Aspartame

[Guest guest]

I want to thank Patti for posting that reprint article on the evils of

aspartame. By reading this article you can get a good idea of what to look

for in order to determine the validity of an news item. For example look for

anecdotes such as the one about Florence Joyner-Griffith jogging and

drinking a diet Coke with Bill Clinton. No athlete would job and drink a

Coke. First the stuff would tend to fizz and go all over you while you ran.

Second, most athletes drink sports drinks or water because staying hydrated

during exercise is the best way to go. Second, look at the littany of woe

mentioned as caused by aspartame, about 7 or 8 different serious problems,

all unrelated. Is this really possible? Unlikely. Consider the idea of

methanol poisoning. The amount of aspartame in any given food item is very

small. So, correspondingly, the amount of methanol produced as a breakdown

product would be that much smaller. Definitely, ingesting methanol in large

amounts is dangerous. We see one or two such poisoning a year in our ER. But

you have to drink a good glass or two full of methanol. In a diet Coke there

might be a a tenth of a teaspoon, if that of aspartame. So the amount of

methanol produced, if it is even a breakdown product of aspartame which I'm

not sure it is, wouldn't be enough to do much of anything to you. Third, the

issue of MS and Lupus has been addressed by a variety of health agencies in

response to one of the wackier religious groups posting information about

aspartame causing MS, on their website. This has been totally refuted.

So there you have it. A lesson on how to distinguish non-science (or

non-sense) from true science.

Aubrey