Is aspartame dangerous?

For the past few months I have been using artificial sweetener in my coffee. I have noticed an uncontrolable urge to eat sweets, I have gained weight and dont feel well. Im going to stop using it and use natural raw sugar instead and see what happens. We should also note that many foods have aspartame (artificial sweeteners) in them and we dont know it. Even if it has real sugar it might contain the artificial ones too. So be careful and read the labels well!!!

FYI sugar free gum has a major amount of it in it. I have often wondered after I pop a piece of gum in my mouth, I need to have another one and then another one, before you know it half the pack is gone

Originally posted by crw2006
We should also note that many foods have aspartame (artificial sweeteners) in them and we dont know it. Even if it has real sugar it might contain the artificial ones too. So be careful and read the labels well!!!

It may not say "aspartame" on the label. It is also marketed as "phenylalanine". Keep an eye out for that.

reply to post by silo13


Go to www.pubmed.gov. This is the online archives for the US National Library of Medicine, it has access to almost all of the abstacts from every medical journal every printed.

Enter "aspartame safety in humans" into the search area. You'll find a lot of scientific research that can answer your question.

I found this article especially to be quite interesting:

"Adverse reactions to aspartame: double-blind challenge in patients from a vulnerable population" by Walton et al.
Butchko HH.
Biol Psychiatry. 1994 Aug 1;36(3):206-8. No abstract available.
PMID: 7948460 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Articles

Adverse reactions to aspartame: double-blind challenge in patients from a vulnerable population.
Walton RG, Hudak R, Green-Waite RJ.
Biol Psychiatry. 1993 Jul 1-15;34(1-2):13-7.
PMID: 8373935 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]


[edit on 26-9-2009 by nikiano]

I can attest to the dangers of aspartame. My 73 year old sister has full blown diabetes. For about 35 years she used MSG (Accent) on almost everything she ate. She also consumed at least one can of Diet Pepsi with every meal. She constantly had a "Craving" for sweets. Needless to say she gained about 80 extra pounds over those 35 years. Besides the diabetes she developed vertigo, lost vision in one eye, had to have ALL her teeth removed, had major bouts of depression with thoughts of suicide, acute irritability, digestive disorders, chronic fatigue, able to sleep 14-16 hours a day. There is more, but just can't think of them right now. I have moved in with her and changed her diet completely. Many of the "symptoms" have disappeared but she is still on many of the prescription drugs her gods (Doctors) are giving her for these symptoms.
My conclusion - If it's a "manufactured" ingredient, it is most likely not good for you. Don't consume it!
Besides aspartame and MSG, fluoride (another Rat Poison) and High fructose Corn Syrup should not be consumed. In Israel they use fluoride as rat poison. The first ingredient added to HFCS to soften the hard dry kernels is Sulfuric Acid. (BATTERY ACID) YUK!
I just can't imagine why there are so many SICK people in this country. RIIIGHT! Can't have all those doctors and hospitals running out of patients now can we?


[edit on 26-9-2009 by Muundoggie]

To sweeten teas, coffees, cereal, whatever use a product called

Stevita, its a natural sweetner I bought from the Organic store in my

neighborhood. Im diabetic and use it often, do the research on it,

www.stevitastevia.com

or google it.

*its also calorie free, and not poison!

Asp is forbidden to US military aircrews in cockpit and 8 hours before flight:

Both the Air Force's magazine, Flying Safety, and the Navy's magazine, Navy Physiology, published articles warning about the many dangers of aspartame including the cumulative delirious effects of methanol and the greater likelihood of birth defects. The articles note that the ingestion of aspartame can make pilots more susceptible to seizures and vertigo. Twenty articles sounding warnings about ingesting aspartame while flying have also appeared in the National Business Aircraft Association Digest (NBAA Digest 1993), Aviation Medical Bulletin (1988), The Aviation Consumer (1988), Canadian General Aviation News (1990), Pacific Flyer (1988), General Aviation News (1989), Aviation Safety Digest (1989), and Plane & Pilot (1990) and a paper warning about aspartame was presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Aerospace Medical Association (Gaffney 1986).

Stevia, if pure natural extract, works great and no dumb-down.

[edit on 26-9-2009 by Chakotay]

I won't touch the stuff with a ten foot pole. real sugar for me. The problem is it is hidden every where! Unless you read EVERY label carefully you never know.

Yes it has caused brain damage and im surprised its freely sold and not banned it is a DRUG.

Google Video Link

Aspartame a poisoned world.


If you are dieting good sugar substitutes would be agave syrup, fruit, honey, maple syrup, organic apple concentrate etc You will find you get used to the taste and your sweet tooth lessens. White sugar is not any better it is bleached and stripped of any nutrients.

It has hit critical point many people are finding out that the food they are eating is not real food and is void of any nutrition or added synthetic vitamins. They grow in their hearts a desire to eat more real food and grow their own. If food companies continue to do what they are doing it wont be long till people find out that the many diseases they are dying from is from processed food. I look at a supermarket with distaste as it treats me as non human a person who only needs chemicals for fuel and food companies as aliens. Im a real human being damn it and i need real food not chemical franken foods with GM, msg, aspartame artificial colours and flavours, trans fats, pesticides, herbicides and any scientific chemical ending in ate, ime,ame , insect parts, and a myriad of other disease promoting chemicals. My body is an organism and i will eat what natures organism grows for me thanks.



[edit on 26-9-2009 by Applesandoranges]

All agreed it is bad. of course this may be considered off topic but I will say I will say it anyway. There are so many things we eat on a daily basis that are really bad for us, I mean deadly bad but our beloved government FDA says nothing about it. Hell, those cancer sticks so many people are hooked on have so many chemicals in them it is comical. I have recently figured out that sodium nitrate( the crap they put in lunch meats, beef sticks, bacon, all processed meats is linked to cancer and other illnesses) was giving me a bad aching feeling in my kidneys every morning( and no it wasn't cause I had to piss.) so I did some testing with this to confirm it, cycling on and off with it. and on the off weeks I had no back pain, and with the weeks I ate foods with sodium nitrates in them I experienced the pain in my kidney area. that was enough for me. The point here is it pays to be a label reader, if you don't know what it is, do the research. Here is another one, Sodium Benzoate.. in most sodas and baking goods..Clinical studies say it damages DNA structures. Well how about that... lets drink more soda and get dumbed down...Great question to the OP and great infos in return. good luck in kickin the sweetner habit.

It's horrible stuff and if I do have it (never intentionally), I know because it make me very irritable. Something else I steer clear of is MSG. It has landed me in the hospital twice.

Lil DrummerBoy: You just reminded me about baking powder. It is sodium aluminum sulfate. Wow, almost all baked goods from the stores use this. Let's eat more aluminum so we can all get Alzheimer's.
And did you know that American cheese and other soft cheeses are hardened using ALUM? That's aluminum powder. More Alzheimer's.
Just think about how much "cheese food" is consumed on PIZZA and our favorite Cheeseburgers.

Former president Reagan's favorite treat was jelly beans. Those are hardened with ALUM too. We know he had Alzheimer's.
Ok, I may be wrong about the jelly beans but I have read that they had Alum in the past. However the ingredients they do have now still does raise my eyebrows. Here's what they have now and I find these ingredients not much better.
Reading from a Jelly Bean box: Sugar, glucose syrup, modified food starches, water, citric acid (E330), fumaric acid (E297), glazing agents: Shellac, bee's wax, carnauba wax, flavourings, acidity regulator: Sodium citrate (E331), colours.


[edit on 26-9-2009 by Muundoggie]


[edit on 26-9-2009 by Muundoggie]

reply to post by Muundoggie

Yeah it is a bad place we live in, gots to be on the ball all the time.

Originally posted by silo13
Please don't take this wrong, but, it seems you haven't looked very hard.

Yeah seriously, all you have to do is type the word 'aspartame' in Google and the entire first page is filled with stuff about its toxicity.

That stuff is in diet soda isn't it?
No wonder I've had problem with depression and other things. That's the only type of soda my parents would by ever since I was a kid! Argh, I'm just gonna drink water for now on, even though it has fluoride in it. *Sigh* It seems almost anything is contaminated or can kill you these days.

If to make thing worse,

Sewage treatment plants fail to remove artificial sweeteners completely from waste water. What’s more, these pollutants contaminate waters downstream and may still be present in our drinking water. Thanks to their new robust analytical method, which simultaneously extracts and analyses seven commonly used artificial sweeteners, Marco Scheurer, Heinz-Jürgen Brauch and Frank Thomas Lange from the Water Technology Center in Karlsruhe, Germany, were able to demonstrate the presence of several artificial sweeteners in waste water.
www.springer-sbm.com...

So next time you gulp some water from the tap, it may contain some artificial sweetener that has made it way through somebody's alimentary tract. How about that for a thought!!

On a lighter note, try substituting Xylitol as a sweetener. It seems to have more plusses then negatives.

Dietary use worldwide

Xylitol is widely used in Finland, its “home country.” Many Finnish confectioneries employ xylitol, or have a xylitol version available. Virtually all chewing gum sold in Finland is sweetened with xylitol.[7]

Medical applications

Dental care

Xylitol is a “tooth friendly” non-fermentable sugar alcohol.[8][9] A systematic review study[10] on the efficacy of xylitol has indicated dental heath benefits in caries prevention, showing superior performance to other polyols (poly-alcohols). Early studies from Finland in the 1970s found that a group chewing sucrose gum had 2.92 decayed, missing, or filled (dmf) teeth compared to 1.04 in the group chewing xylitol gums.[11] In another study, researchers had mothers chew xylitol gum 3 months after delivery until their children were 2 years old. The researchers found that children in the xylitol group had “a 70% reduction in cavities (dmf).”[11] Recent research[12] confirms a plaque-reducing effect and suggests that the compound, having some chemical properties similar to sucrose, attracts and then “starves” harmful micro-organisms, allowing the mouth to remineralise damaged teeth with less interruption. (However, this same effect also interferes with yeast micro-organisms and others, so xylitol is inappropriate for making yeast-based bread, for instance.)

Xylitol-based products are allowed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make the medical claim that they do not promote dental cavities.[13]

A recent study demonstrated that as a water additive for animals, xylitol was effective in reducing plaque and calculus accumulation in cats.[14]

Diabetes

Possessing approximately 40% less food energy,[15] xylitol is a low-calorie alternative to table sugar. Absorbed more slowly than sugar, it does not contribute to high blood sugar levels or the resulting hyperglycemia caused by insufficient insulin response.

Osteoporosis

Xylitol also has potential as a treatment for osteoporosis. A group of Finnish researchers has found that dietary xylitol prevents weakening of bones in laboratory rats, and actually improves bone density.[16][17]

Ear and upper respiratory infections

Studies have shown that xylitol chewing gum can help prevent ear infections[18] (acute otitis media); the act of chewing and swallowing assists with the disposal of earwax and clearing the middle ear, whilst the presence of xylitol prevents the growth of bacteria in the eustachian tubes (auditory tubes or pharyngotympanic tubes) which connect the nose and ear.[19] When bacteria enter the body they hold on to the tissues by hanging on to a variety of sugar complexes. The open nature of xylitol and its ability to form many different sugar-like structures appears to interfere with the ability of many bacteria to adhere.[20] In a double-blind randomized controlled trial, saline solutions of xylitol significantly reduced the number of nasal coagulase-negative Staphylococcus bacteria. The researchers attributed the benefits to the increased effectiveness of endogenous (naturally present in the body) antimicrobial factors.[21]

Infection

In rats, xylitol has been found to increase the activity of neutrophils, the white blood cells involved in fighting many bacteria. This effect seems to be quite broad, acting even in cases such as general sepsis. [22]

Candida yeast

A recent report suggests that consumption of xylitol may help control oral infections of Candida yeast; in contrast, galactose, glucose, and sucrose may increase proliferation.[23]

Benefits for pregnant or nursing women

Xylitol is not only safe for pregnant and nursing women, but studies show that regular use significantly reduces the probability of transmitting the Streptococcus mutans bacteria, which is responsible for tooth decay, from mother to child during the first two years of life by as much as 80%.[24]

Safety

Xylitol has no known toxicity in humans, and people have consumed as much as 400 grams daily for long periods with no apparent ill effects.[25] Like most sugar alcohols, it has a laxative effect because sugar alcohols are not fully broken down during digestion; albeit ten times weaker than sorbitol. The effect depends upon the individual. In one study of 13 children, 4 experienced diarrhea when consuming over 65 grams per day.[26] Studies have reported that adaptation occurs after several weeks of consumption.[26]

Dogs that have ingested foods containing high levels of xylitol (greater than 100 milligram of xylitol consumed per kilogram of bodyweight) have presented with low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) which can be life-threatening.[27] Low blood sugar can result in a loss of coordination, depression, collapse and seizures in as soon as 30 minutes.[28][29] Intake of very high doses of xylitol (greater than 500 - 1000 mg/kg bwt) has also been implicated in liver failure in dogs, which can be fatal.[30] These are points of controversy, however, as earlier World Health Organization studies using much higher doses on dogs for long periods showed no ill effect. [31]

en.wikipedia.org...

It all sounds just too good to be true.

This is so odd. I actually just started getting into coffee in the last couple of weeks. I checked out the FDA website...i know, i know. But it said nothing is linking it to cancer, couldn't find a thing online.

So instead of dumping all that sugar into my coffee, rotting my teeth, gaining weight, I went out and bought a couple boxes of Sweet n' Low. Time will tell I guess.....

Ok, Ok, after actually reading the post of side effects. I have to post again.

Since using the artificial sweetener in my coffee over the last 2 weeks. Keep in mind I just started using this stuff 2 weeks ago.


I have had the following symptoms.

- Sore throat.
- Drowsy
-Pain in the face/jaw
- Not thinking clearly/moody/irritable
- Headache
- Restless legs at night
-Shortness of breath/ trouble breathing

I honestly thought I had just caught a cold or was coming down with something or my allergies were bad. I think I'm going to stick to real sugar.

reply to post by suicide__x


My doctor told me years ago to stay away from aspartame. He said that it contains phenylalanine which feed cancers, and can cause all kinds of health problems. Cancer cannot survive without it either. We already eat foods in which it naturally occurs, but, to process it and add more to you diet is dangerous and unhealthy. Here is a little more about aspartame:

Aspartic acid makes up forty percent of the structure of aspartame. Under excess conditions, the structure of aspartic acid can cause endocrine (hormone) disorders and vision problems. Aspartic acid is a neuroexicter, which means its structure affects the central nervous system. Hyperactivity is stimulated by aspartic acid, so this structure is not good for ADD/ADHD conditions and should be avoided during pregnancy.

Adverse reactions to aspartic acid are: headaches/migraines, nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue, sleep disorders, vision problems, anxiety attacks, depression, and asthma/chest tightness. The second isolated amino acid in aspartame's chemical structure is phenylalanine, fifty percent of aspartame's 3-D structure. Too much phenylalanine causes seizures, elevated blood plasma, is dangerous for pregnancy causing retardation, PMS caused by phenylalanine's blockage of serotonin, insomnia, and severe mood swings

reply to post by intelinside451


Don't read or believe a word of what you read on a FDA website.

The F stands for Federal that should be enough to convince you of how much truth is there.

A number of European countries are trying to ban aspartame.

Put some out for the ants,it will kill them.


[edit on 27-9-2009 by calcoastseeker]