I read this thought with interest. I've seen the same info repackaged as spam several times over the last six years. The links never seem to be available and all of the references to people and places don't match up.
However, I know that at least for a few select individuals Aspartame is bad. In college, which was twelve years ago, I tried to improve my health. I started eating better, avoiding the junk food normally associated with college life, drinking less alchohol, and working out with weight training and running. Everything was improving at a pretty good pace. I then decided to drop one more vice - soft drinks. Too many calories I figured. I started drinking Diet Mountain Dews because that was the only one I could find that didn't taste horrible to me. A few weeks into the change I started getting headaches. Bad headaches. Then I would have periods of blurred vision. I figured it was just too much reading, too little sleep, etc. Eventually I passed out in Assembly Language class one morning.
At some point I got better. Then I got worse. I saw a doctor who had no idea what was going on, but he suggested it might be an alergy and to start logging my eating habits. Eventually a pattern emerged. When I wasn't drinking diet soft drinks (replacing it with water or regular colas) I improved. When I went back to the diet drinks I got sick. I now completely avoid aspartame. On the rare occasion that my symptoms return, I can usually trace it back to an accidental ingestion of the sweetner.
On an interesting side note, my sister suffers from the same "allergy." We were talking one day and she mentioned that she had found that she was allergic to aspartame. This was discovered without knowing I had the same problem.
Bottom line. It may not be a killer for everyone, but there are those of us for whom it is not an urban legend.
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Originally Posted by decius
I figure if any of us actually knew what most of the ingredients in our food were, we'd never eat anything again. I looked at my Wrigley's Extra gum and see that it's sweetened with "Phenylketonurics," which contains "phenylalanine."
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Actually, phenylketonurics are persons with Phenylketonuria which is a rare, metabolic disease in which an enzyme (phenylalinine hydroxylase) which converts phenylalanine (an amino acid) into tyrosine (another amino acid) is missing from their system. Buildup of phenylalanine is toxic to the central nervous system. Diet drinks (and other products with aspartame) have a warning that they do contain phenylalinine. See
http://205.178.182.34/about/intro.htm for more info.
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Bwana Jim
How long before other readers remember their chemistry?
Re: step away from the keyboard...
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