I’ve just recently noticed this. Because of the health risks associated with consuming aspartame, I prefer to chew gums which do not contain that additive. Of course, there are very few sugar-free gums which do not contain aspartame. However, it appears that all cinnamon-flavored sugar-free gums lack aspartame! I’ve checked this out with many different brand names (Trident, Wrigley’s, etc.), and it seems that not a single brand contains it.
Why is this? Is it because cinnamon is a relatively strong/spicy taste which doesn’t really need the addition of aspartame to enhance it? Or is there something chemically incompatible between the aspartame chemical and cinnamon?
First, Snopes (and pretty much the entire scientific community) debunk the idea that aspartame is bad for you: Snopes Link Certainly sugar is worse. This gets discussed here at least a few times a year.
But ignoring that, this link discusses exactly what you propose – that cinnamon can reduce the sweetening behavior – look down in the section about “Aspartame in confectionery products.”
Not to hijack my own thread, but the reason I wish to avoid aspartame is because my friend said that aspartame was proven to cause brain gliomas in lab rats, based on the dosage that a human being would normally receive over a decade due to the toxicity of formic acid and formaldehyde in the body. I would tend to believe her, since she will be defending her PhD thesis in biochemistry in a few months.
Another reason is that maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but I can’t stand that weird, lingering aftertaste of aspartame, which is the main reason why I am switching to sugar-free cinnamon gum.
Not to support the hijacking of your own thread, but honestly, don’t believe everything someone says when they merely tack on ‘a study showed’. Ask to see the study. Ask what company/organization ran the study and if it’s been reproduced by other scientests. I’ve come to take everything I hear with a grain of salt when it comes to the ‘evils’ of our foods today.
Well, that does not make her immune from misinformation, especially if this misinformation is not outright quackery and is valid (just not sound). She can’t possibly read every study that she hears about, at least if she’s social enough in her academic circle. Especially on something that is not all that interesting – admit it, aspartame is boring.
If for example somebody told me there’s an elegant proof that PSPACE-Complete problems lie outside of P and NP, I’d be pestering the person for a cite within seconds. On the other hand, if somebody tells me somebody published a paper that proves yet another finite subset of odd numbers follow Goldbach’s weak conjecture, I might just assume that’s true without checking – c’mon, who is going to make that up and why, and nothing about it is impossible, groundbreaking or useful for me.
Sigh. Fine, we’ll do this again. The Snopes link I posted above has FIVE cites (including MIT, the Lancet, and the FDA) saying that this specific claim (brain tumors, for those who don’t want to look up “glioma”) isn’t true.
Please ask your friend to look up the actual study “proving” this, and its credentials, and why it feels the numerous other studies (there have been something like seventeen of them now) never find the effect.
Okay, I just shared my previous post with my friend, and it seems that I somewhat misunderstood her! :smack:
She reminded me that a lot of these toxicity studies dealt with lab rats that were administered an overwhelming dose of aspartame (significantly more than an adult would consume in a sitting). However, the rumor, which I took to be a fact, is the surprising observation that brain gliomas increased in frequency upon aspartame introduction into the food chain. This can also be explained by the fact that people are living longer and therefore, cancer is more prevalent, not directly an effect of aspartame.
She also said that all such studies need to be taken wih a grain of salt, and that the impact of the journal can be a means to evaluate the validity of a study. For example, we found a recent study on PubMed in a fairly decent journal (Cancer Epidemiol Markers Rev.) stating that they found no correlation between normal aspartame consumption and the occurring rate of hematopoetic cancers/brain gliomas in a huge sample size (> 400K study participants).
Darn it. That’s what I get for hijacking my own thread! :o
