not exaggerating at all. Agriculture has existed for millenia. Our forebearers seeds are not "natural" either. You think thats what a "natural" apple looked like 2000 years ago? The fruit and veg we have today have been so heavily bred as to be completely unrecognizable compared to what they were breed from.
Its funny when people refer to things as being "wild" varieties of our grocery store foods because those "wild" varieties are just what they used to look like a hundred years ago after only 3,900 years of agriculturual breeding instead of 4,000 years.
For example people thing that maize is "wild" corn. Maize isn't any more natural than corn is, its also a product of thousands of years of agriculture. The natural ancestor of corn, the plant that is actually natural, is tesonite, a grass.
This is teosinte
That look particularly edible to you? Its grass. You know how in a park or your yard when grass goes to seed and it forms those little stalks with all those little seed things. Yeah...thats what corn used to be until we spent thousands of years molding it.
Truth is there is nothing in the produce aisle of a grocery store that wasn't created by us. None of that is natural, none of that can you just find growing out in a jungle somewhere.
I didn't just pick corn because its the one plant that is true of, what I said is not an exaggeration. Any fruit or veg in the grocery store has been manipulated for thousands of years to be edible by us and does not resemble in any way shape or form its natural ancestor. The "natural" versions would be unrecognizable, not particularly edible and in some cases poison. Natural almonds for example, if you ate a handful of them you would be dead.
I honestly feel smarter from every science post you post. I learn something new nearly every time! Thanks for all of this and the other posts in this thread and elsewhere. Keep on keeping on! :drinker:0 -
Every time I check on this thread, I see something interesting...
I wanted to comment on this:
First of all, to the best of my knowledge, the domestication of emmer predates that of einkorn and both were (at least starting to) be phased out by the time of the Roman Empire. I'm not 100% on this so feel free to kick my *kitten* if you know better.The wild Einkorn wheat that our ancestors grabbed off the stalk and ate was VERY different from the Emmer wheat which was popular during the Roman Empire and it was very different still from the Triticale wheats of today.
(...)
We have this idea that our ancient ancestors were sickly and weak because we didn't have modern agriculture. Paleontologists are starting to say that our paleolithic ancestors were actually stronger and more resistant to disease than more modern humans. It appears that most of their children made it to adulthood. When agriculture came on the scene, it was a disaster of major proportions for children---infant mortality skyrocketed.
More importantly (and I am 100% on this) the fact that hunter-gatherer populations tend to be more robust than primitive agricultural ones isn't novel at all. It's well accepted that foraging allows a more varied, complete and constant nutrition than primitive locally-based agriculture.
Agriculture won out because it allows for more efficient land usage and, as a result, urbanization. There is precisely one known pre-agricultural permanent urban settlement, and IIRC it's unclear how permanent it was (working hypothesis is that it was a temple complex and "base camp" rather than a village).
In time, humans adapted their agricultural lifestyle (which proved superior from other points of view). The same happened during the industrial revolution, there was a considerable but short-lived spike in infant mortality. We adapted more quickly because we knew more medicine.
Feel free to call it a disaster if you must...0 -
Asparatame probably isn't going to kill you. But if you're pre-diabetic or have a family history of diabetes, stay away from artificial sweeteners. They trick your insulin response with the promise of sugar that never arrives. Not a diatribe against aspartame in particular, just a word of caution to at-risk individuals.2
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So glad this popped up in my feed again. I hope the main protagonist here is logging his/her calories from all the goal post moves, deflections and tangents.0
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Asparatame probably isn't going to kill you. But if you're pre-diabetic or have a family history of diabetes, stay away from artificial sweeteners. They trick your insulin response with the promise of sugar that never arrives. Not a diatribe against aspartame in particular, just a word of caution to at-risk individuals.
I'll have to track it down, but I'm sure studies have shown that aspartame did not spike insulin!0 -
No Aspartame doesn't spike insulinAsparatame probably isn't going to kill you. But if you're pre-diabetic or have a family history of diabetes, stay away from artificial sweeteners. They trick your insulin response with the promise of sugar that never arrives. Not a diatribe against aspartame in particular, just a word of caution to at-risk individuals.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expert-answers/artificial-sweeteners/faq-20058038
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1946186
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2182973
http://www.ajcn.org/content/49/3/427.full.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/97347270 -
Okay so I admit I didn't read every single post, but my favorite argument is "Well the sun may cause cancer so drink diet all you want!" Uh duh, that's why you should wear sunscreen every single day. I don't drink diet soda or consume aspartame because anything that can cause a migraine just at the smell can't be good for me personally. I don't think you are automatically going to get a brain tumor by drinking it, but why risk it? I take care to avoid the sun just like I take care to avoid aspartame.1
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If you get a migraine from the smell it's more likely to be a psychological issue would be my guess. Migraines are weird.
Also the idea behind that quote was probably more along the lines of "Just because something technically could cause problems for some people, that's not a reason to avoid it if it doesn't for you." I get migraines from the weather changing, doesn't mean I should avoid going out.
Or alternatively, just because there are people allergic to peanuts doesn't mean no one should eat peanuts anymore.2 -
If you get a migraine from the smell it's more likely to be a psychological issue would be my guess. Migraines are weird.
Also the idea behind that quote was probably more along the lines of "Just because something technically could cause problems for some people, that's not a reason to avoid it if it doesn't for you." I get migraines from the weather changing, doesn't mean I should avoid going out.
Or alternatively, just because there are people allergic to peanuts doesn't mean no one should eat peanuts anymore.
It could definitely be psychological, I just know that is smells and tastes bad and makes me feel awful.
I just think it's funny that people are using that to completely dismiss the others who avoid aspartame. Personally, I think a website that promotes clean eating and avoiding processed food shouldn't promote a man-made sweetener that we don't know for sure is good or bad. Food science is constantly changing. One year something causes cancer and the next is good for you and then the next it's bad! People should learn to take things with a grain of salt. I have a really hard time believing that aspartame is 100% healthy, because we don't know everything.1 -
You could argue it the other way around too though. If you were to avoid everything anyone has said can cause cancer we would be starving.0
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You could argue it the other way around too though. If you were to avoid everything anyone has said can cause cancer we would be starving.
Personally, I'd rather wear sunscreen and not risk getting sun caner. No, I doubt aspartame is causing cancer, but I'd rather avoid a man-made chemical like that. Sure, I use a lot of other stuff that's bad for me, but so does every single person. You could argue this ten ways to Sunday, but people are allowed to eat/drink whatever they like. It's like the argument that you shouldn't drink while pregnant. Sure, one glass of wine isn't going to hurt, but some people would rather not take that chance. Neither of them are wrong, just make different choices. I don't understand why everyone on here is feeling the need to be "right". Why can't we just accept that everyone owns their own body and can therefore make choices about what to put or not put inside of it (teehee).0 -
If you get a migraine from the smell it's more likely to be a psychological issue would be my guess. Migraines are weird.
Also the idea behind that quote was probably more along the lines of "Just because something technically could cause problems for some people, that's not a reason to avoid it if it doesn't for you." I get migraines from the weather changing, doesn't mean I should avoid going out.
Or alternatively, just because there are people allergic to peanuts doesn't mean no one should eat peanuts anymore.
It could definitely be psychological, I just know that is smells and tastes bad and makes me feel awful.
I just think it's funny that people are using that to completely dismiss the others who avoid aspartame. Personally, I think a website that promotes clean eating and avoiding processed food shouldn't promote a man-made sweetener that we don't know for sure is good or bad. Food science is constantly changing. One year something causes cancer and the next is good for you and then the next it's bad! People should learn to take things with a grain of salt. I have a really hard time believing that aspartame is 100% healthy, because we don't know everything.
Honestly, this is a website that promotes calorie counting; it doesn't inherently promote clean eating (see: any thread about clean eating where no one can agree on a definition) or processed food. This thread is about how aspartame isn't scary because it isn't. Yes, there are people who it affects with things such as migraines; the OP himself has told people who feel that they are negatively affected by aspartame to not drink anything with it. No one has a problem with it; the issue comes in when people who are in the minority, i.e. those who have aspartame as a migraine trigger, try to tell everyone that they're going to get cancer and/or some other terrible thing because they drink diet drinks.
For the vast majority of people, it isn't going to be a problem. If it is a problem for you, don't consume it. Problem solved.1 -
"Personally, I think a website that promotes clean eating and avoiding processed food shouldn't promote a man-made sweetener that we don't know for sure is good or bad"
Do you mean this MFP website?
I'm not sure its philosophy is to promote clean eating and avoidance of processed food - my understanding is that it is to promote weight management by calorie counting.
That may or may not include clean eating or avoiding processed foods. That is up to the users but is not the aim of the site.
Also nobody is promoting aspartame - saying something is not scary and is safe to use is not promoting it - it is just stating the fact that it is not scary and is safe to use.
Also you do realize sun screen has "man made chemicals"?
Sort of blows your logic out of the water.3 -
I personally think a better question would be:
Shouldn't we be breaking our dependency on needing "sweet" flavors altogether?
Sugar, be it natural or artificial gives your body no nutritional benefit so if you're trying to cut it out of your diet to lose weight, you're better off just getting rid of your desire for sweet flavors for good and instead putting things in your body which will actually benefit it.0
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