Why Aspartame Isn't Scary

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every time I check on this thread, I see something interesting...
I wanted to comment on this:

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

No Aspartame doesn't spike insulin

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/9734727

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.

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.