Is Aspartame really THAT bad?

I should also add that it CAN be dangerous if you have phenylketonuria, and shouldn't be used in baking as heat will denature the two amino acids that make up the aspartame compound. Phenylketonuria is an allergy to phenyalanine, one of the amino acids in aspartame. All infants are now tested for this disease and must avoid not only aspartame, but most foods containing protein. Hope that helps!

I'm confused about the "most foods containing protein" what do you mean.?

Okay... 1 more attempt to simplify things. Aspartame is a man-made, toxic chemical (I'm not saying what degree or how much exactly you need, but it is toxic - like many things, especially when taken in larger quantities). Also, keep in mind, many things in excess become more toxic - so do you want to be the guinea pig to figure out where that line is, IF you don't have to do it in the first place.

My point is this - why expose yourself to it? If it's the belief that diet products help you lose weight, then reconsider this as your motivation (since they've been shown after decades to actually cause the opposite result). Moderation and portion control are ten times more effective then just consuming diet sugar products.

That bottom line can't really be in dispute anymore.

That documentary was made by Cori Brackett, who has a very large anti-aspartame slant. If you think objective studies are wrong because they are funded by aspartame supporters, why would you think a documentary written by someone who is anti-aspartame to be any more true? Also, neither person involved in the documentary have any kind of scientific background that I can see. They are both television personalities. Plus they are immediately wrong in just their description on the documentary in the intro. Methanol is NOT an ingredient in making aspartame. Aspartame, when hydrolyzed, can make methanol in the body, but there is no methanol used in the creation of aspartame. If they can't even get that basic fact right, why should I believe anything else in the documentary?

Was I hearing something different from you? I think they explained pretty clearly that when broken down, aspartame breaks into it's separate chemical components.

AND while you may not believe the documentary, you might want to look at "First experimental Demonstration of the multipotential Carcinogenic Effects of Aspartame Adminstered in the feed to Sprague-Dawley Rats". Google it. Just in case you're rusty on statistics, it only takes a p value of .05 and UNDER to make something significant. The incidence of tumors in rats fed aspartame was p less than or equal to .01. Soo.... you don't need to believe the documentary... but you might want to consider the experimental findings of a research institution.

That was an interesting paper. Some things were misleading...a significant 'trend' is not the same thing as significance. That just means it's really close to significant, but it's not. Also, you can set P at whatever you want. It's just a measure of chance, not causation. I've seen P's at .10. P<.05 just means there's less than a 5% chance of seeing that happen randomly.

The only problem is the lack of a physiologically relevant dose. The beginning of the paper states that the average intake is 2-5mg/kg/day. The ADI is up to 20mg/kg/day. They never address the dosing of 100,000ppm in the food and water of the rats. You have no way of knowing how many mg/kg of aspartame the rats are being fed, which is the fundamental problem with these studies.

You are totally correct in pointing out that they show a significant trend and "significance", however the exact mg/kg/day is stated in the paper "In the first study, groups of 40 male and 40 female Sprague-Dawley rats were treated with 1, 2, 4, or 6–8 g/kg bw/day of APM in the diet." So in this aspect, they do not seem to be misleading anyone.

oops, you're right! I grabbed the wrong reference. FYI, you might not mean it to sound that way, but you made it sound like you doubted I read the paper, which is very insulting. Anyway, it seems very straight forward to me.

"An assumed daily intake by humans of 5,000, 2,500, 500, 100, 20, 4, or 0 mg/kg bw was simulated by adding APM to the standard Corticella diet (Laboratori Dottori Piccioni, Milan Italy), used for 30 years at the CMCRC/ERF laboratory, at concentrations of 100,000, 50,000, 10,000, 2,000, 400, 80, or 0 ppm. The APM daily assumption in milligrams per kilogram body weight was calculated considering the average weight of a rat for the duration of the experiment as 400 g, and the average consumption of feed as 20 g/day, both for males and females."

They converted the intake averaged by humans of milligrams of aspartame to kg of body weight and made an equivalent to rats and put it into their food in parts per million. I'm not sure why exact grams is helpful in the study. They tell you what it means in human terms by giving the mg/kg then HOW they transferred it to the rats. Thus methods


Edit: Point being, I think it is dangerous and people should avoid it.

Eating 5,000mg/kg would be equivalent to 5g/kg. So I weigh about 62 kg. 62kg*5g = 309g. That 1/3 of a kilogram. Each packet contains 0.2g of the actual aspartame and 0.8g of filler.

SO who wants to eat 1,500 packets of aspartame a day?

You know what causes far more deaths than aspartame or any other artificial sweetener? DHMO. Dihydrogen monoxide has proven toxic limits, but no one seems to pay any attention to it even though it is found in most foods. It's widely used on crops as well.