Aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and
phenylalanine. The phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a
methyl group, which provides the majority of the sweetness.
Artificial sweeteners tend to trigger enhanced activity
within your brain's pleasure centers, yet at the same time provide less actual
satisfaction. This separation of the taste of sweetness from caloric content
means that when you consume artificial sweeteners, your brain actually craves
more of it because your body receives no satisfaction on a cellular level by
the sugar imposter. This can actually contribute to not only overeating and
weight gain, but also an addiction to artificial sweeteners
The longest-ever
human aspartame study, spanning 22 years. Interestingly enough, this
association was not found in women. Leukemia was associated with diet soda
intake in both sexes. nearly 48,000 men and over 77,000 women over the
age of 20 were reviewed, in which they found that men who consumed more than
one diet soda per day had an increased risk of developing multiple myeloma and
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
Unfortunately, even though
Harvard University researchers originally put out a press release alerting of
these potential cancer dangers, they soon caved to pressure from industry and
issued a second press release that minimized the impact of the study. Even the
study’s authors offered only a milquetoast conclusion:
"Although our findings
preserve the possibility of a detrimental effect of a constituent of diet soda,
such as aspartame, on select cancers, the inconsistent sex effects... do not
permit the ruling out of chance as an explanation."
One hypothesis for the difference
between the sexes is that men have a higher activity of the enzyme ADH, which
metabolizes methanol and converts it to formaldehyde. More formaldehyde
circulating in your blood would naturally have more opportunity to cause
greater damage. It's possible that there is some hormonally mediated protection
against the adverse effects of aspartame in women, in addition to men having
higher ADH activity, but the study was not designed to answer that question but
still it offers significant supporting evidence of the danger that
aspartame-sweetened and other "diet" drinks and foods pose.
In a related study researchers found that mixing alcohol
with diet soda, compared to regular soda, gets you drunk faster. The study
compared Smirnoff Red Label with Squirt (a lemon-lime soda) against the same
vodka mixed with Diet Squirt. The diet drink increased breath-alcohol content
(BAC) by 18 percent — the near-equivalent of one additional standard drink, and
enough to push you over the legal limit for driving. As reported by Counsel
& Heal
“While diet drinks save calorie
intake, they actually accelerate the intoxication. The reason is that since
diet drinks have less sugar in them, they get digested faster in the intestine
and the alcohol in the drink gets mixed in the blood faster. So it is always a
good idea to have alcohol with regular soft drinks, as alcohol with diet soft
drinks accelerates the intoxication process.”
