The Artificial Sweetener Aspartame, Its Potential For Neurological Harm
Protect yourself and your children’s health by not consuming artificially sweetened “Diet” foods and drinks.
The evidence suggests artificial sweeteners have likely played a role in worsening the obesity epidemic, and may even contribute to rising autism rates. In light of such evidence, prudence demands avoiding artificial sweeteners completely. And be sure to read food labels to make sure you are not inadvertently consuming them.
Aspartame is a methyl ester (an organic salt) of aspartic acid and phenylalanine, 2 amino acids, the latter of which has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group.
Aspartame manufacturers claim that these are completely natural amino acids that occur in nature, but when they occur in nature, they are always part of a long protein chain.
They do not occur in isolation, as they do in aspartame, and in isolation they produce entirely different effects when consumed.
In aspartame, the phenylalanine methyl bond is very weak, allowing it to easily break off and form methanol. And when consumed, aspartame releases 11% of its weight as methanol in the human gut.
The aspartame industry is fond of repeating that methanol is naturally found in fruits and vegetables, but they compare apples and oranges, because the methanol found in food is firmly bonded to pectin. This allows it to be safely passed through the digestive tract. The methanol formed when you ingest aspartame is not bonded to pectin or anything else that would help it to be safely eliminated.
Another problem relates to the fact that humans are the only mammals who are not equipped with a protective biological mechanism that breaks down methanol into harmless formic acid. Note that animal testing does not fully apply to humans, and that most of the animal testing used to “prove” aspartame’s safety is rendered null and void.
Both animals and humans have peroxisomes in each cell that help detoxify a variety of chemicals, but there is one important exception: The catalase found in animal peroxisome specifically help detoxify methanol, first to harmless formic acid and then all the way to carbon dioxide.
The catalase found in human peroxisomes is mutated and cannot metabolize methanol. Both animal and human cells also contain alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which converts methanol to formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.
All of the methanol metabolized in human cells is converted directly to formaldehyde by this alcohol dehydrogenase which is located outside the peroxisome, thus dumping free formaldehyde where it can not easily be made safe.
Human peroxisomes cannot convert the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid.
Certain locations in the human body, particularly in the lining of your blood vessels and in your brain, are loaded with ADH that converts methanol to formaldehyde. But since human cells lack functioning peroxisomes and therefore the ability to convert formaldehyde into harmless formic acid, it remains free to cause tremendous tissue damage.
Once inside the cell, formaldehyde can trigger macrophages to attack the cell. It can also readily react with RNA and DNA in such a way that they’re inactivated.
According to the research, all of this is consistent with changes found in the autistic brain adding that: “Formaldehyde is a much more toxic methanol metabolite than methanol’s second metabolite, formic acid. This makes formaldehyde a much greater risk within every compartment of the human cells that contain ADH I. This mechanism, in fact, may be the only natural way to poison the inside of a cell, particularly a brain cell, with the highly reactive and dangerous aldehyde, an aldehyde which is so reactive as to not even be detectable in the blood minutes after massive suicidal consumption.
Because of this, the lethal dose of methanol for humans is extraordinarily low when compared to all other laboratory animals, including primates. Man’s median lethal dose of methanol is guessed at being 0.3 g per kg (only 5% the lethal dose for monkeys) but individuals have succumbed to doses as little as 0.09 g per kg almost a 100X less than other mammals.
Modern scientific literature does not present the true picture of the danger of methanol to the human organism. It fails us by confusing the median lethal dose to humans and by trying to link the fatal outcome to the benign weak acid of formate instead of the more likely culprit, formaldehyde.
Research into the toxicity of methanol has been in the hands of a very few individuals over the last 50 years. Primary funding for this research comes from industrial sources, such as the Methanol Foundation, that have a vested interest in demonstrating methanol’s safety.”
The evidence suggests artificial sweeteners have likely played a role in worsening the obesity epidemic, and may even contribute to rising autism rates. In light of such evidence, I strongly recommend avoiding artificial sweeteners altogether. Also be sure to read food labels to make sure you’re not inadvertently consuming them.
If you have trouble quitting diet soda or other artificially sweetened products, try Turbo Tapping, a version of the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) specifically geared toward combating sugar cravings.
If you experience side effects from aspartame or any other artificial sweetener, please report it to the FDA if you live in the United States. It is easy to make a report, just go to the FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator (www.fda.gov), find the phone number for your state, and make a call reporting your reaction. This is an important step that can help us get this toxic food additive off the market.
Eat well, Be well, Live lively.
HeffX-LTN
Paul Ebeling
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