Aspartame the sweet misery

From the book “Everything You Need to Feel Go(o)d” by Candace Pert

Sweet Poison

For the next hour and a half, we watched in horror and disbelief as the story unfolded, telling how the artificial sweetener aspartame has poisoned millions of people in the 20 years since it’s been on the market, crippling many (like Cori Brackett) and killing others.

One of those people could have been me. I’d always felt good about drinking diet colas, knowing that I was cutting calories by avoiding the sugar in other soft drinks. It was like getting something for free, and while I didn’t consume a lot, it had become my favorite social drink—something to hold at cocktail parties, since I rarely chose alcohol. I never imagined that it could literally be pickling my liver, putting me at risk for brain cancer, and possibly giving me wild mood swings.

It turns out that my nonalcoholic drink of choice is highly toxic, filled with substances that turn to alcohol in my body. And not the pleasant kind that gives you a buzz, which is ethyl alcohol, but the kind drunks die or go blind from: methyl alcohol, more commonly known as wood alcohol.

Aspartame, marketed as Nutrasweet, Equal and Spoonful (UK), is a peptide consisting of two amino acids, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, both normally supplied by the protein-rich foods we eat….

Aspartic acid and phenylalanine occur naturally in foods that we eat in small quantities. Both of these amino acids are known excitotoxins, which can cause neurons to become overexcited to the point of burnout and death. Monosodium Glutamate (MS), another legal food additive, also falls into this category.

Another neurological link is that both peptides are involved in neurotransmitter function. Phenylalinine is the building block of norepinephrine, which increases in the brain when you take aspartame into your body. This can throw off the ratio of norepinephrine to serotonin, another neurotransmitter that regulates mood.

The impact of all this unbalancing in neurotransmitter ratios can be panic symptoms, mood disorders, and, for some people, altered seizure thresholds, leading to convulsions…

As if this weren’t enough, attached to the end of the aspartic acid and phenylalanine is a third component, a methyl-ester group that breaks off easily to become methanol in the body. Methanol is also a naturally occurring substance found in foods that you and I consume. But the key word again is food, because when you eat an apple, for example, methanol is carried through your body by the natural apple fiber (known as “pectin”) and easily eliminated. Alone, methanol is wood alcohol, a known poison, which causes blindness in those desperate enough to drink it.

And it gets worse: Methanol is broken down in the liver to produce an even more toxic substance, formeldahyde. This is known to most people as the fluid used by undertakers to embalm corpses….formaldehyde has been listed as a carcinogen by the EPA, and the reference book clearly states that ingestion of this substance in large doses can cause death….

Sweet Misery (the movie) went on with astounding but increasingly plausible information about how rashes, terrible headaches, and over 40 other symptoms could be traced to aspartame use….

Even more alarming, we learned that the National Cancer Insititue reported an increase in rates of brain cancer since 1985, very possibly linked to aspartame use…In 1984, 6.9 million pounds of aspartame were consumed by Americans…doubled the next year and continues to climb.

Two years after aspartame was introduced the brain tumor rate jumped 10 percent in the U. S., while incidents of brain lymphoma, an aggressive and unusual type of tumor, jumped 60 percent. This huge increase wasn’t due to innovative scanning and diagnostic procedures, as some claimed; other forms of cancer remained the same during that time period.

How in God’s name did the FDA, the country’s largest watchdog agency for protecting consumers in their food and drug choices, let this slip by?

The story of how aspartame got approval by the FDA has some scary political undertones. For 16 years, the laboratory that produced the food additive, G.D. Searle and Co, had petitioned the FDA for approval, but they failed to show that it was safe, and no FDA commissioner would approve it. Then, just days after President Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, a new FDA commissioner was appointed and given the authority to ignore a law that said food additives must test conclusively for safety in order to receive approval.

Politics, economics, and special interests at play? Perhaps. But aspartame was in under the door, and Nutrasweet, the best-known product containing aspartame, came on the market. According to the FDA, aspartame is the most complained-about substance in their history, with over 10,000 official complaints reporting a range of side effects, including neurological ones.

Sweet Misery ended on a poignant and disturbing note with an interview of a woman held in a federal prison. Diane Fleming is serving a 50-year prison sentence in Virginia for poisoning her husband, who died of cardiac arrest after exercising vigorously in hot weather and drinking large quantities of an aspartame-laced sport drink.

In the interview, this tearful, sympathetic woman described how an attending physician suspected poisoning, and upon doing the autopsy, found the body full of formaldehyde that had literally pickled the internal organs. At the trial, the defense incorrectly stated that such a condition could only be explained by someone slipping a methanol-containing product, such as windshield-wiper fluid, into the poor man’s drink. The most likely suspect was his wife, whom the jury found guilty, condemning her to a lifetime in prison, where she is today.

The credits rolled and I clicked off the DVD player. Nancy and I sat in front of the darkened screen, stunned and speechless. Finally I turned to Nancy and said, “Do you think she murdered her husband? My guess is no way! ”

I agree!” Nancy exclaimed. “Plus, she had no motive. Her husband had been drinking large quantities of diet soda for years, and on the day he died he was chugging that diet drink poison instead of water.”

“God… if one person can die of an overdose, then all the toxic side effects are plausible,” I said.” I hadn’t realized that there’s a methanol-generating side chain on the end of aspartame!” I mentally vowed to check out the scientific facts as soon as I got back to Washington, already regretting that in my lectures I’d often used aspartame as an example of a simple dipeptide.