You have to admit, if the Apocalypse had a spokesperson, he’d be it.
I freely admit I’ve been made lazy by American culture. No, I don’t buy the jar of peanut butter and jelly mixed together, but among other things, I’ve become accustomed to easy access to tasty beverages and non-coffee caffeine boosts. In other words, I drink Diet Coke. Depending on the day, I may drink a lot of it, too.
Since the Nutrasweet swirl first hit the can in the ’80s, we’ve been told of its potential harm (especially if you’re a lab rat). But back in the good old days of youthful naivete, I internalized the idea that the FDA knew best. Though I’ve had health-related reservations from time to time, and though I now know the FDA’s reliability rates just behind Satan’s, and even though it’s changed its name to the much less sexy “aspartame,” I’ve still allowed myself to drink the stuff.
Then a friend casually mentioned the one mood-related aspartame study performed to date, a study that found such strong connections between aspartame and increased depression (particularly if you have a family history) that they had to stop the study.
Then I heard about the chewing gum poisoning in New Zealand. Yeah, you heard that right — chewing gum poisoning. A woman in her 20s chewed 4 packs a day of sugar-free gum. Unsurprisingly, the sweetener used in the gum was aspartame. This is her story:
“I became very, very depressed and anxious and I wasn’t sleeping well. I tried to ignore it but it became worse and worse.”
A psychiatrist diagnosed Miss Cormack with mild depression but found it difficult to fathom as she enjoyed a very stable and happy family, social and work life.
She then began to experience panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.
“I started getting physical symptoms. Muscle cramps that started off in my legs. I put the muscle cramps down to weight training.”
She stopped the weight training but the muscle cramps spread and grew worse. Her doctors suspected multiple sclerosis but the numerous tests showed that everything was normal.
Now suffering from exhaustion and excruciating pain, and wondering whether it was all in her head, Miss Cormack said the last straw was when she lost control of her bladder at work.
At that point her mother suggested looking in to her heavy use of sugar-free chewing gum. After checking the ingredients, she ‘googled’ phenylalanine, and up came aspartame.
“And I clicked on that and my symptoms came up – every one of them.”
American researcher and endocrinologist, Dr H. J. Roberts, identified blindness as being ‘the most serious complication’ from the use of aspartame. Miss Cormack said her symptoms disappeared within days of stopping her sugar-free gum habit.
In no way shape or form have I experienced anything like this, but this anecdotal story combined with the earlier study of depression has given me pause. At the very least, it certainly can’t hurt to cut out Diet Coke from my, uh, diet. [There aren't that many good synonyms for "diet," are there?]
The hard part will be fighting the laziness. I like a drink that gives me a boost. I really like the way Diet Coke tastes, whether or not that means I’d also enjoy such beverages as pen ink and battery acid. And when I want a snack, I’m going to have to reach for something other than a soda. Or Frito Lay chips. Or Pop Tarts. Or whatever other over-processed monstrosity pases for food around here.
I just wish I’d decided all this before I bought two 12-packs of cherry coke zero.
Green tea with a fuck ton o’ honey. Just the perfect amount of caffeine.
MMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
How much caffeine does green tea have in it?
I think for me quitting drinking Diet Coke was WAY harder than quitting smoking cigarettes. It is like sweet delicious crack. I can’t stand regular Coke, but I could drink Diet all day long. I quit because of the horrible aspartame, so I totally sympathize with you, good luck!
Mmmmm….. mayostard and mustardayonnaise
How much caffeine does green tea have in it?
My teabags say 41mg per serving. Tea can be easily decaffinated by brewing it for 30 seconds, then throwing out the water and brewing for the normal time in new water. At least, that’s what the people at upton tea told me.
Does Mt. Dew have aspirtene in it? Because I can’t get through the day without a 12 oz.
It helps that aspartame tastes like someone is injecting copper-plated shit directly into your tongue via spinal needle.
At least, it helps me.
I’m going to have to second Auguste on that one. Nothing like the acidic, completely unrefreshing chemical tang of fake sugar.
It also gives me a headache
Death by caffeine!
But seriously, there are all kinds of good reasons to cut Coke out of your diet, starting with human rights abuses in Colombia. The company is pretty much pure evil.
I found a few others (searching PubMed for “aspartame” and “mood”). One study of men, one of college-aged women, and one of children (all healthy) showed no changes in mood with aspartame compared to placebo. I haven’t read the whole studies to see how good they are, though.
The study mentioned in your article wasn’t horrible, but I don’t think you can take much from the study being stopped. The result was statistically significant, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no chance the results were due to chance, just that the odds were against it. With n=13, that’s not too unlikely.
None of that is to say that reducing or eliminating Diet Coke wouldn’t be a good thing, but the studies just don’t show much evidence of harm.
Just drink Diet Coke with Splenda
Kyso, if you reuse green tea, then add a fuckload of honey, I’m a bit surprised you can taste the tea. (Admittedly I like my tea strong and black).
Brewing for less than 30 seconds doesn’t suck too much of the tea flavor out, but does take care of most of the far-more-soluble caffiene. If you do this right, you’ll hardly notice a difference in the tea.
And in what honey-using situation would you not use a fuckload of honey? I can’t think of anything I use honey on that wouldn’t be improved by the addition of more honey.
Well, cherry coke zero has Splenda in it, not aspartame (thats the difference between diet coke and coke zero), so you don’t have to worry about those side effects at least. Don’t know if Splenda’s got any to worry about, though…
actually, coke zero is still aspartame. only diet coke with splenda is splendified.
j train, i think those studies might be the ones done by “friendly” parties to soft drink corps. could be wrong, though…
And aspertame can also cause epilepsy. it did for me and ive heard stories of others. I used to drink at least 4-6 cans of diet coke a day. Or… diet anything. I became epileptic and none of the tests could explain it. they took me off of meds and the diet coke, they went away, and then i went back to drinking the stuff, and poof, like magic, the grand maul seizures came back.
I havent had diet soda (in huge amounts, i still chew stupid sugar free gum and a few diet cokes a year when someone fucks up an order at a restaurant) or medicine for the seizures in over 8 years, and theyve determined it was the high levels of aspertame and saccrin (sp?) that did it
fuck splenda, and fuck nutrisweet.
gimme sugar.
mary, did you control for caffeine? Diet coke has a lot of caffeine in it as well as artificial sweetener(s), and is a known central nervous system stimulant.
My stimulant drink of choice is yerba mate, brewed strong and mixed with equal parts hot soymilk, sweetened with lots of honey (amen, Kyso!) For those of you who haven’t heard of mate, it’s a leafy plant that grows in the tropics. In addition to caffeine, it also contains several other stimulant compounds, and most people report that the ‘high’ from mate is more mild and long-lasting than that from coffee/tea/cola, with less noticeable withdrawal effects like headache and ‘the shakes.’
PSA here. Yes, I’m a chemistry nerd.
There are three main kinds of artificial sweeteners: aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin. They are chemically unrelated to each other, and the differences between them are way bigger than those between different natural sweeteners, like table sugar (sucrose) and fruit sugar (fructose.) The fact that they all have a similar effect on our bodies – tasting sweet – is almost coincidental in this light. To me, that’s why they’re interesting.
Equal and Nutrasweet are made of aspartame [asp-R-tame], which is a molecule made of two linked amino acids. Long chains of amino acids are called proteins, and many if not all proteins contain bits of aspartame in their chains. In other words, aspartame is a naturally occuring substance in the body, but it’s only present in very small amounts at any given time.
Once it’s inside the body, the two amino acids in aspartame are split apart (they react with water) and then used to make proteins that the body can use for rebuilding tissues, etc.
The problem with eating aspartame in large quantities is that some people are sensitive to one of its amino acids (phenylalanine.) They can tolerate the small amounts naturally present in their bodies, but can’t handle the flood of it that happens when they eat aspartame. These people are called “phenylketonurics.” This why Equal/Nutrasweet packages have that warning on them that says, “Phenylketonurics: Contains phenylalanine.” This condition is pretty rare, though.
I don’t think any other common problems have really been proven yet. This is not to discount anyone’s experience with it – as we all know, any substance in large enough quantites isn’t good for you. Theoretically you could die from drinking too much water (it would eventually deplete your body of the salts it needs to function.)
Splenda is made of sucralose[soo-kruh-lowce]. You’ve heard of glucose (“blood sugar,” right?) Well, sucralose is a type sugar, too, except that it – unlike naturally occuring sugars – has a few chlorine atoms replacing some the natural -OH groups in the molecule. It is a “chlorinated sugar.” It is not a naturally occuring substance.
As a chemist, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of putting things in our bodies which don’t occur in nature. But it’s also good to put that suspicion in perspective, based on the available research.
Sweet’N Low is made of saccharin [sack-uh-rin]. It is a not a naturally occuring substance (actually, it has a very strange chemical structure, completely unrelated to sugar.) It passes through the body undigested – that’s why Sweet’N Low is the only artificial sweetener that can claim it’s “calorie-free”… your body can’t use it for energy (calories are a unit of energy.)
There have been a lot of conflicting studies on the health effects of saccharin. Some studies show a link to cancer, and some don’t show any link at all. That’s why saccharin is still legal in the US – it’s not been proven to be hazardous. But this doesn’t mean that it is safe, it just means that what we’ve learned so far doesn’t show a clear danger.
Hopefully someone got something out of this post!