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I really don't need a study to tell me that aspartame is really, really bad for my brain. Had seizures b/c of the stuff for 10 years and yes, I know it was the aspartame. I begged my brother to stop the diet sodas and he laughed me off until his memory started to play tricks on him and one of his pilot friends told him he should lay off the diet soda b/c it causes those same symptoms and apparently a lot of pilots don't touch the stuff for similar reasons.
I look at it this way: I could ignore the warnings and laugh it off as scaremongering. Then I might or might not have problems. Or I could take it as a caution that something so purely unnatural may just very well have consequences and leave it alone and I will not be any worse off. Esp since I don't drink the sugared soda either. My diet does not need soda or diet pudding or diet jello or what have you--aspartame is not a necessary nutrient.
Oh, and the most aspartame I ever consumed in my life was about 5 diet sodas per week for several months in the summertime. When the weather got colder I switched to hot drinks and I started to notice that the seizures always came in September. By most standards, this is not an excessive amount and since I stopped drinking it, I have never had another seizure.
So you know it was aspartame, despite the fact that every study done on the matter shows that it does NOT cause the symptoms you are describing? Quite interesting. Unfortunately, scientific evidence always trumps anecdotal evidence.
Chances are that something else was causing your seizures and you remedied the issue around the same time you quit drinking diet soda and you've confused correlation with causation.
there are the caloric sweeteners - white sugar, brown sugar, honey
and the non caloric sweeteners - Sucralose, Aspertame, Sweet n low (lets just say Yellow, blue, and pink - and stevia.
Because of blood sugar issues, AND weight loss/maintenance, i try to avoid all the caloric ones. I kind of like honey for special things, so I will use it once in a while. Im enough of a child of the 1960s/70s to want brown sugar, but I dont really use it much. While I almost never add white sugar to anything anymore, Im not treating it as poison to be avoided at all costs.
For the sweeteners -I know that single study that showed that artificial sweeteners lead to weight gain is now questioned. I still see no reason to use them when theres a non sweetened alternative that works - so I will drink water or selzer in preference to diet soda. But if you are drinking diet soda, I dont know you have to panic. I do not like unsweetened coffee, or grapefruit, or oatmeal, so I do use sweeteners, esp for coffee. My wife likes stevia, but its pricey and not always available. I tend to use the yellow stuff, but Im not scared of the blue and pink stuff.
only if ingested excessively. otherwise there is nothing wrong with them.
Nobody ingests excessively in one meal. It's the buildup over many years that ruin your health. Folks make the mistake of thinking that only "sweets" that you can see like table sugar, cake, pastry are bad in excess. It's all the refined sugar in most of our processed foods that kills us.
We are culturally conditioned to eat simple carbs like bread, jam, etc without thinking. We grow up on McDonalds foods and beverages. We associate eating at these places with Mom/Pop and good times with friends. We take our children to them regularly. We satiate ourselves with these foods and feel good. It's when you get to your 30's and 40s that you get hit with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gum disease, stroke, etc. All the result of a lifetime of eating refined sugars.
I use stevia in my coffee. No other sweets........but in a social situation may have a slice of cake or something.
When you google aspartame....you will never want to have it ever again. I am hooked on Stevia.
So you trust your health to whoever can get themselves onto the first page or so of Google? That really opens you up to misleading information, and case in point, when I googled "aspartame" the first three links I got were two Wiki pages and then a page from the site of certified quack, Dr. Mercola. In fact, six of the links on the first page are your typical scare sites.
Nobody ingests excessively in one meal. It's the buildup over many years that ruin your health. Folks make the mistake of thinking that only "sweets" that you can see like table sugar, cake, pastry are bad in excess. It's all the refined sugar in most of our processed foods that kills us.
So you know it was aspartame, despite the fact that every study done on the matter shows that it does NOT cause the symptoms you are describing? Quite interesting. Unfortunately, scientific evidence always trumps anecdotal evidence.
Chances are that something else was causing your seizures and you remedied the issue around the same time you quit drinking diet soda and you've confused correlation with causation.
Now maybe you can use one of those studies to convince me that I need aspartame in my diet.
Here's a few. I simply don't have the time or inclination to find you the most authoritative and/or linked studies. There are hundreds of studies out there. A simple google search "site:edu, danger of refined sugars" brings up 29,000 results. If you take the time to go through them, you will come up with enough authoritative studies making a direct link between sugar consumption and risk factors for diabetes, heart disease, stroke, etc.
No one said you need it. Necessity and danger are radically different concepts.
OK, try this. If you're eating pretty healthy and consuming foods with one of these artificial sweeteners and you're not feeling your best--maybe you get headaches or seizures or you have MS or whatever. . . you might just try going off the sweeteners for awhile and see how that does you. It won't hurt your health to do this unless you sub in something worse, and you might even get to feeling better. Your headaches could disappear, and your MS might even clear up as if it had never been. Stranger things have happened. And if there is no diff after about 6 weeks (aspartame is a slow poison so it's hard to tell sometimes that it's hurting you) then just go back to your diet sodas. But you might have lost your taste for them by then and figured out a healthier alternative than a batch of chemicals. It's generally healthier to choose your food as close to the way God made it as you can, assuming that it is food.
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