Why Aspartame Isn't Scary

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.

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.

xionax wrote: »

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.

ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?

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.

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.

WinoGelato wrote: »

ImpreciseSeamstress wrote: »

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Would you object to someone saying peanuts are safe?

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.

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.

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.