> “Aspartame is just as dangerous as pickled vegetables, har-har!”
Are the people who say this dunking on the IARC, or are they trying to dunk on all the people who will inevitably misinterpret the strength of IARC's recommendation as meaning that they should stop consuming aspartame.
“After you consume aspartame, it’s fully broken down in your guts into phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol. No aspartame touches any other part of your body.” This has got to be false. Like 100% wrong false. It is an observed consequence of drinking aspartame that, afterwards, your urine afterwards has two added tastes: one sweet and one foul. (Sweet-tasting pee used to be a diagnostic criterion for diabetes, I think? The practice still survives in doctors that serve some of the communities that reject modern technology.) It's got to be that the aspartame is getting into the bloodstream and then the kidneys, right? I don't know if the foulness is related to this but I know Diet Coke also tastes foul about a month or two before its expiration date, it has a shorter shelf life than high-fructose corn syrup which always surprised me because there's practically nothing there for any microbes to eat.
Like the commenter CR Drost though, I have to point out that this sentence isn't 100% correct:
“After you consume aspartame, it’s fully broken down in your guts into phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol. No aspartame touches any other part of your body...” and "So far as we know, aspartame simply can’t affect any part of the body outside the GI tract."
For instance, it affects your tongue/tastebuds (it's whole purpose). And through your tastebuds, it affects your brain. And your brain controls many aspects of your body, so it's possible for aspartame to have additional, hard-to-predict effects.
Certainly, it seems more mechanistically possible that aspartame could cause tongue (or GI) cancer. But for the brain... There has been some research that looked at if aspartame consumption might increase appetite. (Which, I have no argument that it shouldn't!) If I recall, some of the early research seemed to suggest such an effect but more recent research suggests the opposite. (People who replace sugar with aspartame tend to lose weight.) It's hard to imagine that the way your taste-buds fire when exposed to aspartame has some special effect on your brain different from what sugar could have.
Fair enough - I was just quibbling with the bald assertion that "aspartame simply can’t affect any part of the body outside the GI tract." Goes a bit too far :) I don't disagree that it's likely the effects of aspartame are not worse or significantly different than regular sugars or other sweeteners.
Reading some of your other work, I noticed mention of isolated demands for rigor (which might apply to me here).
Fantastic analysis on aspartame and the WHO announcements. This post is a keeper for all my friends who believe aspartame is a "neurotoxin."
Further, as a word guy, my take is that the Big Problem here is labeling. If the AIRC would label group 2b: "Requires further research," we'd avoid category-killer words like "possible" (which literally means nothing from a category perspective, and does nothing but allow people to <insert belief here>).
What is rarely talked about is how bad of a migraine trigger aspartame is for people prone to it. And it is found in more and more products, sometimes not listed as an ingredient so you have to infer its presence from "sugar free" labels if you're lucky. If I consume something with it, it takes me out for 2 days with reduced productivity up to a week afterwards because of the severity of the experience.
For what it's worth, the EFSA looked at this issue in their 2013 report (which I think is the most thorough review of the safety of aspartame ever). Here is their conclusion:
> The possible effect of aspartame on headaches has been investigated in various studies, which reported conflicting results, ranging from no effect to the suggestion that a small subset of the population may be susceptible to aspartame-induced headaches. The number of existing studies was small, and several had high participant drop-out rates, both under placebo and aspartame treatment. Overall, the Panel noted that because of the limitations of the studies it is not possible to conclude on a relationship between aspartame consumption and headaches.
Thank you for that excellent mini-review of the available evidence and what might have led to those seemingly contradictory claims from the WHO.
This post is DYNOMIGHT!
Love this write up
> “Aspartame is just as dangerous as pickled vegetables, har-har!”
Are the people who say this dunking on the IARC, or are they trying to dunk on all the people who will inevitably misinterpret the strength of IARC's recommendation as meaning that they should stop consuming aspartame.
“After you consume aspartame, it’s fully broken down in your guts into phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol. No aspartame touches any other part of your body.” This has got to be false. Like 100% wrong false. It is an observed consequence of drinking aspartame that, afterwards, your urine afterwards has two added tastes: one sweet and one foul. (Sweet-tasting pee used to be a diagnostic criterion for diabetes, I think? The practice still survives in doctors that serve some of the communities that reject modern technology.) It's got to be that the aspartame is getting into the bloodstream and then the kidneys, right? I don't know if the foulness is related to this but I know Diet Coke also tastes foul about a month or two before its expiration date, it has a shorter shelf life than high-fructose corn syrup which always surprised me because there's practically nothing there for any microbes to eat.
This is one of the most well-established fact about aspartame and has been known for decades. I'm not aware of any controversy on this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame#Metabolites
This is a great essay, thank you!
Like the commenter CR Drost though, I have to point out that this sentence isn't 100% correct:
“After you consume aspartame, it’s fully broken down in your guts into phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol. No aspartame touches any other part of your body...” and "So far as we know, aspartame simply can’t affect any part of the body outside the GI tract."
For instance, it affects your tongue/tastebuds (it's whole purpose). And through your tastebuds, it affects your brain. And your brain controls many aspects of your body, so it's possible for aspartame to have additional, hard-to-predict effects.
Certainly, it seems more mechanistically possible that aspartame could cause tongue (or GI) cancer. But for the brain... There has been some research that looked at if aspartame consumption might increase appetite. (Which, I have no argument that it shouldn't!) If I recall, some of the early research seemed to suggest such an effect but more recent research suggests the opposite. (People who replace sugar with aspartame tend to lose weight.) It's hard to imagine that the way your taste-buds fire when exposed to aspartame has some special effect on your brain different from what sugar could have.
Fair enough - I was just quibbling with the bald assertion that "aspartame simply can’t affect any part of the body outside the GI tract." Goes a bit too far :) I don't disagree that it's likely the effects of aspartame are not worse or significantly different than regular sugars or other sweeteners.
Reading some of your other work, I noticed mention of isolated demands for rigor (which might apply to me here).
Fantastic analysis on aspartame and the WHO announcements. This post is a keeper for all my friends who believe aspartame is a "neurotoxin."
Further, as a word guy, my take is that the Big Problem here is labeling. If the AIRC would label group 2b: "Requires further research," we'd avoid category-killer words like "possible" (which literally means nothing from a category perspective, and does nothing but allow people to <insert belief here>).
What is rarely talked about is how bad of a migraine trigger aspartame is for people prone to it. And it is found in more and more products, sometimes not listed as an ingredient so you have to infer its presence from "sugar free" labels if you're lucky. If I consume something with it, it takes me out for 2 days with reduced productivity up to a week afterwards because of the severity of the experience.
For what it's worth, the EFSA looked at this issue in their 2013 report (which I think is the most thorough review of the safety of aspartame ever). Here is their conclusion:
> The possible effect of aspartame on headaches has been investigated in various studies, which reported conflicting results, ranging from no effect to the suggestion that a small subset of the population may be susceptible to aspartame-induced headaches. The number of existing studies was small, and several had high participant drop-out rates, both under placebo and aspartame treatment. Overall, the Panel noted that because of the limitations of the studies it is not possible to conclude on a relationship between aspartame consumption and headaches.
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3496
Interesting write-up. In which of those groups would (refined) sugar be located?