Why Aspartame Isn't Scary
Replies
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »When I have lots of aspartame, I have the symptoms of a mini stroke. When I was in college and started weight watchers and I switched to drinking several diet sodas instead of my regular. That day, I lost the ability to write what I wanted to write, talk how I wanted to talk, and I could barely stand or stay awake. I don't know why I didn't take those symptoms seriously at that time, but in retrospect, it really sounds like a mini stroke. Another time I unknowingly had a lot of aspartame. I instantly had to go to bed, even though it was the middle of the day. I had a dream and sort of woke up, but my dream was frozen in my brain and I was paralyzed and couldn't move. If I accidentally have a small amount of aspartame, I mentally get a little fuzzy and very tired. You won't be able to convince me that aspartame is a good thing.
Probably be a good idea to get this checked out.
As mentioned, just eating some chicken has way more phenyl provided - so unless you've avoided meats, the issue isn't the PKU aspect of it.
It could be something else in the diet soda that could be found in other things you are unaware of yet. And may not like the surprise then.
Did you perhaps drink more of the diet than the regular, because it was 0 calories?
Of course, finding a Dr that doesn't just jump on the bandwagon of "sugar substitutes are bad for you" could make it harder to search it out.3 -
Probably be a good idea to get this checked out.
As mentioned, just eating some chicken has way more phenyl provided - so unless you've avoided meats, the issue isn't the PKU aspect of it.
It could be something else in the diet soda that could be found in other things you are unaware of yet. And may not like the surprise then.
Did you perhaps drink more of the diet than the regular, because it was 0 calories?
Of course, finding a Dr that doesn't just jump on the bandwagon of "sugar substitutes are bad for you" could make it harder to search it out.
I always drank lots of soda in college. I drank about six/day, so I thought I could just switch to diet. The second instance involved my friend daring me to try one of her coffee sugar pills to see what it tasted like. After my dream freeze episode, I checked the ingredients and literally the only ingredient to the coffee sweetener pill was aspartame. Lots of my genetic relatives react to aspartame. My birth mother gets headaches. When my son was a baby, he had an antibiotic sweetened with aspartame and he had episodes where he'd lose muscle tone in his neck and his head would drop. I had videos of it and his doctor switched the medicine and it stopped. My birth father had narcolepsy. I don't think that was the diet soda, but I noticed some of the things that happened with aspartame were related to narcolepsy like my son's cataplexy and my waking paralysis and excessive daytime sleepiness. I can't help but wonder if there's a connection. That's just a random theory of someone without any medical training, though. I did have an MRI a few years ago and they did find two spots on my brain that could've been mini strokes. There's nothing to really do about it, since I don't have any reason to want to be able to have aspartame. I know many people drink it with no symptoms, and that's great for people who need sugar free substitutes. My dad drinks several diet sodas a day with apparently no problems. But saying that it's completely safe doesn't sit well with me.
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I don't believe that anyone has said that aspartame is completely safe, just that it has been deemed to be safe and is not the boogeyman that so many people claim it to be.
And it is a well established fact that some people, such as yourself, have adverse reactions to aspartame, just like some people have adverse reactions to peanuts, gluten and a whole range of other things. That does not make the peanuts or gluten or 'insert item here' bad - it just makes those items bad for that subset of the population.
The point of the thread was to try and diffuse the notion that aspartame is the devil incarnate for the entire population of the planet and it should be banned from ever being used again in any product that might be consumed by humans.
There is nothing on this planet that can be deemed to be completely safe, not even things that everyone would consider 'safe' such as water and oxygen...7 -
I don't believe that anyone has said that aspartame is completely safe, just that it has been deemed to be safe and is not the boogeyman that so many people claim it to be.
And it is a well established fact that some people, such as yourself, have adverse reactions to aspartame, just like some people have adverse reactions to peanuts, gluten and a whole range of other things. That does not make the peanuts or gluten or 'insert item here' bad - it just makes those items bad for that subset of the population.
The point of the thread was to try and diffuse the notion that aspartame is the devil incarnate for the entire population of the planet and it should be banned from ever being used again in any product that might be consumed by humans.
There is nothing on this planet that can be deemed to be completely safe, not even things that everyone would consider 'safe' such as water and oxygen...
Indeed. This is why the concept of context and dosage are so important. Well said, by the way.5 -
Exactly. Like many things it's safe for most. Nothing is safe for all. Anyone can be allergic or intolerant to anything. Take gluten for example. It's well documented that some are either intolerant, allergic, or have celiac disease. Which makes their body attack itself when in the presence of gluten. Yet I have never told anyone I eat pasta and bread in some form almost daily and been told "Ya know that stuff will kill you right? My aunt's uncle's mom DIED from eating bread!" It's usually "Yeah I can't have bread because I'm celiac/ gluten makes me sick". Yet with aspartame, even though it has been tested and tested over and over and proven as safe for the majority of people, many seem to be on a crusade to save lives from the "dangers" of aspartame. Instead of just saying "Oh you drink diet? I cant have that stuff. It makes me sick." Although I do realize GF seems to be more popular and trendy then ever before, I do not see the same fear mongering that I see for aspartame.3
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »
Probably be a good idea to get this checked out.
As mentioned, just eating some chicken has way more phenyl provided - so unless you've avoided meats, the issue isn't the PKU aspect of it.
It could be something else in the diet soda that could be found in other things you are unaware of yet. And may not like the surprise then.
Did you perhaps drink more of the diet than the regular, because it was 0 calories?
Of course, finding a Dr that doesn't just jump on the bandwagon of "sugar substitutes are bad for you" could make it harder to search it out.
I always drank lots of soda in college. I drank about six/day, so I thought I could just switch to diet. The second instance involved my friend daring me to try one of her coffee sugar pills to see what it tasted like. After my dream freeze episode, I checked the ingredients and literally the only ingredient to the coffee sweetener pill was aspartame. Lots of my genetic relatives react to aspartame. My birth mother gets headaches. When my son was a baby, he had an antibiotic sweetened with aspartame and he had episodes where he'd lose muscle tone in his neck and his head would drop. I had videos of it and his doctor switched the medicine and it stopped. My birth father had narcolepsy. I don't think that was the diet soda, but I noticed some of the things that happened with aspartame were related to narcolepsy like my son's cataplexy and my waking paralysis and excessive daytime sleepiness. I can't help but wonder if there's a connection. That's just a random theory of someone without any medical training, though. I did have an MRI a few years ago and they did find two spots on my brain that could've been mini strokes. There's nothing to really do about it, since I don't have any reason to want to be able to have aspartame. I know many people drink it with no symptoms, and that's great for people who need sugar free substitutes. My dad drinks several diet sodas a day with apparently no problems. But saying that it's completely safe doesn't sit well with me.
Honestly, knowing how Aspartame gets digested thanks to Aaron, I can't think of any way Aspartame would be biologically able to do any of that to you which things like a cup of orange juice wouldn't do hundreds of times stronger.10 -
stevencloser wrote: »
Honestly, knowing how Aspartame gets digested thanks to Aaron, I can't think of any way Aspartame would be biologically able to do any of that to you which things like a cup of orange juice wouldn't do hundreds of times stronger.
And yet, it did.
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »
Honestly, knowing how Aspartame gets digested thanks to Aaron, I can't think of any way Aspartame would be biologically able to do any of that to you which things like a cup of orange juice wouldn't do hundreds of times stronger.
And yet, it did.
OR.... perhaps this was nothing but a coincidence, or at best, correlation.9 -
ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »When I have lots of aspartame, I have the symptoms of a mini stroke. When I was in college and started weight watchers and I switched to drinking several diet sodas instead of my regular. That day, I lost the ability to write what I wanted to write, talk how I wanted to talk, and I could barely stand or stay awake. I don't know why I didn't take those symptoms seriously at that time, but in retrospect, it really sounds like a mini stroke. Another time I unknowingly had a lot of aspartame. I instantly had to go to bed, even though it was the middle of the day. I had a dream and sort of woke up, but my dream was frozen in my brain and I was paralyzed and couldn't move. If I accidentally have a small amount of aspartame, I mentally get a little fuzzy and very tired. You won't be able to convince me that aspartame is a good thing.
I have no interest in convincing you personally that aspartame is a good thing notr have I ever actually claimed at all that aspartame is a "good thing" for anyone. Aspartame is just a thing that seems to have become a popular scapegoat for whatever ails you. A fear reinforced by the armchair diagnosers and health blogger gurus of the internet but not actually backed up by any studies or plausible mechanistic explanations of why aspartate phenylalanine and methanol in those concentrations would be harmful coming from a soda but not from a bite of chicken and a sip of apple juice.
Fact is no actual scientific trial or test as shown any causal negative affect with aspartame and the metabolic breakdown products are relatively harmless or found in much greater concentrations and amounts in other common foods.
It isn't that I feel the need to convince everyone...if anything I just hope some come away realizing that ones own personal anecdote is not really a reason to claim something is somehow inherently dangerous or harmful not is it a good reason for the general public to fear something.10 -
ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »
Probably be a good idea to get this checked out.
As mentioned, just eating some chicken has way more phenyl provided - so unless you've avoided meats, the issue isn't the PKU aspect of it.
It could be something else in the diet soda that could be found in other things you are unaware of yet. And may not like the surprise then.
Did you perhaps drink more of the diet than the regular, because it was 0 calories?
Of course, finding a Dr that doesn't just jump on the bandwagon of "sugar substitutes are bad for you" could make it harder to search it out.
I always drank lots of soda in college. I drank about six/day, so I thought I could just switch to diet. The second instance involved my friend daring me to try one of her coffee sugar pills to see what it tasted like. After my dream freeze episode, I checked the ingredients and literally the only ingredient to the coffee sweetener pill was aspartame. Lots of my genetic relatives react to aspartame. My birth mother gets headaches. When my son was a baby, he had an antibiotic sweetened with aspartame and he had episodes where he'd lose muscle tone in his neck and his head would drop. I had videos of it and his doctor switched the medicine and it stopped. My birth father had narcolepsy. I don't think that was the diet soda, but I noticed some of the things that happened with aspartame were related to narcolepsy like my son's cataplexy and my waking paralysis and excessive daytime sleepiness. I can't help but wonder if there's a connection. That's just a random theory of someone without any medical training, though. I did have an MRI a few years ago and they did find two spots on my brain that could've been mini strokes. There's nothing to really do about it, since I don't have any reason to want to be able to have aspartame. I know many people drink it with no symptoms, and that's great for people who need sugar free substitutes. My dad drinks several diet sodas a day with apparently no problems. But saying that it's completely safe doesn't sit well with me.
Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?3 -
Until I have a mechanistic explanation for why aspartame would cause symptoms such as a stroke but eating protein and drinking juice would not cause those symptoms then I will remain extremely skeptical of those claims. Not the claim that it happened but rather the attribution of cause to aspartame which I thin not coincidentally just happens to be a popular chemical boogieman of the times.7
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »
Honestly, knowing how Aspartame gets digested thanks to Aaron, I can't think of any way Aspartame would be biologically able to do any of that to you which things like a cup of orange juice wouldn't do hundreds of times stronger.
And yet, it did.
You had an adverse effect and you decided that aspartame was the cause. You have no idea why it would cause those symptoms, no medical training as you stated and no actual evidence of causation. Any scientific attempt to link aspartame to negative effects in humans in controlled trials has shown zero effect and its byproducts are found in higher concentrations in a wide variety of common foods. Yet you feel enabled to announce publicly that aspartame poses a threat.
Honestly...there isnt evidence that it does, it doesn't make sense mechanistically that it would and you personally deciding it does because...well...you decided that it does is not very convincing. But yeah of course avoid aspartame if you want to...no reason not to. Maybe lay off making causal claims of harm in public though if there isnt any actual evidence of cause since it sort of adds to this whole fear thing.13 -
I've not read all the posts, but what I have will not put me off using the stuff, the only time I pull out my rather old packet of sugar these days is when I make a curry and use it to offset my tomato allergy.
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For those claiming a severe acute effect from ingesting aspartame here is a simple experiment to try.
If aspartame is the cause then if you add aspartame to water and drink the water you should get the negative effect. If you have 10 bottles of water and only one contains aspartame and you drink one bottle a day you should be able to identify which has the aspartame by the reaction you get.
But...I hear you saying...you'll be able to tell anyways because the aspartame water will be sweet and the others won't. Well...aspartame is a methylester and methylesters tend to be heat labile so if you simply boil the water for an hour or so beforehand before you add it to one of your 10 bottles it should lose its sweetness and be indistinguishable by taste but yet still contain the molecules youd get if you injested it before you boiled it.
So yeah. Add aspartame to water. Have a friend taste it to get a level where they can just taste sweetness and then boil it for a few hours then bring it up to the original volume by replacing any evaporated water. Have them taste it again to confirm it no longer has any sweetness...if it still does boil it longer. Without you around have your friend add it to a bottle then fill 9 other of the same bottle type with regular water. Have them number the bottles so they know which number has the aspartame but you dont.
Now drink one bottle a day and if you suddenly develop your symptoms you'll know that was the bottle that contained aspartame and you can confirm with your friend by stating which number it was. If you are concerned symptoms might take more than 24 hours to develop then drink one bottle a week instead.
Doubt anyone will actually do this though because those who believe it is aspartame already know it is and would view this as a waste of time probably.9 -
I have epilepsy and my neurologist (one of the best in the country!) has told me two things to stay away from caffeine & aspartame. I have noticed when I have to much aspartame it triggers my seizures.5
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I have epilepsy and my neurologist (one of the best in the country!) has told me two things to stay away from caffeine & aspartame. I have noticed when I have to much aspartame it triggers my seizures.
Did your neurologist tell you to go on the internet and tell other people to avoid aspartame and make sure to tell everyone what they think? Do you go on websites that sell coffee and warn everyone in the comments sections there about the dangers of caffeine since your neurologist suggested you avoid that as well?
Lots of people, including doctors, tend to take a "better safe than sorry" approach to things that we don't need to injest, and we certainly don't need to injest caffeine or aspartame. But don't think them suggesting you avoid those things is equivalent to them stating that it is their medical opinion that they are dangerous.
As for a connection between injesting aspartame and seizures I find that extremely difficult to believe given that no aspartame enters your bloodstream after injestion and therefore none would ever make it to your brain. Caffeine on the other hand does enter your blood and can cross the blood brain barrier so that one is at least plausible.
I've said this before but I think it is worth saying again as it keeps coming up in this thread.
No aspartame enters your circulatory system intact, this not only makes sense that it wouldn't from a chemistry perspective but it has been studied and shown that aspartame is not found in blood after ingesting it in a variety of ADME/DMPK studies and that it is rapidly metabolized into those three breakdown products as is summarized in chapter 5 of the book "Clinical Evaluation of a food additive: assesment of aspartame or in the published "Review of data on the food additive aspartame". I stated this in my original post and it has been brought up numerous times within this thread. The amount you get of the metabolic products from drinking a can of diet soda are functionally identical and equivalent to the amount you'd receive having a bite of chicken and a sip or two of orange juice.
Summary of the Review of data on the food additive aspartame section on metabolism shown on page 21:
"Following oral exposure, aspartame undergoes hydrolysis catalysed by esterases and dipeptidases leading to release of its individual components (Asp, Phe and methanol). This may occur either in the lumen of the GI tract or within intestinal mucosal cells; either way, it is the individual components which undergo absorption. Intact aspartame is not detected in the systemic circulation, and aspartame therefore has an effective oral bioavailability of zero."
The only potential issue with aspartame is that since one of its breakdown products is phenylalanine that could be an issue for people who suffer from phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare genetic disorder where you can't appropriately metabolize phenylalanine. That said it has been shown that normal levels of aspartame consumption are not enough to raise phenylalanine levels to clinically relevant levels even in people with PKU. Despite that companies have still opted to apply warning labels saying products with aspartame contain phenylalanine because of this condition.
Cites:
Clinical Evaluation of a food additive: assesment of aspartame. Chapter 5 for metabolism and radiolabeling studies in humans
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0849349737
Review of data on the food additive aspartame (359 page document): Page 18 for start of metabolism section. Page 21 has a summary.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/sp.efsa.2013.EN-399/pdf
DMPK study in mice and rats:
https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/138873
Phenylalanine in plasma from consumption of aspartame PKU study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1617863
It is hard to argue with a "better safe than sorry" attitude but honestly there is as much evidence supporting that one should be "better safe than sorry" with aspartame as there is with something like chicken and orange juice...there is no evidence that it causes any problems nor does it make sense that it would. Would I claim it is utterly impossible that there might be some sort of way it would cause an issue...no I wouldn't, but i wouldn't claim that for chicken or orange juice either...never a good idea to assert something that can never be proven. The issue is the constant barrage of people saying "well I don't know seems like it might be dangerous" in the public arena about things like aspartame have lead people to just assume it is dangerous despite it literally just being people like you just asserting that there "seems" like their "might" be a danger. That is basing decisions on fear of something one doesn't understand, that sort of approach does not make good policy.
Clinical studies have found the connection between seizures and aspartame to be anecdotal and not reproducible in actual blinded trials.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7614911
Perhaps next time you see your neurologist see if they actually consider aspartame to be dangerous and if they do ask them to explain specifically how aspartame causes seizures, would be really interested to hear that explanation.
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Any time anyone asks if it's safe to feed foods with peanuts to babies for the first time, they say it's probably fine, but to be very careful because there are some people who have dangerous reactions, so watch carefully for symptoms of a reaction until you know it's safe, especially if there's a family history of peanut allergies. Seems like the same thing I say about aspartame. It's fine for most people, but I have a strong reaction.Aaron_K123 wrote: »
Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?
I know I'm not going to convince any of you that aspartame causes my symptoms, but it was more than just those two times and I wasn't Google diagnosing myself. (I didn't have a computer then.) After the bad episode, my friend told me she thought it was the diet soda and I thought she was just being a hippy and I kept drinking it in moderation and every single time I got a brain fog and excessive sleepiness. When I stopped, it didn't happen anymore. Since then there have been times where I didn't realize I had aspartame and I felt mentally foggy and tired. I back tracked and found that it was in something I wasn't expecting.
Science isn't perfect. Just because you don't understand how it could cause that, doesn't mean it doesn't cause it. If it's such a small percentage of people who react like I do, it's possible they didn't make it into the testing groups.
I'm not trying to cause fear. I'm stating my experience with the topic. I'm not disagreeing about it being safe for most people.
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »
Any time anyone asks if it's safe to feed foods with peanuts to babies for the first time, they say it's probably fine, but to be very careful because there are some people who have dangerous reactions, so watch carefully for symptoms of a reaction until you know it's safe, especially if there's a family history of peanut allergies. Seems like the same thing I say about aspartame. It's fine for most people, but I have a strong reaction.Aaron_K123 wrote: »
Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?
I know I'm not going to convince any of you that aspartame causes my symptoms, but it was more than just those two times and I wasn't Google diagnosing myself. (I didn't have a computer then.) After the bad episode, my friend told me she thought it was the diet soda and I thought she was just being a hippy and I kept drinking it in moderation and every single time I got a brain fog and excessive sleepiness. When I stopped, it didn't happen anymore. Since then there have been times where I didn't realize I had aspartame and I felt mentally foggy and tired. I back tracked and found that it was in something I wasn't expecting.
Science isn't perfect. Just because you don't understand how it could cause that, doesn't mean it doesn't cause it. If it's such a small percentage of people who react like I do, it's possible they didn't make it into the testing groups.
I'm not trying to cause fear. I'm stating my experience with the topic. I'm not disagreeing about it being safe for most people.
What part of "it literally never enters your bloodstream" did you not understand?10 -
Also those studies were done on people who themselves claimed to have adverse reactions to it. None were observed during the studies.8
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »
Any time anyone asks if it's safe to feed foods with peanuts to babies for the first time, they say it's probably fine, but to be very careful because there are some people who have dangerous reactions, so watch carefully for symptoms of a reaction until you know it's safe, especially if there's a family history of peanut allergies. Seems like the same thing I say about aspartame. It's fine for most people, but I have a strong reaction.Aaron_K123 wrote: »
Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?
I know I'm not going to convince any of you that aspartame causes my symptoms, but it was more than just those two times and I wasn't Google diagnosing myself. (I didn't have a computer then.) After the bad episode, my friend told me she thought it was the diet soda and I thought she was just being a hippy and I kept drinking it in moderation and every single time I got a brain fog and excessive sleepiness. When I stopped, it didn't happen anymore. Since then there have been times where I didn't realize I had aspartame and I felt mentally foggy and tired. I back tracked and found that it was in something I wasn't expecting.
Science isn't perfect. Just because you don't understand how it could cause that, doesn't mean it doesn't cause it. If it's such a small percentage of people who react like I do, it's possible they didn't make it into the testing groups.
I'm not trying to cause fear. I'm stating my experience with the topic. I'm not disagreeing about it being safe for most people.
I think it’s amusing that you are arguing with a PhD biochemist who has studied this compound extensively that he just may not understand it... but your anecdotal testimonial about mental fogginess - which incidentally I often experience but I just attribute to being a busy adult who doesn’t get enough sleep - should trump the actual documented science of how this substance behaves in the body.21 -
I do wonder what's actually going on when someone claims they are allergic or intolerant to aspartame. If the same compounds that are present in aspartame are present in meat and fruit juice (and in higher concentrations), why no one reports feeling bad then they consume those things? Is there an additive that is commonly added when aspartame is present that leads people to believe it's the aspartame, and not something else (a preservative maybe??) Or is it psychosomatic? A sort of negative placebo effect? I suppose the water idea would be the only way to tell. I have a friend that claims to be allergic, it makes his lips tingly and mouth numb if he ingests it. Either in a drink, or gum, or anything else. He has ingested things before, gets the reaction, looks at the ingredients and sees aspartame. Yet I've seen him put away chicken, and fruit, and other things that contain those same compounds, no allergic reaction. It's strange.6
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Crafty_camper123 wrote: »He has ingested things before, gets the reaction, looks at the ingredients and sees aspartame.
This has happened to me many times. Maybe in some people it is psychosomatic, but if we didn't know we consumed it until after we get symptoms, that isn't the case.
My fogginess isn't the same as just being tired. It comes on very suddenly and has a very different feeling from being too tired to focus.
As for the other people in this thread, I'm not going to pretend I understand the biochemistry going on. I'm not going to try to Google things to prove my point because I know the internet is full of things that aren't true. Obviously I can't Google my way to be on the same level as you in terms of understanding biochemistry, bou can't convince me that I'm imagining the direct correlation between aspartame and my symptoms. I've experienced it way too many times for it to be a coincidence.
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »Crafty_camper123 wrote: »He has ingested things before, gets the reaction, looks at the ingredients and sees aspartame.
This has happened to me many times. Maybe in some people it is psychosomatic, but if we didn't know we consumed it until after we get symptoms, that isn't the case.
My fogginess isn't the same as just being tired. It comes on very suddenly and has a very different feeling from being too tired to focus.
As for the other people in this thread, I'm not going to pretend I understand the biochemistry going on. I'm not going to try to Google things to prove my point because I know the internet is full of things that aren't true. Obviously I can't Google my way to be on the same level as you in terms of understanding biochemistry, bou can't convince me that I'm imagining the direct correlation between aspartame and my symptoms. I've experienced it way too many times for it to be a coincidence.
It would be interesting to try the water thing though. You would then know if it's the aspartame or if it is a preservative/additive, etc. that is commonly found with aspartame containing products. I would love to see someone willing to do this mini-study and report back their findings. I'm genuinely curious.0 -
ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »
Any time anyone asks if it's safe to feed foods with peanuts to babies for the first time, they say it's probably fine, but to be very careful because there are some people who have dangerous reactions, so watch carefully for symptoms of a reaction until you know it's safe, especially if there's a family history of peanut allergies. Seems like the same thing I say about aspartame. It's fine for most people, but I have a strong reaction.Aaron_K123 wrote: »
Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?
I know I'm not going to convince any of you that aspartame causes my symptoms, but it was more than just those two times and I wasn't Google diagnosing myself. (I didn't have a computer then.) After the bad episode, my friend told me she thought it was the diet soda and I thought she was just being a hippy and I kept drinking it in moderation and every single time I got a brain fog and excessive sleepiness. When I stopped, it didn't happen anymore. Since then there have been times where I didn't realize I had aspartame and I felt mentally foggy and tired. I back tracked and found that it was in something I wasn't expecting.
Science isn't perfect. Just because you don't understand how it could cause that, doesn't mean it doesn't cause it. If it's such a small percentage of people who react like I do, it's possible they didn't make it into the testing groups.
I'm not trying to cause fear. I'm stating my experience with the topic. I'm not disagreeing about it being safe for most people.
You avoided a substance because you heard an anecdote. You are now turning around and also telling anecdotes. That creates a culture of fear about something without merit. That isn't a good thing. You having symptoms, deciding to stop something, and then no longer having those symptoms doesn't establish causality....there are many many times more things that are coincidental than causal and if you go in believing X causes symptoms and then you stop X and your symptoms go away you are just priming yourself to believe X is the cause without any further thought, that isn't how we determine cause and for a good reason. If there isn't evidenced based reasons for stating that something is harmful then one shouldn't go around saying that is harmful.
The reason that so many people think aspartame is harmful is because there are so many friends going around talking about how harmful aspartame is. I think that justifies calling it causing fear but if you don't want to use that term then whatever term describes telling stories about something causing harm without evidence of cause or any sort of explanation as to how.
I don't believe you not because I doubt your sincerity, I don't believe you because I know enough to know that your claims don't make that much sense and are likely to not be true.
If you really cared to establish whether or not aspartame causes your symptoms you could legitimately test it blinded as I suggested. I understand if you decide that that isn't worth your time but I think at least if you decide it isn't worth your time to establish that it is a cause then the least you could do is not claim that it is.13 -
Here is the cycle and you see it all the time.
A story that substance A might be dangerous appears in a press somewhere and gains a lot of readership. Lets say then 1 million people then question if there given medical issue or symptom might actually be caused by A and they decide to stop using A because better safe than sorry. Of those 1 million people maybe 100,000 have their symptoms stop shortly after stopping A and they decide that their symptoms were therefore caused by A. From then on whenever a friend is complaining about that symptom they ask them if they use A and if they do they suggest that A is likely the cause. Those 50,000 people therefore end up telling millions of other people this. Those millions of other people then try stopping A and low and behold 100,000 of them find the symptoms stop and decide that it likely was A, after all their friend told them about it and when they stopped their symptoms did go away.
Meanwhile actual studies show no link between A and symptoms but that doesn't really get a lot of readership because scientific literature is dense and not that interesting and tends not to be told to you by friends over coffee. So what happens is the public starts to demand studies be done (even though studies have already been done) and as a result grants and funding go towards doing studies that have already been done instead of going towards other things. When those studies are published and find the same thing, no evidence of cause no one actually reads them so the cry for more studies just continues.
This will just continue and waste money. Only way to stop it is when someone tells these "harmless" anecdotes is to tell them straight up that it is harmful to do that unless you have actual evidence of cause other than an anecdote and to tell them straight up they really shouldn't be doing that. I'm not saying its necessarily effective, but what else can you do. Sick of money being wasted in science over chasing tails of the latest public outcry to fund studies on things that don't need to be studied simply because of this sort of anecdotal b.s.
I get that it is comforting to feel like you have found the cause of a medical symptom and therefore can avoid it, I do understand that. But it takes an extra step to them just spread that belief around and all I'm asking is maybe don't do that because lets be honest, its just a belief. Again I have no interest in convincing any individual that they should be injesting aspartame nor do I feel the need to convince any individual that they shouldn't personally believe it is dangerous. All I am saying is if you don't actually know what you are talking about medically or biochemically or mechanistically you probably shouldn't be going around in public talking about how it caused you harm because you are just guessing.
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WinoGelato wrote: »ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »
Any time anyone asks if it's safe to feed foods with peanuts to babies for the first time, they say it's probably fine, but to be very careful because there are some people who have dangerous reactions, so watch carefully for symptoms of a reaction until you know it's safe, especially if there's a family history of peanut allergies. Seems like the same thing I say about aspartame. It's fine for most people, but I have a strong reaction.Aaron_K123 wrote: »
Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?
I know I'm not going to convince any of you that aspartame causes my symptoms, but it was more than just those two times and I wasn't Google diagnosing myself. (I didn't have a computer then.) After the bad episode, my friend told me she thought it was the diet soda and I thought she was just being a hippy and I kept drinking it in moderation and every single time I got a brain fog and excessive sleepiness. When I stopped, it didn't happen anymore. Since then there have been times where I didn't realize I had aspartame and I felt mentally foggy and tired. I back tracked and found that it was in something I wasn't expecting.
Science isn't perfect. Just because you don't understand how it could cause that, doesn't mean it doesn't cause it. If it's such a small percentage of people who react like I do, it's possible they didn't make it into the testing groups.
I'm not trying to cause fear. I'm stating my experience with the topic. I'm not disagreeing about it being safe for most people.
I think it’s amusing that you are arguing with a PhD biochemist who has studied this compound extensively that he just may not understand it... but your anecdotal testimonial about mental fogginess - which incidentally I often experience but I just attribute to being a busy adult who doesn’t get enough sleep - should trump the actual documented science of how this substance behaves in the body.
Eh I wouldn't say I have "studied this compound extensively", my job isn't related to aspartame at all. I've probably spent like 50 hours on it tops and just reading the literature pertaining to the DMPK studies because it is one of those things that really grabbed public attention. Most of my understanding of it just comes from my training as a biochemist and the fact that it is a methylated dipeptide and what that means mechanistically. My main point is that it breaks down immediately upon injestion into products that are found in all protein sources and all fruits. So if it causes medical issues then you would expect so would injesting protein and fruit. If injesting protein and fruit doesn't cause those issues then I think it is reasonable to ask how one explains that discrepency especially if ones evidence of the cause of symptoms is just correlative in nature.8 -
Question with your water test. I thought you couldn't cook with aspartame because it doesn't withstand high heat. Wouldn't boiling it change it enough to possibly change the results?0
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ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »Crafty_camper123 wrote: »He has ingested things before, gets the reaction, looks at the ingredients and sees aspartame.
This has happened to me many times. Maybe in some people it is psychosomatic, but if we didn't know we consumed it until after we get symptoms, that isn't the case.
My fogginess isn't the same as just being tired. It comes on very suddenly and has a very different feeling from being too tired to focus.
As for the other people in this thread, I'm not going to pretend I understand the biochemistry going on. I'm not going to try to Google things to prove my point because I know the internet is full of things that aren't true. Obviously I can't Google my way to be on the same level as you in terms of understanding biochemistry, bou can't convince me that I'm imagining the direct correlation between aspartame and my symptoms. I've experienced it way too many times for it to be a coincidence.
You are experiencing a correlation, I wasn't denying that. You have to things that happened in relation to one another, their incidence was at the same time...they are co-incident. There are many more things that happen with coincidence than happen causally. For every 1 thing that causes something else there are hundreds of thousands of things that correlate and have no causal relationship. If you decide that something might be the cause of something and then go looking for it, chances are you will find it...and if that is your only evidence of cause that isn't evidence at all to be frank.
The way to test it would be to injest something that you have no way of knowing if it contains aspartame or not and then seeing if you get symptoms. Then later have a way of determining if that thing did have aspartame in it. In otherwords a blinded experiment.
The best version would be something that only had or did not have aspartame and had no other ingredients. For example you could add aspartame to plain water and then boil it to inactivate the sweetness so that it cannot be identified by taste. Put that water into a bottle and then also fill 9 other bottles with water that does not contain aspartame. You could then have a friend take the bottles and label them with numbers in such a way that only they know which number corresponds to the bottle with aspartame. Then you could take the bottles back and drink one of them a week. If you are correct that aspartame causes an acute reaction with identifiable symptoms then you should be able to reliably identify which of the 10 bottles contained aspartame despite them all tasting the same. You could then confirm whether or not you were correct by asking your friend if bottle number X was the one that had aspartame in it since they have the actual answer. You'd have a 10% chance of guessing correctly at random of course but if you could repeat it reliably it would be convincing.
Merely looking back to what you have injested searching for a particular ingredient you already suspect after you have had symptoms and then deciding that since you were able to find it that that was the cause of your symptoms is not convincing.
5 -
Diet pop gives me diarrhea. That's why I avoid it.2
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fromnebraska wrote: »Diet pop gives me diarrhea. That's why I avoid it.
All diet pop? I get that reaction when I overdo sorbitol (we will not talk about the time I chain-chewed a double pack of sugar free gum...), but not aspartame.1
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