What's the consensus on aspartame?

Factual Questions
21

First, the question is moot if you can drink something else that tastes sweet but doesn’t contain either aspartame or sugar. That was the obvious point of my comment.

Second, the effect isn’t the same as aspartame. Aspartame is metabolized, sucralose isn’t. It does appear to trick the body into thinking it’s sugar though so presumably that could have some untoward effects if you overdo it but then the same is obviously true of sugar. So you then have a choice of the lesser of the two evils in which case I think it’s a pretty clear choice.

22

It’s not moot for obvious reasons. First, “something else” isn’t always preferred. As you note, drinks containing sucralose are hard to find. Why should the OP search for something hard to find when his preferred drinks are perfectly fine to consume? Second, if aspartame has a mountain of research that deems it safe, there’s no reason to swap it for something else just because you claim that something else “should pose fewer potential issues” and “should make it even more innocuous.”

Now that’s a moot point. We eat plenty of things that are metabolized, obviously. The salient point is that aspartame has been widely studied for many years and have been deemed safe at even unreasonable levels of consumption.

But just for fun, some metabolism of sucralose does occur. Some of something can be more dangerous than all of something else. How much is metabolized isn’t clear to me, as different sources give different numbers.

https://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/98fr/040398a.pdf

23

That’s interesting about the metabolites. I didn’t know it was possible to only partially metabolize something. I always figured that if you had the enzymes to break it down it got metabolized and if not it didn’t. I wonder what the mechanism involved is.

But back to whether something is a moot issue or not. As has been pointed out, there are still open issues with all artificial sweeteners so based on available information you can choose something other than aspartame if you don’t like the evidence you’ve been presented with so far. Personally I don’t. While I understand that mouse studies don’t tend to extrapolate to humans something like alkaline phosphatase is probably something we share with our diminutive murine brothers and sisters. So I’m going to avoid anything that interferes with its activity.

I’m also going to avoid anything that is extensively metabolized if for no other reason that we have no idea what affect it has on our microbiomes. That’s an area that is very poorly understood at the moment so if I’m going to consume something artificial at all, I want to pick something that is as unlikely as possible to interfere either with my own biochemistry or commensal inhabitants.

If someone else disagrees with my assessment of the risks and benefits, that’s fine. I don’t get any points for winning converts. My only objective is to share information and help advance the discussion.

24

Then you’ll need to avoid the vast majority of (if not all) foods including “natural” foods because they haven’t been rigorously studied to see how they’ll affect our microbiomes. :frowning:

It’s repeatedly been shown that extrapolating results from rodents to humans is fraught with error.

“…when one empirically analyzes animal models using scientific tools they fall far short of being able to predict human responses. This is not surprising considering what we have learned from fields such evolutionary and developmental biology, gene regulation and expression, epigenetics, complexity theory, and comparative genomics…
There are direct and indirect consequences to this misunderstanding of what prediction means. If we did not allow on the market any chemical or drug that causes cancer, or is teratogenic, or causes severe side effects in any species, then we would have no chemicals or drugs at all. Furthermore, there is a cost to keeping otherwise good chemicals off the market. We lose: treatments perhaps even cures; the income that could have been generated; and new knowledge that could have been gained from learning more about the chemical. These are not insignificant downsides. Since we now understand vis-à-vis personalized medicine that even humans differ in their response to drugs and disease and hence one human cannot predict what a drug will do to another human, it seems illogical to find models that are predictive using completely different species from humans.”

26

MichaelEmouse has been elevated to the ranks of those who can boast that their questions were answered by Unca Cece himself: What’s the skinny on artificial sweeteners like aspartame? (November 17, 2017). Congratulations.

The column reports that: “Control groups of mice were fed natural sugars; only the NAS mice developed abnormally high blood-sugar levels.” so I wonder if some of the OP’s relatives were involved in the lab tests.

27

That column does not mark one of Cecil’s finer moments.

Instead of the backhanded comment about how aspartame “probably” doesn’t cause cancer, an accurate observation would’ve been that research overwhelmingly shows no cancer link*, and that there’s considerable research showing that substituting artificial sweeteners for sugar consistently lowers BMI and total weight.

And speaking of consensus: there’s a definitely risky sweetener out there linked to obesity, type II diabetes, poorer mental health and risk markers for heart disease. It’s called sugar.

*For example, the European Food Safety Authority says: “Overall, the Panel concluded, on the basis of all the evidence currently available… that there is no indication of any genotoxic or carcinogenic potential of aspartame and that there is no reason to revise the previously established ADI for aspartame of 40 mg/kg [body weight].”

28

It’s no such thing, which wouldn’t exist anyway. Sucralose is derived from sucrose, but so is acetic acid and nobody would sweeten his coffee with vinegar or declare that vinegar is “biologically inert sucrose”.

29

Not all NAS work the same way, and rodents don’t metabolize glucose like humans do.

30

I don’t know if it is too late to comment on this thread. But I would just add Aspartame does contain Methyl Alcohol, which is poisonous.

It’s claim to fame 30+ years ago is that it was merely two harmless amino acids bound together. But actually that is only partly true. In fact, Methyl Alcohol is even part of its name.

In its chemical form, it is inert. But as the theory goes, when it has been laying around for a while (like in factory bins), it breaks down, and some of the Methyl Alcohol is freed.

Aspartame was still great for its time though. It was the first alternative to Saccharine. Now there are so many alternatives, the magic is essential gone.

:slight_smile:

31

From here.

32

Oh, please.

Your body is exposed to more methyl alcohol when you ingest citrus fruits or tomatoes, than you get when you ingest ordinary amounts of aspartame.

33

All I know about aspartame is that it’s a product originating from the loins of Lucifer himself, crafted insidiously in order to systematically wipe out the human race. “Science” is part of the insidious smokescreen on used to fool all the rubies and peons
ETA: And this is a fact!

34

Are you referring to PKU? That’s extremely rare (something like 1 in 20,000) and people who have that are on extremely restricted diets anyway. It’s vegan, and because they cannot have commonly used vegan protein sources like dried beans, because they contain phenylalanine, they have to take protein supplements and use special medical foods so they can get proper nutrition and also eat foods that look “normal”.

As for a consensus, there really isn’t one.

p.s. Pearl S. Buck’s daughter, who was mentally disabled, was discovered in middle age to have PKU. She was put on a modified PKU diet and it did improve her overall health, although the brain damage was irreversible. It’s one of those diseases that’s looked for when they do that heel stick on newborn babies, not the implantation of a microchip as some people believe.