Just how safe is the artificial sweetener aspartame (more commonly known as NutraSweet), currently used in some 6000 products and consumed by hundreds of millions of people? You may be surprised to learn that a number of medical problems are likely to be adverse reactions to products containing aspartame. Author HJ Roberts, MD, a board-certified internist with impressive credentials, first became suspicious of aspartame when he encountered an increasing number of patients with a wide variety of symptoms, such as headaches, mood swings, memory loss, dizziness, depression, insomnia, diarrhea and anxiety, among others. Based on hundreds of case studies, Roberts concluded that these unexplained symptoms were actually reactions to products containing aspartame. The book not only looks at the clinical picture of aspartame, but also describes how it received FDA approval without undergoing testing in humans, and how the United States Senate allowed this well-financed chemical additive to sail through the official government channels.
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Interesting book:
However, since Equal and Nutrasweet became widely available -- I recall the products coming on the market around 1984 -- it's practically been a food group for me. If I were going to drop dead, I think I'd have done it by now. I notice that Splenda is being substituted for Nutrasweet in a lot of the products I've been buying for years. Twenty years down the road, I'll probably be reading about the ways Splenda kills people. Whatever.
It is NOT safe.:
A MUST READ BOOK. I read this book many years ago, long before they had to start putting all the warning labels on every product now containing Aspartame. Donald Rumsfeld, left government to become CEO of Searle and his job was to put Aspartame in just about every food and drink on the planet. Now, Searle is no longer the company that is listed on NutraSweet and Equal packets, but now the company on those products is listed as MONSANTO. Yes that IS the same company responsible for producing... more info
Don't believe everything you hear:
In this age of free press, email chain letters, and sensationalized media stories, people are willing to believe almost anything these days. If you do your own research on aspartame, you'll find that it is much more natural than you think. It is made up of two amino acids which naturally occur in protein, esterified with methanol (which by the way is found naturally in most fruits and vegetables - a cup of tomato juice contains more methanol than a cup of diet coke). The governments of Canada and the US... more info
someone who did undergraduate research on aspartame at ucla:
Arthur R. Rolla, M.D. of Harvard Medical School was so frustrated by the claims of H.J. Roberts that he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine to debunk the aspartame rumors. Rolla immediately considers the professional background of Roberts- an internist from West Palm Beach, Florida. This information already places Rolla of Harvard University at a much higher standing than Roberts. Rolla reveals Roberts became suspicious of his patient's complaints and began to associate them with... more info
