Aspartamane

Had a long forward from a friend with statements from doctors on the dangers of this "Nutrasweet" As I cannot figure out how to transfer it onto the site (and cannot type that long a message, I wanted to share my experience with others, as many of my garden friends have pain and also were using diet foods. My year-long experience with headaches, treated by a healer with an organic diet, , stopped my headaches; I am back on everything ( frozen dinners etc.) but no nutra-sweet. No more headaches that not even narcotics could stop. The article linked it to MS., lupus and lots of other stuff, all I know is what I experienced that year (including no gardening); horrible daily headaches. No Nutrasweet=no headaches. My doctor has warned all patients off of artificial sweetners. Just a thing to try if having some health problems. Hope it helps.

Marcia
I have migraines and the first thing my doctor told me to stop eating was anything with nutrasweet in it. I can drink a diet coke and have a headache within 30 minutes.
Calalily

I have exactly the same problem with Nutrasweet...headaches! If I drink a soda, it's got to be the "real thing" or I'll be sorry. :(

I am not saying nutrasweet is ok, but it doesn't give me a problem. I had surgery for obestity. I still have a sugar addiction not to mention chocolate(lol). I do drink diet sodas usually 3 a day. I don't have problems with headaches unless it is sinus.

Related to lupus, I am going to the National Institutes of health today as a follup to an illness I had twenty years ago call dermatomyositis. I am one of the extremely lucky few that got over this devastating muscle disease. I am thankful for my good health. I contacted them (NIH)for the followup because I have read recently that still no cure. I may just be a statistic but who knows maybe my case will help someone else.

thanks for listening

puttyrat, thank you for sharing your story and giving others hope. I hope you have more good news at your checkup today. :)

Terri

Thanks Pete2,

I just had my 15 minutes of fame. The Doctors at NIH were really impressed with my "permanant remission" as they called it. I always knew I was lucky, but I had also assumed that others were as lucky. I find that is not the case and for most there is no long term remission and a lifetime of being on prednisone and other immune-supressing drugs.

I was paraded in front of about 20 doctors, so they could see that there is "hope" for their patients. Only 5-10 people out of a million per year develop the disease and I don't know the percentage of total remissions, however it must be very uncommon, if the folks at NIH are not accustomed to seeing it. Apparently they had seen one other case like me.

You see I was given hope by the last doctor I saw there, some 22 years ago. It may have been the power of "the mind" that helped a cure.

Well enough of that. If any of you know anyone with "myositis" either polymyositis or dermatomyositis that needs to talk to someone let me know.

I am here

Sally

I find aspertrame makes a dandy ant killer. if you have sugar ants in your house, find their trails and pour aspertame on the trails. the ants eat the stuff and take it back ti the formiucary and about 8 weeks later not an ant to be seen and they haven't come back for 3 years and counting. This is one powerful insecticide.

I personally cannot consume the stuff. I get a headache from about 1/4 can of diet coke and a full can makes me puke. When it is heated about 85F, I believe, it turns to wood alcohol, which is toxic to humans.

Hey I will try that ant trick. The ants are driving me nuts!

Sally

Sally, what wonderful news!!!! You are blessed! :)

Terri

Use Stevia instead ; all natural and zero calories . Used for 1000's of years by the South American Natives .

We do get stevia at work in the herb section. I work at a garden center.

Sally

Hi guys, I'm more often on the Uk forum but this heading made me twitch.
Some years back I was with an industrial chemist boyfriend who worked for one of the really big soft drink makers - I'll not mention names 'cos I don't want to be sued, but it was on of the big two if you follow me.
Anyway, he was in the quality control lab when they were trialling aspartame as an alternative sweetener to saccharin and he told me the test results were suppressed and that despite there being all sorts of potential health problems inherent in the product it was released as the next best thing since sliced bread. Anyhow, he told me absolutely never to let my kids have anything with it in and I haven't since it came out.
I think I remember there being some press coverage about this, probably in one of the 'soft' science journals, like New Scientist (I may be wrong), and the tests on rats being really scary.
Don't want to scaremonger but that's what I've always believed and the comments from Marcia seem to me to confirm it all.

Sally - you've made me smile with happiness for you. Terrific !

Jo

Sally, I am so happy for you! Thanks for telling us the good news.
I also used to get real bad headaches from Aspratame too. I avoid it totally. If I even chew a stick of gum with that stuff in it I'll get a headache. I live in the sugar cane belt of Louisiana, so I'll support the cane farmers! Lisa

what is stevia? i have been using nutrasweet for yeears as a sugar subsitute. have diabetes so i need some thing that has no glucose and does not react w/ insulin.

Thanks,

Just for a follow-up from my doctor's visit:

Only about 5% recover as fully as I did. Usually there is residual muscle weakness, which I don't have.

Second my bloodsugar was high, he wants me to have it tested again. I used to be hypoglyceminc (low blood sugar), but often hyperglycemia will follow. I guess the cookies and candy are going to be off limits for me now. They should have been anyway. I have a sweet tooth. :)

Puttyrat

Congratualations Sally, hope everything carries on smoothly for you in the future.
I quite often suffer from headaches, I'm going to try cutting out Aspratame/ Nutrasweet and see if it makes a difference.
Thanks Marcia for bringing it to my attention.

Stevia is a herb. You can get the seeds through Johnny's Selected Seeds.

About 2 years ago there was something about consuming more than a 6 pack a day of diet colas was bad for you. I don't remember all the details.

Byron

Sally - how wonderful!

I've cut way back on the nutrasweet products and have had a lot less headaches. I noticed some products now use Splenda as an artificial sweetener which is supposed to be a sugar by product. Anyone heard anything out there about this. The low cal/no fat Blue Bunny Yogurt and Diet RC colas contain spenda and I think it tastes pretty good.

I was fine with saccharin actually. After so many years you don't taste the aftertaste. Anyone remember cyclamates? I remember that the old TAB was the best diet soda ever IMO. Then they said it was bad caused cancer, years later after being taken off the market they found out the studies were flawed and was actually safe, but with a bad reputation it was never put on the market again.

Well I happen to have a glucomter as my boyfriend has type 2 diabetes, and I took two readings on different days, both would have been considered fasting and the reading was 80, totally normal for a fasting reading. I still don't know what reading they had at the clinic, but must have been a fluke. I will be careful however as I know hypogycemia which I have can turn into diabetes. I will still get another reading at the doctors, but you know they had me a bot worried. I should avoid sugar with the hypogycemia, but is just hard for me, no willpower :).

I used to drink Diet Rite colas, maybe I will try them again. I need to look into the nutrasweet thing. I used the pink sweetner when buying artifical sweetners, but you don;t have much choice in diet drinks.

puttyrat

I use Splenda daily and have since before it hit the market shelves. I have had no headaches or bad aftertaste. It lists it ingredients as Maltodextrin and Sucralose--0 calories. Hopes this helps. I tried stevia, but did not give it a good trial. I am off to get Blue Bunny!!!!!!!

I will check it out

Thanks,

Puttyrat

[ Removed per member request. - Admin]

This may not set well with some of you, but I must speak. I am a natural-born 'healer' (LONG time in accepting THAT!) and have learned over the years to do MRT (Muscle Reflex Technonogy testing, many books available on the subject) that let's our bodies over-ride our minds in what is and isn't good for our bodies. I have NEVER tested anyone on Nutri-sweet or Aspartamane that it didn't test bad for them. Even suger tests better. I also understand that the artificial sweetners metabolize just like a sugar, only slower, so even with a low or zero calorie count, they affect our bodies differently.

mighty interesting.....I wonder if my headaches/migraines are a direct result of my drinking 3-4 diet cokes a day......

Wintermoor posted on another thread the hazards of diet coke, and when I did a google search, this was the first entry.

"thanks wintermoor for alerting me...I must have missed this thread at the time

I have avoided aspartame for about 2 years now and I do not have nearly as many headaches as I did when consuming it regularly in just about everything (lite yogurt, diet pop, gum, etc.). I still get bad headaches sometimes, but they're usually sinus or because of the alignment of my neck. I have had foodstuffs containing aspartame a few times in the last few years, but have not noticed any ill effects afterward. Overall, though, I do believe there was a difference for me.

We check everything that goes into the shopping basket if Aspartame is in it.
One couple didn't beleive me when I told them that their kid, who was always sickly, was so, due to drinking diet Coke, having his tea made with sweetener, all puddings etc. were made with liquid Nutra-Sweet, and everything he got to eat or drink was loaded with this stuff.

His Mum took him off the Nutra-Sweet stuff for 1 week, and the wee boy was the brightest he had ever been. When she told her Doctor, he was so angry at her for even giving such a wee kid sweeteners. He had been trying to find out what was wrong with the kid for months, but the Mum didn't tell him that she used sweetener for EVERYTHING.

Now they, of course have banned it, and the kindergarten which he attends also. When my wee boy was in primary school, my wife and four other mothers got the stuff banned from the school after showing the headmistress the internet sites on this subject, both pro and con. She decided that the stuff was too dangerous, and if Nutra-Sweet could prove that it was good, then she would 'maybe consider' using it again in the school canteen.

This has now spread to over 70% of school canteens in Hamburg, which have all banned sweeteners from their kitchens.

Tell all others about this, and spread the word, you may be saving the future health of your friends.

All the best

Wintermoor

Wintermoor, we never have really had too much of aspartame products in our house, and never have served the children any. They are not allowed to drink our diet coke, we have fruit juice available to them, they do on occasion take sips of our diet cokes.
Just to be on the safe side though, I will do a spring cleaning of my pantry and toss any products that contain it. I may have a couple of boxes of sugar free jello, which would of course contain aspartamane.

What a terrible thing this! and the government doest do anything about it??? geez what is the FDA doing?

First of all, congrats, puttyrat, on that checkup and your recovery. Success stories like yours are fuel for the doctors (like yours) to offer other patients hope.

I just had to butt in here to 2nd that opinion on Cyclamates. My brother was diabetic, so we always had artificial sweetners around the house as I was growing up. When the cyclamates came out, it was a real boon for those who had to watch their sugar intake. As mentioned, the flavor was much better than previous products. Too bad it was never trialed again.

My husband is border-line diabetic, so he drinks diet sodas with nutrasweet in them. If we have non-diet pop in the house, he tends to "cheat" on them, so we don't buy them often. I've gotten in the habit of opting for a glass of water or a glass of milk most of the time, just because I don't like that sickeningly sweet aftertaste of nutrasweet.

For the same reason, I've learned to drink coffee black, and now prefer it that way. If I order a drink somewhere that has seltzer water, I have that, or have them mix it half and half with the sugared soda. Yet, when I go to the grocery store, I can buy flavored pop, diet or otherwise for much less than I can buy a can of plain seltzer water.. why?

Weez, I dont know, but I think that they keep the price low so that we will continue buying them. I know, I can get a 12-pack of diet coke on sale for 1.98, normally they are anywhere from 3.98 up to 5 bucks....
I'm going to save some money by giving up my diet coke...

The food industries in this country have always been good at charging us more for leaving something out! Carbonated water with no syrup is double the price, and how about canned soup? For decades we've been feeding our children canned soup as a luncheon meal, soup that was high in salt. Now that we are more aware of our salt intake, the soup with less sodium is more expensive!

That soup's a good example...Part of the problem is supply and demand. I'd wager there's not as much of a demand for low-sodium soups as regular, so less is manufactured and that makes the per-can price higher.

It loosely reminds me of these idiots filing class-action lawsuits against fast food chains. The restaurants have tried introducing healthier foods (i.e. Taco Bell's "border lites" menu, McDonald's "McLean", etc.) and those food items have been dismal flops. The majority of people don't want healthy food when they go to a fast food place. If it is not profitable for a company to maintain such a product line - if there is not sufficient interest - they either price it high, or discontinue it.

You're right about that, Gardenwife. You can lead a junk food junky to health food, but you can't make them eat. In all fairness to the food industry, supply & demand is the name of the game.

However, our free enterprise system, as wonderful as it is, has created a market filled with one-upmanship. We're no longer satsified with just pizza... no we must have cheese in the crust. We are not satisfied with cheese in the crust... no we must have a double-layered pizza.

I'm relatively sure the excessive amount of sugar and salt in baby food is to satisfy the parents who take a nip to see how it tastes. As I recall, my toddlers had to wrestle me to the floor to get their Dutch Apple Dessert back!

Even dog food is geared to our preferences. Do the dogs care what shapes and colors their kibbles & bits are? Do they care if their snacks look like bacon or a T-bone steak? If we truly had our pets' preferences in mind, doggy toys would smell like our old sox and catfood would come in baby bird flavor.

Lol; what can you expect from a company that produces both genetically altered crops; herbicides; insecticides and food additives...

I would like to add one thing to this discussion, and hope at least a few find it helpful. When it comes to government performing "lab rat" tests, they often overload the animal with the compound they're checking. This often only proves that a ton of the thing in question will kill the animal. For example, if you feed a lab rat 5 gallons of water a day, they'll die. Um, yeah, that's cuz they probably drown.

Please do not assume that the FDA and others are not carefully testing every thing that is "FDA Approved". They have many many things to keep us safe from, and it's not as easy as it may seem. Not too many humans are quick to volunteer for "chemical testing" to find out if something's safe or not.

I often feel bad for folks in the FDA because when something goes wrong with something "artificial", it's always their fault. I don't think this is always the case.

-Jennifer

Angelsong,

the case is not against the FDA as such, but against people who worked there and manipulated the findings. Don't you think it strange, that Dr. Friedman, who was in charge of the FDA, and allowed Aspertame onto the market, after it had been banned for eight years, should suddenly go to that particular company as Vice President a short time later?

Quote:
Dr. Friedman, who quit the FDA when Jane Henney was selected to become the permanent FDA commissioner (1999), elected to sign on with G. D. Searle as a senior vice president at a purported cushy $500,000 a year.

Going to work for someone who he was supposed to REGULATE (AND for someone who he helped to DEFEND [60 Minutes, Dec. 1996, along with Monsanto's Dr. Welden] instead of investigate) seems very WRONG! Could this new job be his reward for ignoring citizen complaints and defending aspartame and rbGH?

Now, you tell me.

Wintermoor

AngelSong, it must be great to have your understanding of all the names and gobbledygook on those labels! When I try to determine if a product is safe, I am usually defeated right away by the terminology. We are consuming many things we think we have eliminated because of the way they are listed as ingredients. I learned how to spot forms of sugar because of my diabetic son, and how to determine if there were troublesome preservatives which caused about half of my headaches. But there always seems to be entirely too much labspeak on any label. I think it should be mandatory to list in plain English (or regional language) when possible. In the insurance industry, laws require that policies be written in language understandable to an average 9 year old. When it comes to our money, we insist on such, but we plop containers into our shopping baskets without a clue as to contents.

Some of those names of things are as simple as they get. Preservatives all have different names, different "jobs" in the things you eat and drink. Different flavors come from different things, and it's not always as simple as writing "lemon flavor" on the labels.

My education doesn't always lead me to read over food and drug labels cautiously. I usually trust well-educated and intelligent people to keep me safe by testing new things before they wander into my pantry or medicine cabinet.

-Jennifer

I too have migraines and several years ago had a round of them that just wouldn't quit. The first thing my Dr asked me was how many diet sodas are you drinking? I love Diet Dr. Pepper and was drinking one or two cans a day. I stay away from Nutrasweet completely, even a stick of gum with it in it causes a headache.
My friend is a diabetic and told me about Splenda, it's not caused a problem yet, doesn't have an aftertaste either.

No aftertaste, Calalily, I'll have to give Splenda a try.

I wonder if it is possible that the effects of Nutrasweet are cumulative. We are, after all, a society addicted to excess, so could it be possible that high dosages create a higher intolerance to it? I know that is true of some toxins. That might explain why a simple stick of gum could give one a headache.

It's rather sad that many of these products were produced originally for people who have a medical need to reduce their sugar intake.. for instance, diabetics, the morbidly obese. Somehow, it's become popular with many people who don't fall into that catagory. I've seen people drinking diet pop and eating a piece of pecan pie!

I don't think our bodies are very pleased with our consuming a six-pack of any kind of soft drink a day, or coffee, or alcohol, or anything but water. (We've lost the art of drinking water.) This isn't an accusitory statement, since I'm the queen of excess myself, just an observation.

It's pretty hard to keep corporate needs out of the laboratory, since scientific studies must be funded, and the folks doing the funding have an agenda of their own. There is also an issue concerning being the first to discover some new drug or product, and that can breed some shaky testing procedures.

I guess my point is that we really can't depend on anyone else to keep us safe. Everybody's got an agenda or is being driven by one. We just have to look at something, give it a sniff or a taste, and decide if it's good for us. In some cases, you just have to go with the lesser of two evils, but ultimately, we are our own physicians.