Aspartame is a sugar substitute that can be found in many products, such as sodas, chewing gum, breakfast cereal, and even medicines. This artificial sweetener is 200 times sweeter than sugar, so it can be considered free of calories because of the small quantity needed to sweet food, even if it has almost the same amount of calories that sugar has. Since it was first approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981, it has been used in more than 6,000 food products, and consumed by over 200 million people worldwide. Although the popularity of this product, numerous studies have proved that this sugar substitute is one of the most dangerous food additives today.
According to the FDA, over the 75% of the adverse reactions to food additives are due to aspartame. These reactions include headaches, muscle spasms, weight gain, depression, insomnia, vision problems, memory loss, loss of taste; or even worse things such as brain tumors, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes.
Several recent studies have scientifically proved this:
• In Italy, a study on rats has shown that aspartame is a multi-potential carcinogenic compound. Its effects are evident at a daily dose of 20 mg/kg of body weight, less than the recommended for humans.
• In Greece, a group of scientists have shown that aspartame ingestion worsen learning and causes memory loss.
• In Spain, a study on rats has proved that ingestion of aspartame promotes the formation of a known carcinogen called formaldehyde.
Having this in mind, Are you going to prefer food that contains aspartame instead of sugar?
Just weeks ago I was reading about aspartame and I don't agree with you. Yes, aspartame may be dangerous for our health, but only if its consumption exceeds a certain level. Let's be fair: everything can be dangerous for our health if we exceed its consumption.
ReplyDeleteAnother important point is that it has been clarified that aspartame is a non-nutritive sweetener so we can't expect that it would offer a lot of benefits more than being a sugar substitute.