I saw short news story on the TV this morning saying that drinking a lot of diet soda with aspartame may not actually help the old diet because your body will ‘learn’ how to turn it into sugar and then will just turn that sugar into fat. I’m deeply suspicious of news items on FOX, and therefore tried to confirm this report on GOOGLE, but no luck. (Instead I found lots of reports on aspartame being deadly…but since most were written by licensed Iridologists :rolleyes: I immediately discounted them). So I thought I’d put it forth to you fine people here.
Is this even possible? And even if it is, one of the benefits of aspartame is that it is soooo freaking sweet that you need hardly any in the first place, right? So even if you are turning it into sugar, it wouldn’t be much anyhow.
Thanks much.
That’s freakin’ ridiculous. There is NO similarity between sugar and aspartame (Equal, the sugar substitute containing aspartame, has some non-nutritive sugar in it, I believe, but not diet soda). Well, they both have carbon, and some hydrogen and oxygen, but that’s about it. Bodies don’t “learn” stuff like that, anyway, so if it were possible, there would be only be a handful of mutants who could do it.
Anyway, you’re right; aspartame is about 200 times sweeter than sugar; a 12-oz. can of Coke contains about 40g of sugar, so I’d guess a can of diet Coke contains about 200mg of aspartame.
Aspartame is a dipeptide: L-aspartyl-L-phenylalanine methyl ester.
When you hydrolyze (i.e. digest) aspartame you end up with two amino acids: aspartic acid and phenylalanine. Amino acids are normally used by the body as building blocks for proteins, not sugars or fats. It’s possible to break these amino acids down further and make sugar from the pieces, but that’s not something that happens much.
The sites you referred to seem to enjoy making a big deal about how toxic phenylalanine is, yet phenylalanine is an essential amino acid (i.e. we’d die without it) that humans cannot make, and must obtain from bacterial, plant or other sources.
FOX is up to its usual misinformational hyjinx.
Well, there’re something like 9 kcal/g in fat, and 4 in carbohydrates and proteins. So 1 g aspartame (should give you about 4 kcal, same as sugar, unless it’s not digestable. Is it?
PC