The big debate of artificial sweeteners have never been as big as it is today.
Artificial sweeteners have been deemed dangerous for your health after heavy fear-mongering
and links to problems ranging from headaches to cancer.
And the one artificial sweetener that has taken the most assault is aspartame.
The people that have already heard of aspartame generally have a bad opinion of aspartame.
For those of you that never heard of it, well if you ever drank a diet soda, you most certainly
have consumed aspartame as well.
So what exactly is so wrong with it?
Let's look at what happens to aspartame within the body.
Aspartame is broken down to phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol.
Outside of people with a rare genetic disorder known as phenylketonuria, phenylalanine and
aspartic acid are generally safe to consume, since they're amino acids that exist in pretty
much any protein source.
But the big bad wolf of these three is methanol.
Methanol can definitely be toxic for your body in very high amounts because your body
converts methanol into a proven dangerous compound known as formaldehyde.
Many anti-aspartame folks will tell you to avoid aspartame exactly for this reason.
But the studies unfortunately doesn't back it up.
Reason being is because the amount of methanol from aspartame consumption, is, well, extremely
small.
And at such small doses, the added methanol into the body simply doesn't do anything to
the body.
In fact, your body produces formaldehyde every single day in amounts thousands of times greater
than you can get from aspartame.
It's just simply not enough.
And on top of that, one study has subjects consuming upwards 200 milligrams of aspartame
per kilogram of bodyweight, which is 40 times greater than the average American daily consumption.
Yet, still nothing.
No methanol poisoning nor changes in formaldehyde levels in the body.
As far as causing cancer, well, the American Cancer Society themselves have looked at studies
containing as much 500,000 adults and found that there's simply no strong link between
cancer and aspartame.
Another cause for concern is causing weight gain.
People drink diet sodas so they can lose weight, but wouldn't it be pretty darn... crappy if
that same diet soda actually make them gain weight?
Well, good thing is that it doesn't.
No causative studies has ever shown artificial sweeteners causing weight gain.
One 6-month long study even showed that substituting regulars soda with diet soda is as effective
as substituting with water in terms of losing weight.
And in case you're wondering, aspartame does not spike insulin levels in healthy individuals
as well as diabetics.
But... you've probably seen people that drink diet soda and notice they're... pretty big.
Well, the real problem might be that they just under-estimate how many calories they're
consuming.
By drinking diet soda, they think the zero calories means they can eat MORE, and chances
are they do and eat way too much more.
This explains the so-called "link" between obesity and diet soda when in fact it's not
the diet soda causing the weight gain, but more so bad eating habits associated with
the people that do drink diet soda.
So it's the person's habits that link to obesity and NOT the diet soda.
In terms of headaches, the studies are quite inconclusive.
Trying to link headaches to anything is already a challenge, since many times even a placebo
can have high returns in headache correlations.
Headache studies on aspartame share very similar correlations as a placebo, so it's hard to
say for sure, and you're best just using your own judgment in this matter.
So the studies are there, and it's clear that the fear of artificial sweeteners, especially
aspartame, just doesn't hold up.
The only concern that you can definitely have for diet sodas is that, just like regular
soda, it's gonna rot your teeth.
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