I see a lot of people around me drinking Diet Coke. Still! Don't they know the dangers? Surely they care about their long-term health. If you're a Diet Coke drinker or ingest other products containing aspartame, please, for your health, consider making an immediate change. And by all means, do not let your children eat, drink or chew anything containing aspartame - ever. Their precious little brains are still developing. Give that process a healthful chance at getting it right.
Live Light, xo-C.
From Mercola.com:
Aspartame is a poison that does not belong in your body, and this is not an exaggeration. Yet, this toxic substance is consumed by over 200 million people around the world and is found in more than 6,000 products.
Everything from soda and chewing gum to desserts, yogurt, and even some vitamins and cough drops contain it.
When you drink, say, a can of diet soda sweetened with aspartame, what are you REALLY consuming? Here’s a breakdown of aspartame’s three chemicals: the amino acids aspartic acid and phenylalanine, and methanol.
1. Aspartic acid (40 percent of aspartame)
Aspartate acts as a neurotransmitter in your brain by facilitating the transmission of information from neuron to neuron. Too much aspartate in your brain kills certain neurons by allowing the influx of too much calcium into your cells. This influx triggers excessive amounts of free radicals, which kill your cells.
The neural cell damage that can be caused by excessive aspartate is why Dr. Russell Blaylock refers to them as "excitotoxins." They "excite" or stimulate your neural cells to death.
Now, when aspartic acid is consumed, it significantly raises your blood level of aspartate, which leads to a high level of those neurotransmitters in certain areas of your brain, where they slowly begin to destroy neurons.
Your brain cells could be dying right now, but you likely would not notice the symptoms until 75 percent or more are gone. Then, chronic illnesses such as the following, which may by caused by long-term exposure to excitatory amino acid damage, may occur:
- Multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease
- Memory and hearing loss
- Hormonal problems
- Epilepsy
- AIDS
- Brain lesions
- Neuroendocrine disorders
2. Phenylalanine (50 percent of aspartame)
Phenylalanine is an amino acid normally found in your brain, however people with the genetic disorder phenylketonuria (PKU) cannot metabolize phenylalanine. This leads to dangerously high -- and sometimes lethal -- levels of phenylalanine in your brain. It has been shown, though, that ingesting aspartame, especially along with carbohydrates, can lead to excess levels of phenylalanine in your brain even if you do not have PKU.
Even consuming aspartame one time has been found to raise your blood levels of phenylalanine. What’s the risk of this?
Excessive levels of phenylalanine in your brain can cause the levels of serotonin in your brain to decrease, leading to emotional disorders such as depression. It can also cause schizophrenia or make you more susceptible to seizures.
3. Methanol (aka wood alcohol) (10 percent of aspartame)
Methanol/wood alcohol is a deadly poison, and the absorption of methanol into your body is sped up considerably when free methanol is ingested. Well, free methanol is created from aspartame when it is heated to above 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Centigrade). This would occur when an aspartame-containing product is improperly stored (in the sun, for instance) or when it is heated, such as part of a "food" product like Jello.
Meanwhile, methanol breaks down into formic acid and formaldehyde -- a deadly neurotoxin -- in your body.
Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that methanol "is considered a cumulative poison due to the low rate of excretion once it is absorbed. In the body, methanol is oxidized to formaldehyde and formic acid; both of these metabolites are toxic."
They recommend a limit of consumption of 7.8 mg/day, but a one-liter aspartame-sweetened beverage contains about 56 mg of methanol. Heavy users of aspartame-containing products consume as much as 250 mg of methanol daily -- or 32 times the EPA limit!
The symptoms of methanol poisoning are numerous and varied. They include:
- Vision problems
- Headaches, ear buzzing, dizziness
- Nausea and gastrointestinal disturbances
- Weakness, numbness and shooting pains in your extremities
- Behavioral disturbances
- Memory lapses
Do You STILL Believe Aspartame is Safe?
I could literally go on for days about the many problems plaguing this artificial sweetener; both the dangers it poses to your health and the blatant greed and manipulation that got it on the market.
That is why I spent years researching and writing Sweet Deception. It is the most comprehensive book on the market addressing this issue, and if you or your loved ones drink diet beverages or eat diet foods, please read it sooner rather than later.
I also highly recommend watching Sweet Misery, which is part documentary, part detective story that sheds much-needed light on the controversy surrounding aspartame.
Folks, aspartame is not your friend. It is actually responsible for 80-85 percent of the food complaints registered with the FDA!
Aside from the damage it can do to your brain, aspartame can cause cancer. One well-controlled, peer-reviewed, SEVEN-year study even found that as little as 20 mg per day can cause cancer in humans.
One 12-ounce diet soda contains about 180 mg of aspartame, so you do the math on that risk!
If you have NutraSweet or Equal packets in your home, I urge you to get rid of them. About the only good use for them I’ve heard about is using them to kill ants in your kitchen.
And if you’re consuming diet foods or drinks of any kind, toss those as well. Your health will be much better off for it.
If you find you’re still having sweet cravings or are having a hard time giving up your diet soda, Turbo Tapping is a simple tool to help you get rid of your soda addiction in a short period of time. And in the case of aspartame, getting it out of your diet can’t come fast enough.
I would like to share my daughter’s reaction to aspartame with you.
More than 20 years ago, when my daughter was in her early 20’s and studying for
a Master’s Degree,she noticed that she was experiencing bizarre symptoms that were quite
alarming .
This truly bright girl – (whose college tuition was entirely funded by
scholarships and who won a Telluride Association Scholarship in competition
with more than one million students from the entire US) –realized that she
was becoming very confused. She would go to a grocery store and couldn’t
remember why she was there. She would be driving her car and couldn’t
remember how to get home. She had déjà vu experiences.
And she got much worse. In addition to her drastic personality change and
intellectual deterioration,
she had epileptic-type seizures,
she began to lose her vision in both eyes
she had severe headaches and trouble forming words, panic attacks, a
rapid heart rate, tremors, tingling and numbness of the extremities,
profound exhaustion and severe drowsiness, insomnia, suicidal thoughts
and numerous other problems including a very short temper, gastrointestinal
problems, and joint pains.
She consulted a neurologist, and he told her that she had temporal lobe
epilepsy.
He began treating her with medication, but the medication didn’t work,
because the doctor was wrong in his diagnosis and he was treating her for a
condition she didn’t have! What she really had was ASPARTAME
POISONING/TOXICITY!
I had heard about Dr. H. J. Roberts (Florida), so I contacted him and he
confirmed what I suspected – that she was suffering from a reaction to the
artificial sweetener in diet soda. My daughter owes her life to Dr.
Roberts, because thanks to him, she stopped drinking diet soda, and
gradually, every one of her problems disappeared. Today, she is a
successful computer programmer and financial analyst.
It took a year or more for all her symptoms to vanish. She got better slowly with bad days thrown in.
To follow up, we took her to Boston for special studies on her brain, and
the doctors confirmed that it was the aspartame that had made her so sick.
They said that she had been totally misdiagnosed by the neurologist and that
she did not have temporal lobe epilepsy at all. ( These men were in the
Clinical Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. ). We also took her to a highly-respected ophthalmologist who
explained why her vision loss was due to aspartame.
She was fine for 12 years. Then, she began
drinking diet soda again and had the same severe reaction. Luckily, we
realized what was happening to her and were able to convince her to stop
using NutraSweet. Why did she start again? It’s addictive!
Many other members of our family also have noticed a reaction to NutraSweet.
I get severe classic migraines from diet soda – my son, who is a physician and pharmacist,
can’t see to drive if he drinks diet soda – another young man in the family,
a lawyer, had double vision. His ophthalmologist thought he had a brain
tumor, but all the tests were negative. He stopped drinking diet soda, and
within 3 months, the double vision was gone. My sister-in-law acted like a
“raving maniac” when she drank diet soda.
And, by talking to others in my community for 20 years, I have learned that
reactions to aspartame are quite common.
Unfortunately, most physicians are clueless when it comes to connecting the
many symptoms of aspartame poisoning/toxicity with the consumption of what
is supposedly a safe substance.
By approving aspartame, the FDA caused many problems for many innocent
people.
The FDA should be protecting Americans, but sadly, Americans have to protect
themselves.
All this happened to my daughter 20 years ago, long before I had a computer and could check out aspartame there. I had to spend an entire year writing to doctors and scientists and congressmen to learn about aspartame. When my daughter recovered by stopping diet soda (and she only drank 1 can a day), I knew that I had to fight aspartame for the sake of others.
Posted by: Barbara Metzler | May 20, 2008 at 08:44 AM