My husband and I ingested aspertame loaded soda for years! One day we decided to take care of ourselves. This included dropping sodas. Within mere weeks, I noticed my mood was 10 times more pleasant. And, still, my husband swears by that change.
In addition, if I have a diet soda(with aspertame), it's guaranteed that I'll be cranky after a couple of ours.

Lately, I've been annoyed by the fact I can't buy 70% of what's on the gum rack - it's all loaded with aspertame. Sigh.

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FYI on the picture choice...

Sweet N Low is Saccharine
Equal is Aspartame.

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I'm not saying the product is good or bad, I'm just saying that if you're going to launch a tirade against a product, you should spell it right...
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aspartame

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I thought there was something odd about the spelling! No matter though, I usually spot aspArtame by its chemical name, anyway.

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when i was in college getting my degree in agriculture, a classmate who had graduated and gone to work for searle came back for a visit (Probably 1981), and told me not to ever eat or drink anything that had aspartame in it....that they couldnt finish a test on it because the lab animals kept dying.

so is splenda any different? it certainly tastes better...i heard somewhere that monsanto had some kind of agreement with coca cola's parent company to keep using aspartame.

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It's a shame that there isn't a better option for people for whom the dangers of aspartame is the lesser of two evils. I happen to be a type 1 diabetic; if I want soda it's got to be Diet. Ever had one of those Splenda Diet Cokes? I took one sip and almost poured out the drink and ate the glass instead.

I happen to work with a woman who loves to lecture me on the dangers of artificial sweeteners. I would love to show her what someone who has had multiple amputations and years of dialysis due to poorly controlled diabetes looks like.

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I would be a lot more likely to take you seriously if you offered links to ANY studies, or articles with references, to back up your position.

Here, I'll start:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/aspartame.asp

http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/antpoison.asp

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At least use an appropriate picture. Sweet-n-Low uses saccharine, not aspartame. http://www.sweetnlow.com/faqs.html#mainfaq01

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it is also species specific... rats do not find aspertame sweet. So that means it REALLY sucks for them to be force fed it weeks at a time.

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It might help you to spell things correctly if you want to know more about them. (And maybe you want to correct that category tag, too?)

Aspartame. It also goes by the commercial names Equal and NutraSweet. (Not the Sweet 'n Low shown in the stock photo there.)

It's not that hard to avoid. I'm a candy blogger and I've managed to keep it out of my body pretty easily (two small slip ups in three years). It give me headaches and makes me nauseous.

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This kind of post destroys any goodwill or credibility that Slashfood has generated.

The "biochemical warfare" saw is urban legend - please point to a credible primary source that substantiates this bogus claim.

Aspartame is made up of two amino acids found in abundance in the food supply at large. That's all. Nothing sinister about it.

E

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Upon ingestion, aspartame breaks down into several residual chemicals, including aspartic acid, phenylalanine, methanol, and further breakdown products including formaldehyde, formic acid, and a diketopiperazine.

just what you need floating around ya body formaldehyde.

I know from personal experience that once, I completely cut it out of my diet, moods, anxiety, dodgy tummy all went away

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Some people have adverse reactions to aspartame the same way some people are allergic to peanuts, or soy lecithin, or gluten. They just have to avoid it. I have never had any such reactions myself, but I avoid large quantities of Diet Coke et al anyway; I think caramel coloring is a lot grosser than artificial sweetener.

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I might take you more seriously if you spelled the subject you're demonizing correctly.

ASPARTAME.

On second thought... I can't take this drivel seriously either way.

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You what else has methanol and formaldehyde in it? Tomatoes. Fresh fruits. These are small organic molecules that are the byproduct of a variety of natural processes.

I'm not going to claim that aspartame is absolutely unequivocally harmless, but please, unless you can cite some real peer-reviewed data, don't contribute to the scary rumor-mongering.

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Uh, when you eat pretty much any animal or vegetable protein source, you get phenylalanine. It's one of those pesky essential amino acids, without which, life as a primate is impossible. Your brain runs, in part, with dopamine as a messenger, and phenylalanine is the precursor to tyrosine, which is the precursor for both dopamine and norepinephrine.

Yes, esters of amino acids have breakdown products. They have scary-sounding names. Some seem poisonous...say, methanol...

But if you look at *how much* methanol we're talking here, you'll find it's astonishingly low - there's less methanol produced from a diet coke than a glass of grape or tomato juice. The formic acid and formaldehyde come from the liver's metabolism of the methanol, so it's completely reasonable to presume that you'll get a higher level of these breakdown products from a source with more methanol, like a big glass of V8. I find a Diet Coke about a zillion times more refreshing than V8.

BLAME THE LIVER! It's also responsible for synthesis of aspartic acid from other precursors. Assuming your liver is functioning enough that you're not on the transplant list or deceased, you're making more aspartate than you could possibly consume from sugar-free products.

I'm not arguing the stuff is healthfood, but the science against aspartame is very, very weak. If the stuff were hideously toxic to humans, primates fed it would die sooner than primates not fed it, and repeated feeding trials at doses 1000X the human exposure have failed to reveal this trend.

Avoiding exposure to the amino acids that make up aspartame is folly, because they're in everything you eat already or your body makes them on its own with no conscious input from you.

Not to get off on a rant here, but this is one of those pesky cases where a lack of high-powered science education works against the public interest. The documented effects of overfeeding rats (they get fat, develop diabetes and/or cardivascular complaints and die) compared to the relative risks that even the most alarming studies have found, would tend to indicate that being a fatass is vastly more harmful than limiting your caloric intake through use of non-caloric sweeteners. Relative risk is complicated, though, and requires use of algebra and some multiplication to understand.

There's also the issue of "big bad multinational corporations making good people ill". Personal responsibility for diet behaviors (ie, I ate pure cane sugar, got fat, lost a leg and died) isn't as fun to broadcast as "my diet soda made me grow a third boob".

Eric

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Stephen,
Why not finish the reference that you obtained from Wiki? This is the entire paragraph:
Upon ingestion, aspartame breaks down into several residual chemicals, including aspartic acid, phenylalanine, methanol, and further breakdown products including formaldehyde,[12] formic acid, and a diketopiperazine. There is some controversy surrounding the rate of breakdown into these various products and the effects that they have on those that consume aspartame-sweetened foods. (See Aspartame controversy)
and the linked reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

It is worth a read for a bit more objective perspective. There is a bottom line, if you don't want to eat asparatame and/or feel you have symptoms attached to consumption, then avoid it. The majority of people who consume asparatame have none of the symptoms listed by some users. That fact has been proven outside of the manufacturers influence in any number of short and longer term clinical studies.

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Stephen,
Why not finish the reference that you obtained from Wiki? This is the entire paragraph:
Upon ingestion, aspartame breaks down into several residual chemicals, including aspartic acid, phenylalanine, methanol, and further breakdown products including formaldehyde,[12] formic acid,
and a diketopiperazine. There is some controversy surrounding the rate of breakdown into these various products and the effects that they have on those that consume aspartame-sweetened foods. (See Aspartame controversy)and the linked reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

It is worth a read for a bit more objective perspective. There is a bottom line, if you don't want to eat aspartame and/or feel you have
symptoms attached to consumption, then avoid it. The majority of people who consume aspartame have none of the symptoms listed by a very insignificant number of users(from a clinical statistical perspective). That fact has been proven outside of the manufacturers influence in any number of short and longer term clinical studies.

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I have a personal story about it. While trying to lose weight I switched to diet drinks and noticed that I began slowly use the "wrong" words when I spoke. I would say words that matched phonetically but were semantically incorrect. I thought I had a brain tumor to be honest. I quit drinking diet drinks really based on some reading I had done and noticed that the word switching stopped. Since then I have not drank any more diet drinks and have not had the problem.

It is enough for me that I will not let my kids drink them. I think that everyone can have different side effects. But for me I will not drink anymore of them.

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I'm with PAgent on this. Where's the research? All I see are claims with nothing to back them up.

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