Most Diet Coke® drinkers have read the term but havn’t a clue what it means.
Some people(appx. 1 in 15,000) with the recessive disorder called PKU(Phenylketonuria) are deficient in the enzyme which is necessary for metabolizing the amino acid known as Phenylalanine. Phenylalanine is found in most foods that contain protein(meat, dairy, tofu, etc.) and also aspartame, the sweetner used in most sugar-free foods including Diet Coke®. Don’t worry, usually a person knows if they have PKU.
I was always under the impression that the phenylketonuric warning on Diet Coke® cans was essentially a “drink at your own risk” warning by innuendo that meant it just may have caused cancer in lab rats. I was wrong. It is essentially the same thing as the “Kosher K”, a warning to consumers that it contains aspartame.
It just sounds too good to be true: A carbonated beverage that is 100% calorie-free and perfectly safe, except for the 40mg of sodium, but my blood pressure is fine.
Is there anything else I should know, considering that I drink gallons upon gallons of Diet Coke® anually?
Gallons per year? I probably average a gallon a day or more and have for years. If someone has a specific, citable warning, I’d be quite interested to know, too.
Aspartame is about as safe as they get if you’re not phenylketonuric.
I mean, it’s just two amino acids (phenylalanine and aspartic acid) bonded together. How much safer can you get? Scientific studies have confirmed again and again that it is safe, even in ludicrously high doses.
But that doesn’t stop the fanatics. Just type “Aspartame” into Google and click on any of the first half-dozen or so links. Here’s a particularly interesting page:
Whoa. First off, what happens at 86 degrees F is that the bond between the two amino acids dissociates (breaks down). That’s why you can’t use the stuff in baking, for instance; you wind up with no extra sweetness and some very expensive added amino acids. Even in hot coffee, the effective sweetness of Aspartame is often noticeably reduced; if you’re heating your cup up in the microwave, add the stuff afterwards. Second off, there is no wood alcohol (methanol) in Aspartame. Even if there were, converting methanol into formaldehyde in appreciable quantities requires a catalyst, not just the application of a smallish amount of heat.
Note: Since aspartame is made from amino acids, it is not 100% calorie-free; I’m guessing it goes about the same level as other proteins, 4 kCal per gramme. The ads I’ve seen for Diet Coke always claim, “Just 1 Calorie!” I think that’s per 355 mL can.
The link refers to a study done for four months, but gives no other details concerning the study, particularly how large a group it was. It, incidentally, refers to another study with schoolchildren, but, again, no details.
Just because it’s composed of two amino acids, doesn’t mean it’s safe. Salt, which is safe to most people, is compsed of two toxins. Anecdotal reports of headaches, diarrhea, and other minor complaints have been reported from the use of aspartame. It’s questionable if aspartame is to blame, but one or two studies of an indeterminate number of subjects does not prove anything.
First, to show I’m not covering my ass, the National Soft Drinks Association tell me I was wrong about the methanol-formaldehyde business. It turns out methanol is produced, in small amounts, during the metabolism of Aspartame. If you’re worried about it though, stay away from fruits and vegetables, which also contain methanol. Tomato juice too, which has five times the methanol level of metabolised Diet Coke. (The methanol comes from the fact that aspartame is in fact aspartic acid bonded to a methyl ester of phenylalanine, which I didn’t know before.)
More cites from The American Diabetes Association; the FDA, who say that “more than 100 toxicological and clinical studies [the FDA] has reviewed confirm that aspartame is safe for the general population”; the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, who have what appears to be the best information, including the following:
Two studies published this year (abstracts here and here) indicating that aspartame in fact helps relieve arthritic pain (in rats), and a third (here) indicating that aspartame might be effective in treating sickle-cell anemia. Another study on rats (here), where the experimenters were expecting aspartame to increase their aggressiveness, found in fact that the rats’ aggressiveness decreased and their serotonin levels rose. Unfortunately, an article (Health News. 2001 Jan;7(1):10) titled “What’s the truth about the health risks of sugar substitutes such as saccharin and aspartame?” has no abstract available.
And salt is not composed of two toxins. Neither the sodium ion nor the chloride ion are toxic. Elemental sodium and chlorine are, but that’s a different business.
(And of course, seconds before I hit “submit”, I see samclem has a much better post than I. I’m going to post anyway, if only for the bit about arthritic pain and sickle-cell.)
I just want to add that practically any substance in excess can have deleterious side effects, even water (water intoxication). Your liver, if not diseased, can handle small portions of toxins, but you can overwhelm it. For example, Tylenol won’t hurt you if taken in moderation, but it can in excess, as well as many other NSAIDs.
As far as aspartame being a peptide and our digestive system breaks down all peptides and proteins into their individual amino acids, that is true, but again in moderation. If you drink diet Coke all day, the aspartic acid and phenylalanine can overwhelm our system, even if healthy.
Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is not an NSAID; specifically, it is not anti-inflammatory (which is why it bugs me when they push it as arthritis medication, but that’s another story). Moreover, the toxic dose of acetaminophen, about 7 g, is much lower than that of any NSAID on the market. See what Cecil has to say.
A 355 mL can of Diet Coke contains 200 mg of Aspartame. If you drink Diet Coke all day (let’s say 32 cans, one every half-hour while you’re awake - equivalently, five and a half 2-litre bottles), you will ingest approximately 3.2 grammes each of aspartic acid and phenylalanine (I don’t know if one is heavier than the other). I don’t have figures in front of me, but I suspect you’d get more of these amino acids from scarfing down a 12-ounce steak. Meanwhile, ingesting that much liquid in a day is probably more harmful to me than 3 grammes of aspartic acid or phenylalanine (or 300-ish mg of methanol for that matter).
Most of the rest of the previous post is fairly accurate.
This issue was discussed about a month ago in the midst of this thread. I’ve copied below my comments from that thread.
And now, back to this thread ----
If I may quibble, a scientific study cannot confirm that it is safe. It may confirm that a particular study finds no link between ingesting aspartame in specific quantities and particular health problems during the timeframe of the study, but it cannot confirm that there are not other issues that they were not studying or did not find, or that may show up with continued use. That said, since it has been used in such massive quantities for about 20 years, it probably isn’t massively toxic stuff for the general population — but I don’t use it, and I don’t feed it to my kids.
YWalker In the interest of science, could you answer the following questions.
l. You say that you used to consume aspartame in little blue packets in 1983 “on a regular basis.” How frequently would that be?
2. How frequently would your headaches be?
I don’t doubt that there COULD be some cause/effect. But you also gave up pretzels at the same time, assuming I understood your post. You can’t say for sure that it wasn’t something in the pretzels(just to make an argument).
That seems to be the problem. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of professional, controlled studies which prove anything.
You said
Would you care to offer studies done by non-manufacturers that offer definitive “proof” of anything. I think that most of the research is very poorly done.
Again, don’t get me wrong. I would dearly love to know the answers. But the anti-aspartame side has never come up with a study which offers reproducible results which would offen explanations for your “anecdotal” headaches.