Why Are Americans Becoming Wary of Aspartame?

As more research links aspartame to health risks, increasing numbers of people are looking to avoid it in their diets. That's why Pepsi was proactive in removing it from their diet soda.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved aspartame for use in dry foods in 1981 and as a general artificial sweetener in 1996.

Unlike other artificial sweeteners that move through the body without being digested, aspartame can be metabolized by your body and exerts a number of concerning effects. For instance, aspartame has been found to increase hunger ratings compared to glucose or water and is associated with heightened motivation to eat (even more so than other artificial sweeteners like saccharin or acesulfame potassium).

For a substance often used in "diet" products, the fact that aspartame may actually increase weight gain is incredibly misleading. Aspartame also exerts changes on the microbial composition in your gut, the consequences of which are unknown.

However, emerging evidence suggests gut microbes play a role in metabolic diseases that aspartame is known to increase, pointing to alteration of gut microbial composition as one of its mechanisms of harm. According to research published in PLOS One:

"Regular consumption of artificially sweetened soft drinks is associated with disorders of the metabolic syndrome, including abdominal obesity, insulin resistance and/or impaired glucose tolerance, dyslipidemia and high blood pressure.

In particular, daily diet soda consumption (primarily sweetened with N-a-L-aspartyl-L-phenylalanine methyl ester, aspartame, APM), is reported to increase the relative risk of type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome by 67 percent and 36 percent respectively.

Given this data, and the presence of APM in over 6000 food products, there is a need to understand the potential role of APM sweetened products in the development and maintenance of metabolic disease."

Independent Studies Link Aspartame with Depression, Headaches and Other Adverse Effects

A 2004 BMJ study gave aspartame a clean bill of health, in part because it noted 100 percent of industry-funded studies concluded aspartame is safe. Yet, in an editorial response published in BMJ in 2005, it's revealed that 92 percent of independently funded studies found aspartame may cause adverse effects, including depression and headaches.

A recent study also found the administration of aspartame to rats resulted in detectable methanol even after 24 hours, which might be responsible for inducing oxidative stress in the brain.

Aspartame is made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. But the phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group as that provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol. When aspartame is in liquid form, it breaks down into methyl alcohol, or methanol, which is then converted into formaldehyde and represents the root of the problem with aspartame.

Why Aspartame May Be Toxic

Both animals and humans have small structures called peroxisomes in each cell. There are a couple of hundred in every cell of your body, which are designed to detoxify a variety of chemicals.

Peroxisome contains catalase, which helps detoxify methanol once it is turned into formaldehyde. Other chemicals in the peroxisome then convert the formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last step occurs only in non-human animals.

When methanol enters the peroxisome of every animal except humans, it gets into that mechanism. Humans do have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as animals, but human peroxisomes cannot convert the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid. According to Dr. Woody Monte, professor emeritus at Arizona State University in food and chemistry:

"The methanol bounces off the catalase or bounces off something there. What happens then is every cell in your body cannot metabolize methanol. Wherein the animal body, every cell can metabolize and turn it to formic acid, which is safe. What happens to the methyl alcohol?

That's the key. In humans, methyl alcohol could just as easily not be metabolized at all. That would be the ultimate and best outcome, and you could urinate it away or sweat it out and you would be fine.

Unfortunately, there are some locations in the human body, particularly in the lining of the vessels of your body, especially in your brain, that are loaded with alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) that converts methanol to formaldehyde …

… [A]nd there is no catalase present so enormous amounts of damage are created in the tissues."

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

Aspartame and Shame

January 12, 2016  Mercola.com

Reducing The Chemical Load On Your Body

As one of the major components of trying to achieve a better level of health, reducing the chemical stress load on our bodies should hold a place of high importance on our list of strategies. And while it may seem easy enough to do that in some circumstances, such as simply opting not to smoke a cigarette or inhale dangerous chemicals, it may be more challenging to avoid some of the less obvious sources of chemical stress. More than 80,000 synthetic chemicals surround you every day. Synthetic chemicals are in your air, food, water, and in most of the products you use — many going straight into your body, even before birth. Directly, your body’s cells interact with about 200 industrial chemicals every day. Ninety percent of food is chemically processed today with flavorants, colorants, texturants, and preservatives — and typically loaded with sugar and high fructose corn syrup. The average woman in the US uses 12 personal care products a day, containing 168 different chemicals. Cosmetics manufacturers don’t have to disclose the ingredients in their products. The vast majority contains chemicals either known to be toxic, suspected to be toxic, or whose effects are unknown because there’s been no testing. Between processing, agricultural chemicals and toxic sludge, you can understand how a multitude of chemicals can accumulate in your body to damage your health over time. The various ways that these chemicals can manifest poor health in your body would give us a list of possible symptoms too long to list here. Therefore, the best strategy would be to learn to identify where these chemicals are hiding so as to reduce your risk of exposure in the first place.

A good place to start would be by reading ingredient labels of every food you’re considering putting inside your body. As a general rule of thumb, the longer the list of ingredients, the higher the potential that there will be added chemicals such as preservatives and artificial colors. Take a look at the ingredient lists of some of the foods in your pantry right now. How many have ingredients that are more than a dozen letters long, that you’ve never heard of, or have no idea how to pronounce? Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)? Propyl paraben? Tartrazine (yellow #5)? If these additives don’t occur naturally in the foods we eat that haven’t been “chemically enhanced” (like an apple), should we really be putting them into our bodies? A brief tour online will easily give you listings of all the different names that monosodium glutamate (MSG) can be disguised as on a label. Autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and “spices” can all mean that msg has been added to the product. As much as the producers of artificial sweeteners (saccharin, aspartame, sucralose) want you to believe that their products are “derived from natural sources”, they are still chemically altered substances. Toxic effects have already been shown to occur in the first two. As far as the third, if you’re currently using it on a regular basis, then you’ve basically volunteered as a human guinea pig to help determine if there are any long-term side effects from ingesting it since there are no such studies to support that level of safety.

These are just a few examples of possible sources of chemical stress to our bodies, and just in the foods we eat. One recent assessment by the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark found that even small amounts of chemicals when combined can amplify each other’s adverse effects. You have multiple types of chemicals in your body at any one time. Neglecting to consider their interactions is like a physician prescribing a drug without asking you what other drugs you’re taking. The bottom line is that we need to limit the amount of chemical burden we are putting on our organs, especially our gastrointestinal tract, liver and kidneys since they bear the initial brunt of the chemical onslaught. Right along with that is to start fortifying the diet with REAL foods, especially vegetables and fruits which are abundant in healthy phytochemicals and nutrients that can help minimize the damage from years of poor choices. So start spending more time in the produce section of the grocery store and less among the aisles of packages, boxes and cans.