Waiting Room
How safe are artificial sweeteners?
Julie Chaplin CHHP
Our last Northword topic was sugar, and I suggested a variety of alternatives. You will note, however, that I did not suggest artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, saccharine, or sucralose as healthy alternatives to sugar. This is because I personally do not condone their use and would actually choose sugar over artificial sweeteners if there were no other options.
Artificial sweeteners contain zero nutritional value, are highly processed and toxic, cancer-causing substances. As Paul Pitchford states in Healing with Whole Foods, “...any food that is highly processed and taken out of its whole-food environment of minerals, fibres, vitamins, and enzymes is already limited in nutritional content.”
Artificial sweeteners have multiple names and disguises. For instance, products containing aspartame include NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, Canderel, NatraSweet and Diabeti-Sweet. Saccharine is known as Sweet’n Low, and Sucralose is known as Splenda.
According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), aspartame is one of the most thoroughly tested food additives, but has also had the most complaints. With a long list of 92 side-effects, it has been linked to brain tumors, migraines, immunological and neurological disorders, seizures, confusion, depression, gas, indigestion, joint pain, muscle spasms, Attention Deficit Disorder, and it mimics diseases such as fibromyalgia, MS, and chronic fatigue syndrome. The FDA actually denied the approval of aspartame for more than eight years. When Arthur Hull Hayes became the new FDA commissioner in the early 1980s, he overruled the scientific review panel and approved aspartame, right before going on to work for the public relations department of the initial owner of aspartame, G. D. Searle. Coincidence?
The toxicity of aspartame is a result of the by-products produced in your body once the substance is ingested. Once consumed, aspartame breaks down into methanol, aspartic acid, and phenylalanine. Individually, these by-products are extremely harmful. It is important to understand that although methanol is naturally present in fruits and vegetables, so are ethanol and pectin. But because ethanol and pectin are not present in aspartame, the methanol by itself converts to formaldehyde and formic acid (the same chemical as fire-ant venom), which can cause blindness and acidosis; aspartic acid can cause brain damage and phenylalanine causes brain damage to anyone with the genetic disease PKU (phenylketonuria).
Not any better, Sucralose is essentially chlorinated sugar and saccharine is a carcinogen.
Unfortunately, artificial sweeteners are used in many products—usually labeled “diet,” “low fat,” or “no calories“—such as pop, gum, yogurt, desserts, and even cold medicines. To make matters more confusing, there are many other artificial sweeteners on the market. To simplify things, here is a list of the ones to AVOID: aspartame,saccharine, sucralose.
These artificial sweeteners are considered safe: maltitol,mannitol,sorbitol, and xylitol.
If you are interested in reading more about aspartame, artificial sweeteners and their health risks, read Aspartame Warning at www.321recipes.com, which contains more than one hundred articles from over 50 doctors and nutritionists. Another good resource is Deadly Deception: Story of Aspartame: Shocking Exposé of the World’s Most Controversial Sweetener by Mark Nash. As well, check out www.sweetpoison.com for nutritionist Dr. Janet Star Hull’s Aspartame Detox 10-Step Program.
I urge you to do your own research and learn about these silent killers that are lurking in our foods. Artificial sweeteners have a distinct taste and once you know what healthy, nutritional food tastes like, you can taste the fake stuff. Not only is it harmful, it doesn’t taste good!
Tracy Morton MD
In the last Northword, Julie and I discussed the health troubles that can arise from consuming sugar. This week, we will look at sugar alternatives.
There are few topics more controversial than the health effects of artificial sweeteners. Some people have difficulty with the idea of eating foods sweetened with a manmade chemical, and believe that there must be toxic effects because it is “artificial.” I will admit that before I researched this article, I had some uneasiness about that Diet Coke I often consumed; maybe I would find out that the rumours are true. Here’s what I found.
First, there are four artificial sweeteners used in Canada, each very different in composition: cyclamate, aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame. It is time-consuming to research the health impacts of all the various sweeteners; a Google search for ‘aspartame’ alone returned over two million hits. In the top ten are seven sites detailing the evidence that aspartame is harmful, with some calling it toxic and poisonous. In an article called “Aspartame and the Internet” published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, the authors wrote, “Virtually all of the information offered [on these websites] is anecdotal, from anonymous sources, and is scientifically implausible.”
Instead of looking at unfiltered websites, I went to sources I respect: Health Canada, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Food and Safety Authority, and other bodies like WHO. These organizations employ thousands of people whose job it is to review the evidence on our behalf.
In the approval process for a new food additive, the US FDA and Health Canada review extensive testing on a substance and conduct research following approval to ensure safety. Using aspartame as an example, Health Canada says, “follow-up studies on human subjects revealed that no adverse effects were observed even when humans were exposed to higher intakes than the established Acceptable Daily Intake.” The US FDA website states, “The FDA stands behind its original approval decision [for aspartame].”
Many aspartame nay-sayers point to one of the products released during the digestion of aspartame: methanol. While it is true that methanol is dangerous in large doses, the amount released through the consumption of a can of Diet Coke is less than what is released by drinking an equivalent amount of fruit juice or drinking a beer.
Health Canada has set an upper limit for aspartame consumption of 40mg per kg of body weight (the so-called Acceptable Daily Intake, or ADI). Multiply your weight in kgs by 40 to get the maximum daily amount of aspartame (in mg) for your weight. Since a can of Diet Coke contains 200mg aspartame, a 75kg adult would have to consume 15 or more cans of Diet Coke to exceed it. This seems like a lot, but how about a child? A 25kg child would have to drink just five cans of Diet pop to reach the ADI—a not inconceivable amount on a hot day.
It is important to check labels, because there are other dietary sources of aspartame, like sugar-free foods, gums and candies. Unfortunately, though aspartame may be listed on the label, there is often no indication of how much has been added, making it difficult for even motivated consumers to know exactly how much one is ingesting.
Is there any risk to exceeding the ADI? Probably not in the short term. A study where people consumed five times the ADI for 11 days showed no evidence of toxic effects and no increase in plasma concentrations of methanol, formic acid, or phenylalanine.
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