2 replies to this topic

[stocks]

The campaign against Nutrasweet (aspartame)

Coming as I do from a big sugar-producing area (Far North Queensland), I always read carefully the little sachets that one gets with one's coffee in coffee lounges. I make sure that I am putting real sugar in my coffee and not some substitute junk. So I should be in sympathy with the campaign against aspartame, right? Wrong! As far as I can see, the campaign is founded on little more than the usual self-glorifying belief that if something is popular it must be bad.

There is a list here of 13 recent anti-aspartame studies and, unless I have missed something, there is not one study of the type that would be decisive: A double-blind study in humans. There are plenty of in vitro ("test tube") and in vivo (rats and mice) studies but that's about it.

http://health.groups...NM/message/1464

And even some of the studies listed there admit that some of the potentially bad byproducts of aspartame metabolism can be broken down rapidly by other food components or metabolites. So showing that rats on a rat diet cannot handle aspartame well tells us nothing about humans. What is needed are studies of humans on a human diet as it seems probable that the human metabolism CAN safely break down aspartame. One has to look at the bottom line, not intermediate processes in isolation.

Since a double blind study in humans should not pose any great difficulty, I think it is the absence of such a study which is most telling.

The attention-seeking studies have however had an effect. There are now various bans on aspartame, particularly in Europe and the UK. Seeing how crazy such places also are about "obesity", it is strange indeed that something which could help combat obesity is restricted on such flimsy grounds. It reinforces the impression that the attack on obesity is insincere too. It adds to the evidence that the anti-obesity campaign is really an expression of middle-class contempt for the working class, who are indeed fatter on the whole: Good old class-prejudice again. The more things change ....

The amusing thing is that all the food and health rhetoric goes right over the heads of most working class people. They very wisely just don't listen. They just eat what they like and darn the consequences. I do too. But my father was, after all, a lumberjack. Heh!

http://john-ray.blogspot.com/

[TTHQ Staff]

The campaign against Nutrasweet (aspartame)

Coming as I do from a big sugar-producing area (Far North Queensland), I always read carefully the little sachets that one gets with one's coffee in coffee lounges. I make sure that I am putting real sugar in my coffee and not some substitute junk. So I should be in sympathy with the campaign against aspartame, right? Wrong! As far as I can see, the campaign is founded on little more than the usual self-glorifying belief that if something is popular it must be bad.

There is a list here of 13 recent anti-aspartame studies and, unless I have missed something, there is not one study of the type that would be decisive: A double-blind study in humans. There are plenty of in vitro ("test tube") and in vivo (rats and mice) studies but that's about it.

http://health.groups...NM/message/1464

And even some of the studies listed there admit that some of the potentially bad byproducts of aspartame metabolism can be broken down rapidly by other food components or metabolites. So showing that rats on a rat diet cannot handle aspartame well tells us nothing about humans. What is needed are studies of humans on a human diet as it seems probable that the human metabolism CAN safely break down aspartame. One has to look at the bottom line, not intermediate processes in isolation.

Since a double blind study in humans should not pose any great difficulty, I think it is the absence of such a study which is most telling.

The attention-seeking studies have however had an effect. There are now various bans on aspartame, particularly in Europe and the UK. Seeing how crazy such places also are about "obesity", it is strange indeed that something which could help combat obesity is restricted on such flimsy grounds. It reinforces the impression that the attack on obesity is insincere too. It adds to the evidence that the anti-obesity campaign is really an expression of middle-class contempt for the working class, who are indeed fatter on the whole: Good old class-prejudice again. The more things change ....

The amusing thing is that all the food and health rhetoric goes right over the heads of most working class people. They very wisely just don't listen. They just eat what they like and darn the consequences. I do too. But my father was, after all, a lumberjack. Heh!

http://john-ray.blogspot.com/

I did *some* secondary research into Aspartame about a decade ago and found one of my favorite arguments against aspartame. One was that aspartame was the product of two amino acids, phenylalanine (an essential amino acid found in meats, dairy products, eggs, nuts, legumes... etc.) and aspartic acid. But the silent killer was the 10% methanol which will make you go BLIND!! or at least turn into formaldehyde - i.e. embalming fluid.

Ok, since most people regularly consume up to 10 mg of methanol per day as part of their normal diet. One 12-ounce can of aspartame-sweetened soda contains about 200 milligrams of aspartame*. You'd add a tenth of this amount to your diet as methanol following digestion.

Ta Da.

[EntropyModel]

Quick google search I found these -
------------------------------------------

Adverse reactions to aspartame: double-blind challenge in patients from a vulnerable population.

Department of Psychiatry, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, Youngstown.

This study was designed to ascertain whether individuals with mood disorders are particularly vulnerable to adverse effects of aspartame. Although the protocol required the recruitment of 40 patients with unipolar depression and a similar number of individuals without a psychiatric history, the project was halted by the Institutional Review Board after a total of 13 individuals had completed the study because of the severity of reactions within the group of patients with a history of depression. In a crossover design, subjects received aspartame 30 mg/kg/day or placebo for 7 days. Despite the small n, there was a significant difference between aspartame and placebo in number and severity of symptoms for patients with a history of depression, whereas for individuals without such a history there was not. We conclude that individuals with mood disorders are particularly sensitive to this artificial sweetener and its use in this population should be discouraged."

PMID: 8373935 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]


http://www.ncbi.nlm....c...&dopt=Books

3 double blind studies with adverse effects
http://www.wnho.net/...experiments.htm



Personally, unscientifically and anecdotally, I cannot drink anything with it in, if I do I get pain in my joints the next day and feel really terrible, but possibly a large % of population have no problems with it at all.

This is a statistical problem, because random double blind studies with large n will show a normally distributed set of statistical signficances i.e. a bunch of studies will show no statistically significant results, a few outliers will show a strong significance - as is typical of most medical study design i.e. pretty worthless and allows everyone to pick their favourite study to fit bias, or do 'meta analysis' and just add another layer of statistical delusion. Whereas using small n and targetting a dependent variable e.g. depression, as study above, will show strong results, that will be dismissed due to small n.(its hard to find large target populations).....hence as I endlessly repeat, using statistics as a substitute for real science is a waste of time, especially since the statistical methods beings used are throughly discredited by Bayes and other mathematicians who invented them.



Mark

Edited by entropy, 11 September 2007 - 01:53 PM.