Aspartame Associated with Increased Risk of Blood Cancers in
Long-Term Human Study
November 07 2012
Story at-a-glance
-
The longest ever human aspartame study, spanning 22 years, found
a clear association between aspartame consumption and
non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and leukemia in men
-
Leukemia was associated with diet soda intake in both sexes
-
The study was done out of Harvard but after caving to pressure
from industry, a press release was issued that minimized the
impact of the study
-
The long-term nature of this study is crucial as one of the
primary tricks companies use to hide the toxicity of their
products is short-term tests of a few weeks. The longest study
prior to this one was only four and half months, far too short
to reveal any toxicity from chronic exposure
-
Another trick, especially with aspartame, is to use animal
models and not humans. This is problematic because animals are
protected from methanol toxicity, unlike humans
-
Another recent study found that compared with sucrose (regular
table sugar), saccharin and aspartame caused greater weight gain
in adult rats, and this weight gain was unrelated to caloric
intake
By Dr. Mercola
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener used in diet soda and
over 6,000 other sugar-free or "diet" products. New research1
linking aspartame to cancer in some individuals has sparked a
flurry of commentary, including an "apology" from Brigham and
Women's Hospital, a Harvard University teaching facility, for
promoting the results2.
I first found out about the study when ABC News contacted me
and requested that I provide them with a comprehensive analysis
of this 40-page study within an hour. Fortunately, I have
extensively reviewed this topic and was able to provide their
requested review.
Funding was provided by grants from the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The Harvard hospital originally sent out a press release with
the headline: "The truth isn't sweet when it comes to artificial
sweeteners." Alas, just half an hour before the release of the
study, the hospital suddenly got cold feet, issuing the
following statement:
"Upon review of the findings, the consensus of our
scientific leaders is that the data is weak, and that BWH
Media Relations was premature in the promotion of this work.
We apologize for the time you have invested in this story."
According to Erin McDonough3,
senior vice president of communication and public affairs, this
was "the first time something like this had ever happened in her
25 years of working in media relations."
NBC News stated4:
"Not all science deserves publicity. Some is not done
well. Some comes to equivocal conclusions and serves solely
to alert other researchers of the need for further study.
The research... about a potential cancer from aspartame
falls squarely in that second category. If such a study does
get attention, it can often increase the confusion and anger
that many people feel about science in general and the
study of possible risks and benefits of our diet, in
particular."
None of this surprises me. After all, can you imagine the
liability the food and beverage industries, not to mention
virtually every public health agency in the US, would face were
there convincing evidence that aspartame is carcinogenic? They
simply cannot afford such evidence to be accepted.
But make no mistake about it, this study is of great
importance because it's the most comprehensive and longest human
study spanning 22 years that has ever looked at aspartame
toxicity. The study evaluates the effect between aspartame
intake and cancer, and they found a clear association between
aspartame consumption and non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and leukemia.
Ignoring First Long-Term Human Study Would Be a MAJOR Mistake
This is the first large-scale observational human study to
report an association between aspartame consumption and blood
cancers. The long-term nature of this study is really crucial
because one of the primary tricks companies use to hide the
toxicity of their products is short-term tests.
As the study mentions, the longest study prior to this one
was only four and half months, far too short to reveal
any toxicity from chronic exposure. Unfortunately, because there
are so many of these short-term trials, they get away with
saying that aspartame is one of the most studied food additives
ever made and no health concerns have ever been discovered. The
beverage industry was quick to respond5
to the study saying aspartame has been "deemed safe for decades
by the world's leading toxicologists."
Well, they simply didn't look long enough! But the average
person does not realize that all those industry-funded studies
were so pathetically short, and the media doesn't inform them of
this fact either. Hence, people are easily misled.
A number of animal studies have clearly documented the
association between aspartame and cancer, as the study points
out. But what most researchers do not appreciate is that humans
are the only animals that do NOT have the protective
mechanism to compensate for methanol toxicity. So evaluating
methanol toxicity in animals is a flawed model for testing human
toxicity.
This is due to alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). In humans,
methanol is allowed to be transported in the body to susceptible
tissues where this enzyme, ADH, then converts it to
formaldehyde, which damages protein and DNA that lead to the
increased risk of cancer and autoimmune disease.
Interestingly, the previous AARP Diet and Health Study, which
did not find an association with aspartame and cancer, used
fruit juice as the control. Most are unaware that canned or
bottled fruit juice is loaded with methanol that dissociates
from the pectin over time and can actually cause similar
problems as aspartame. This does not occur in freshly consumed
fruits and vegetables, only ones that are bottled or canned.
Hence no major difference could be discerned between the
aspartame and the control group.
Why Was Aspartame More Toxic in Men than Women?
The health statistics for nearly 48,000 men and over 77,000
women over the age of 20 were reviewed for the featured study.
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. Interestingly enough, this association
was not found in women.
Leukemia was associated with diet soda intake in both sexes.
One hypothesis for the difference between the sexes is that
men have a higher activity of the enzyme ADH, as I mentioned
earlier, which metabolizes methanol and converts it to
formaldehyde. More formaldehyde circulating in your blood would
naturally have more opportunity to cause greater damage.
While the findings from this study add credible evidence that
consuming aspartame over a long period of time can pose
significant health risks, it also demonstrates that our
understanding of the precise mechanism of harm is still lacking
and needs to be investigated further, as it's unclear why the
women in this study didn't experience the same increased rates
of cancer.
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.
All in all however, I believe the study offers significant
supporting evidence of the danger that "diet" drinks and foods
pose. Many have indeed been injured by aspartame there are
more adverse reports to the FDA on aspartame than all other food
additives combined. It's also widely known how massive industry
and government collusion at the FDA was ultimately responsible
for its approval after it failed to be approved for many years.
Although the authors' summary conclusion mentions they do not
rule out the possibility of chance for this association, it's
worth noting that this is because they could not offer a
conclusive explanation for the difference between the sexes.
I carefully reviewed this study in its entirety, and found it
to be extremely well executed. While the mechanism responsible
for the difference between the sexes for certain cancers need to
be studied further, a biological mechanism for cancer from
aspartame does exist, which I'll review in a moment.
Furthermore, it was the reviewers of the study that
pushed back during the editing process, insisting that it should
be made clear that chance was a plausible explanation for the
findings6.
Lead researcher Eva Schernhammer, MD, DrPH stated in the
original press release (which has since been removed):
"The sex difference we observed deserves
consideration. There are many possible explanations in this,
one being chance, however these differences could be related
to a yet-to-be-discovered risk factor for lymphoma and
leukemia, which are associated with soda consumption in men,
but not women."
Methyl Alcohol The Root of the Problem with Aspartame
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. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl
ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the
phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol. This is in
sharp contrast to naturally-occurring methanol found in certain
fruits and vegetables, where it is firmly bonded to pectin,
allowing the methanol to be safely passed through your digestive
tract.
If the methyl alcohol is broken off from the phenylalanine,
as easily happens when drinks sweetened with it are exposed to
higher temperatures, it no longer tastes sweet. This is
precisely what happened to most of the diet soda sent to the
Middle East for US troops. They received non-sweet sodas that
were loaded with dangerous levels of methanol, which can be
toxic when it's in this already broken down state.
Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it's carried into
susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone
marrow, where the ADH enzyme converts it into formaldehyde,
which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA. All other
animals, on the other hand, have a protective mechanism that
allows methanol to be broken down into harmless formic acid...
According to aspartame expert Dr. Woodrow Monte, there's a
major biochemical problem with methanol in humans, because of
the difference in how it's metabolized, compared to all other
animals. This is why toxicology testing on animals is a flawed
model. It doesn't fully apply to humans.
Both animals and humans have small structures called
peroxisomes in each cell. There are a couple of hundred in every
cell of your body, which are designed to detoxify a variety of
chemicals. Peroxisome contains catalase, which help detoxify
methanol. Other chemicals in the peroxisome convert the
formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last
step occurs only in animals.
When methanol enters the peroxisome of every animal
except humans, it gets into that mechanism. Humans do
have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as
animals, but human peroxisomes cannot convert
the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid.
So again, to recap: In humans, the methyl alcohol travels
through your blood vessels into sensitive areas, such as your
brain, that are loaded with alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which
converts methanol to formaldehyde, and since there's no catalase
present, the formaldehyde is free to cause enormous damage in
your tissues.
Saccharin and Aspartame Cause Greater Weight Gain than Sugar
In related news, a study published on October 19 in the
journal Appetite7,
found that compared with sucrose (regular table sugar),
saccharin and aspartame caused greater weight gain in adult
rats, and this weight gain was unrelated to caloric intake. The
underlying mechanism was not determined.
However, a number of studies have already shown that
consuming artificial sweeteners breaks the connection between a
sweet sensation and a high-calorie food, thereby changing your
body's ability to regulate intake naturally. In a similar 2008
study8,
rats that ate yogurt sweetened with an artificial sweetener
consumed more calories, gained more weight, and put on more body
fat than rats that ate yogurt sweetened with sugar.
Other studies, too, have shown that eating artificial
sweeteners might hinder your body's ability to estimate calorie
intake, thus boosting your inclination to overindulge.
The fact that aspartame is NOT a dieter's best friend has
been known by scientists for some time. The problem is this news
has not received the necessary traction in the media...
For example, a study from 19869,
which included nearly 80,000 women, found that those who used
artificial sweeteners were significantly more likely than
non-users to gain weight over time, regardless of initial
weight. According to the authors, the results "were not
explicable by differences in food consumption patterns," and
concluded that:
" The data do not support the hypothesis that
long-term artificial sweetener use either helps weight loss
or prevents weight gain."
Another more recent study with the telling title of Gain
Weight by "Going Diet?" Artificial Sweeteners and the
Neurobiology of Sugar Cravings, published in 201010,
found that epidemiologic data suggest artificially sweetened
foods and beverages do not reduce weight. Quite the contrary:
"Several large scale prospective cohort studies found
positive correlation between artificial sweetener use and
weight gain. The San Antonio Heart Study examined 3,682
adults over a seven- to eight-year period in the 1980s.
When matched for initial body mass index (BMI),
gender, ethnicity, and diet, drinkers of artificially
sweetened beverages consistently had higher BMIs at the
follow-up, with dose dependence on the amount of
consumption... Saccharin use was also associated with
eight-year weight gain in 31,940 women from the Nurses'
Health Study conducted in the 1970s.
Similar observations have been reported in children.
A two-year prospective study involving 166 school
children found that increased diet soda consumption was
associated with higher BMI Z-scores at follow-up, indicating
weight gain. The Growing Up Today Study, involving 11,654
children aged 9 to 14 also reported positive association
between diet soda and weight gain for boys. For each daily
serving of diet beverage, BMI increased by 0.16 kg/m2... A
cross-sectional study looking at 3,111 children and youth
found diet soda drinkers had significantly elevated BMI."
Are Your Health Problems Related to Artificial Sweeteners?
Many people belatedly realize they've been suffering
reactions to one artificial sweetener or another. If you suspect
an artificial sweetener might be to blame for a symptom you're
having, a good way to help you weed out the culprit is to do an
elimination challenge. It's easy to do, but you must read the
ingredient labels for everything you put in your mouth
to make sure you're avoiding ALL artificial sweeteners. To
determine if you're having a reaction to artificial sweeteners,
take the following steps:
- Eliminate all artificial
sweeteners from your diet for two weeks.
- After two weeks of being artificial sweetener-free,
reintroduce your artificial sweetener of choice in a
significant quantity (about three servings daily). Avoid
other artificial sweeteners during this period.
- Do this for one to three days and notice how you feel,
especially as compared to when you were consuming no
artificial sweeteners.
- If you don't notice a difference in how you feel after
re-introducing your primary artificial sweetener for a few
days, it's a safe bet you're able to tolerate it acutely,
meaning your body doesn't have an immediate, adverse
response. However, this doesn't mean your health won't be
damaged in the long run.
- If you've been consuming more than one type of
artificial sweetener, you can repeat steps 2 through 4 with
the next one on your list.
Let me make it abundantly clear that even though you may not
show immediate signs of any noticeable reaction after consuming
artificial sweeteners, please don't make the mistake of telling
yourself "they must be OK for me". I strongly urge you to avoid
them at all costs. They are toxic to all humans and will not
help you in any way, shape, or form.
Also, if you do experience side effects from aspartame,
please report it to the FDA (if you live in the United States)
without delay. It's easy to make a report just go to the
FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator page, find the phone
number for your state, and make a call reporting your reaction.
There's no telling just how many reports they might need to
receive before taking another look at aspartame's safety and
reconsidering their stance. But I CAN tell you, the more reports
they get, the more likely that is to happen. So if you suspect
you have experienced an adverse reaction from aspartame (or any
other drug or food additive), please take a moment to make this
important call.
Are there ANY Safe and Healthy Alternatives to Sugar?
The best strategy is to lower your use of sugar and eat right
for your nutritional type and make sure you have enough high
quality fats. Once your body has the proper fuel, your sweet
cravings will radically diminish and you will be satisfied
without them. If you still have cravings it is a strong
suggestion you need to further refine your attempt to identify
the right fuel for your body. My free
Nutritional Plan can help you do this in a step by step
fashion.
If you need a sweetener you could use
stevia or Lo Han, both of which are safe natural sweeteners.
Remember, if you struggle with high blood pressure, high
cholesterol, diabetes or extra weight, then you have insulin
sensitivity issues and would benefit from avoiding ALL
sweeteners.
If you're having trouble weaning yourself off soda, try
Turbo Tapping. Turbo Tapping is a clever use of the
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), specifically designed to
resolve many aspects of an addiction in a concentrated period of
time.
By Dr. Mercola
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener used in diet soda and
over 6,000 other sugar-free or "diet" products. New research1
linking aspartame to cancer in some individuals has sparked a
flurry of commentary, including an "apology" from Brigham and
Women's Hospital, a Harvard University teaching facility, for
promoting the results2.
I first found out about the study when ABC News contacted me
and requested that I provide them with a comprehensive analysis
of this 40-page study within an hour. Fortunately, I have
extensively reviewed this topic and was able to provide their
requested review.
Funding was provided by grants from the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The Harvard hospital originally sent out a press release with
the headline: "The truth isn't sweet when it comes to artificial
sweeteners." Alas, just half an hour before the release of the
study, the hospital suddenly got cold feet, issuing the
following statement:
"Upon review of the findings, the consensus of our
scientific leaders is that the data is weak, and that BWH
Media Relations was premature in the promotion of this work.
We apologize for the time you have invested in this story."
According to Erin McDonough3,
senior vice president of communication and public affairs, this
was "the first time something like this had ever happened in her
25 years of working in media relations."
NBC News stated4:
"Not all science deserves publicity. Some is not done
well. Some comes to equivocal conclusions and serves solely
to alert other researchers of the need for further study.
The research... about a potential cancer from aspartame
falls squarely in that second category. If such a study does
get attention, it can often increase the confusion and anger
that many people feel about science in general and the
study of possible risks and benefits of our diet, in
particular."
None of this surprises me. After all, can you imagine the
liability the food and beverage industries, not to mention
virtually every public health agency in the US, would face were
there convincing evidence that aspartame is carcinogenic? They
simply cannot afford such evidence to be accepted.
But make no mistake about it, this study is of great
importance because it's the most comprehensive and longest human
study spanning 22 years that has ever looked at aspartame
toxicity. The study evaluates the effect between aspartame
intake and cancer, and they found a clear association between
aspartame consumption and non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and leukemia.
Ignoring First Long-Term Human Study Would Be a MAJOR Mistake
This is the first large-scale observational human study to
report an association between aspartame consumption and blood
cancers. The long-term nature of this study is really crucial
because one of the primary tricks companies use to hide the
toxicity of their products is short-term tests.
As the study mentions, the longest study prior to this one
was only four and half months, far too short to reveal
any toxicity from chronic exposure. Unfortunately, because there
are so many of these short-term trials, they get away with
saying that aspartame is one of the most studied food additives
ever made and no health concerns have ever been discovered. The
beverage industry was quick to respond5
to the study saying aspartame has been "deemed safe for decades
by the world's leading toxicologists."
Well, they simply didn't look long enough! But the average
person does not realize that all those industry-funded studies
were so pathetically short, and the media doesn't inform them of
this fact either. Hence, people are easily misled.
A number of animal studies have clearly documented the
association between aspartame and cancer, as the study points
out. But what most researchers do not appreciate is that humans
are the only animals that do NOT have the protective
mechanism to compensate for methanol toxicity. So evaluating
methanol toxicity in animals is a flawed model for testing human
toxicity.
This is due to alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). In humans,
methanol is allowed to be transported in the body to susceptible
tissues where this enzyme, ADH, then converts it to
formaldehyde, which damages protein and DNA that lead to the
increased risk of cancer and autoimmune disease.
Interestingly, the previous AARP Diet and Health Study, which
did not find an association with aspartame and cancer, used
fruit juice as the control. Most are unaware that canned or
bottled fruit juice is loaded with methanol that dissociates
from the pectin over time and can actually cause similar
problems as aspartame. This does not occur in freshly consumed
fruits and vegetables, only ones that are bottled or canned.
Hence no major difference could be discerned between the
aspartame and the control group.
Why Was Aspartame More Toxic in Men than Women?
The health statistics for nearly 48,000 men and over 77,000
women over the age of 20 were reviewed for the featured study.
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. Interestingly enough, this association
was not found in women.
Leukemia was associated with diet soda intake in both sexes.
One hypothesis for the difference between the sexes is that
men have a higher activity of the enzyme ADH, as I mentioned
earlier, which metabolizes methanol and converts it to
formaldehyde. More formaldehyde circulating in your blood would
naturally have more opportunity to cause greater damage.
While the findings from this study add credible evidence that
consuming aspartame over a long period of time can pose
significant health risks, it also demonstrates that our
understanding of the precise mechanism of harm is still lacking
and needs to be investigated further, as it's unclear why the
women in this study didn't experience the same increased rates
of cancer.
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.
All in all however, I believe the study offers significant
supporting evidence of the danger that "diet" drinks and foods
pose. Many have indeed been injured by aspartame there are
more adverse reports to the FDA on aspartame than all other food
additives combined. It's also widely known how massive industry
and government collusion at the FDA was ultimately responsible
for its approval after it failed to be approved for many years.
Although the authors' summary conclusion mentions they do not
rule out the possibility of chance for this association, it's
worth noting that this is because they could not offer a
conclusive explanation for the difference between the sexes.
I carefully reviewed this study in its entirety, and found it
to be extremely well executed. While the mechanism responsible
for the difference between the sexes for certain cancers need to
be studied further, a biological mechanism for cancer from
aspartame does exist, which I'll review in a moment.
Furthermore, it was the reviewers of the study that
pushed back during the editing process, insisting that it should
be made clear that chance was a plausible explanation for the
findings6.
Lead researcher Eva Schernhammer, MD, DrPH stated in the
original press release (which has since been removed):
"The sex difference we observed deserves
consideration. There are many possible explanations in this,
one being chance, however these differences could be related
to a yet-to-be-discovered risk factor for lymphoma and
leukemia, which are associated with soda consumption in men,
but not women."
Methyl Alcohol The Root of the Problem with Aspartame
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. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl
ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the
phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol. This is in
sharp contrast to naturally-occurring methanol found in certain
fruits and vegetables, where it is firmly bonded to pectin,
allowing the methanol to be safely passed through your digestive
tract.
If the methyl alcohol is broken off from the phenylalanine,
as easily happens when drinks sweetened with it are exposed to
higher temperatures, it no longer tastes sweet. This is
precisely what happened to most of the diet soda sent to the
Middle East for US troops. They received non-sweet sodas that
were loaded with dangerous levels of methanol, which can be
toxic when it's in this already broken down state.
Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it's carried into
susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone
marrow, where the ADH enzyme converts it into formaldehyde,
which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA. All other
animals, on the other hand, have a protective mechanism that
allows methanol to be broken down into harmless formic acid...
According to aspartame expert Dr. Woodrow Monte, there's a
major biochemical problem with methanol in humans, because of
the difference in how it's metabolized, compared to all other
animals. This is why toxicology testing on animals is a flawed
model. It doesn't fully apply to humans.
Both animals and humans have small structures called
peroxisomes in each cell. There are a couple of hundred in every
cell of your body, which are designed to detoxify a variety of
chemicals. Peroxisome contains catalase, which help detoxify
methanol. Other chemicals in the peroxisome convert the
formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last
step occurs only in animals.
When methanol enters the peroxisome of every animal
except humans, it gets into that mechanism. Humans do
have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as
animals, but human peroxisomes cannot convert
the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid.
So again, to recap: In humans, the methyl alcohol travels
through your blood vessels into sensitive areas, such as your
brain, that are loaded with alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which
converts methanol to formaldehyde, and since there's no catalase
present, the formaldehyde is free to cause enormous damage in
your tissues.
Saccharin and Aspartame Cause Greater Weight Gain than Sugar
In related news, a study published on October 19 in the
journal Appetite7,
found that compared with sucrose (regular table sugar),
saccharin and aspartame caused greater weight gain in adult
rats, and this weight gain was unrelated to caloric intake. The
underlying mechanism was not determined.
However, a number of studies have already shown that
consuming artificial sweeteners breaks the connection between a
sweet sensation and a high-calorie food, thereby changing your
body's ability to regulate intake naturally. In a similar 2008
study8,
rats that ate yogurt sweetened with an artificial sweetener
consumed more calories, gained more weight, and put on more body
fat than rats that ate yogurt sweetened with sugar.
Other studies, too, have shown that eating artificial
sweeteners might hinder your body's ability to estimate calorie
intake, thus boosting your inclination to overindulge.
The fact that aspartame is NOT a dieter's best friend has
been known by scientists for some time. The problem is this news
has not received the necessary traction in the media...
For example, a study from 19869,
which included nearly 80,000 women, found that those who used
artificial sweeteners were significantly more likely than
non-users to gain weight over time, regardless of initial
weight. According to the authors, the results "were not
explicable by differences in food consumption patterns," and
concluded that:
" The data do not support the hypothesis that
long-term artificial sweetener use either helps weight loss
or prevents weight gain."
Another more recent study with the telling title of Gain
Weight by "Going Diet?" Artificial Sweeteners and the
Neurobiology of Sugar Cravings, published in 201010,
found that epidemiologic data suggest artificially sweetened
foods and beverages do not reduce weight. Quite the contrary:
"Several large scale prospective cohort studies found
positive correlation between artificial sweetener use and
weight gain. The San Antonio Heart Study examined 3,682
adults over a seven- to eight-year period in the 1980s.
When matched for initial body mass index (BMI),
gender, ethnicity, and diet, drinkers of artificially
sweetened beverages consistently had higher BMIs at the
follow-up, with dose dependence on the amount of
consumption... Saccharin use was also associated with
eight-year weight gain in 31,940 women from the Nurses'
Health Study conducted in the 1970s.
Similar observations have been reported in children.
A two-year prospective study involving 166 school
children found that increased diet soda consumption was
associated with higher BMI Z-scores at follow-up, indicating
weight gain. The Growing Up Today Study, involving 11,654
children aged 9 to 14 also reported positive association
between diet soda and weight gain for boys. For each daily
serving of diet beverage, BMI increased by 0.16 kg/m2... A
cross-sectional study looking at 3,111 children and youth
found diet soda drinkers had significantly elevated BMI."
Are Your Health Problems Related to Artificial Sweeteners?
Many people belatedly realize they've been suffering
reactions to one artificial sweetener or another. If you suspect
an artificial sweetener might be to blame for a symptom you're
having, a good way to help you weed out the culprit is to do an
elimination challenge. It's easy to do, but you must read the
ingredient labels for everything you put in your mouth
to make sure you're avoiding ALL artificial sweeteners. To
determine if you're having a reaction to artificial sweeteners,
take the following steps:
- Eliminate all artificial
sweeteners from your diet for two weeks.
- After two weeks of being artificial sweetener-free,
reintroduce your artificial sweetener of choice in a
significant quantity (about three servings daily). Avoid
other artificial sweeteners during this period.
- Do this for one to three days and notice how you feel,
especially as compared to when you were consuming no
artificial sweeteners.
- If you don't notice a difference in how you feel after
re-introducing your primary artificial sweetener for a few
days, it's a safe bet you're able to tolerate it acutely,
meaning your body doesn't have an immediate, adverse
response. However, this doesn't mean your health won't be
damaged in the long run.
- If you've been consuming more than one type of
artificial sweetener, you can repeat steps 2 through 4 with
the next one on your list.
Let me make it abundantly clear that even though you may not
show immediate signs of any noticeable reaction after consuming
artificial sweeteners, please don't make the mistake of telling
yourself "they must be OK for me". I strongly urge you to avoid
them at all costs. They are toxic to all humans and will not
help you in any way, shape, or form.
Also, if you do experience side effects from aspartame,
please report it to the FDA (if you live in the United States)
without delay. It's easy to make a report just go to the
FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator page, find the phone
number for your state, and make a call reporting your reaction.
There's no telling just how many reports they might need to
receive before taking another look at aspartame's safety and
reconsidering their stance. But I CAN tell you, the more reports
they get, the more likely that is to happen. So if you suspect
you have experienced an adverse reaction from aspartame (or any
other drug or food additive), please take a moment to make this
important call.
Are there ANY Safe and Healthy Alternatives to Sugar?
The best strategy is to lower your use of sugar and eat right
for your nutritional type and make sure you have enough high
quality fats. Once your body has the proper fuel, your sweet
cravings will radically diminish and you will be satisfied
without them. If you still have cravings it is a strong
suggestion you need to further refine your attempt to identify
the right fuel for your body. My free
Nutritional Plan can help you do this in a step by step
fashion.
If you need a sweetener you could use
stevia or Lo Han, both of which are safe natural sweeteners.
Remember, if you struggle with high blood pressure, high
cholesterol, diabetes or extra weight, then you have insulin
sensitivity issues and would benefit from avoiding ALL
sweeteners.
If you're having trouble weaning yourself off soda, try
Turbo Tapping. Turbo Tapping is a clever use of the
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), specifically designed to
resolve many aspects of an addiction in a concentrated period of
time.
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