| Sweet Enough? Editor: Capocuoco
|
Are you buying
sugar-free drinks for your kids, in order to protect their teeth? Are you buying
sugar-free drinks and other "diet" products in order to protect your waist-line? If you are consuming these products on a regular basis, you may be interested to know a little bit about aspartame, one of the artificial sweeteners used to make them taste good without piling on the calories. Aspartame is a known poison. Yep, it's toxic, and the history
of how it came to be passed by the Food and Drug Administration, (FDA) as a food additive
rather than a drug is a sleazy tale, full of intrigue, fraud, double-dealing, misconduct,
lies, cover-ups and greed. Although it has been known since the 1970s that aspartame causes brain-tumours in rats and monkeys, and although several attempts have been made in the last 30 years to have it banned, the FDA continues to allow it to be marketed as an ingredient in an ever-growing array of products. Along the way, a number of personnel within the FDA who were involved in regulating the tests have gone on to find employment within the company that produces aspartame, which is now owned by Monsanto. The detrimental effects of aspartame on human health have become more widely acknowledged in recent years as the worrying symptoms of habitual intake of this chemical have emerged. What happens is this. Aspartame, once ingested breaks down into methanol which then converts into formaldehyde in the body. Formaldehyde causes severe damage to the neurological and immune systems and does permanent genetic damage. Over fifty different kinds of adverse reactions have been reported to the FDA by thousands of users, ranging from headaches and dizziness to heart palpitations, joint pain, loss of vision, slurred speech and many psychological disorders such as chronic depression, anxiety attacks, memory loss and personality changes.There have also been incidents of seizure and even death. However, it is more than likely that this is the tip of a huge iceberg as most people do not report adverse reactions to the FDA or indeed necessarily link either their acute reactions or chronic health problems to aspartame. Consumption of aspartame has steadily increased as more and more products are marketed either to appeal to the weight-conscious, and most worryingly, to children, including some makes of child vitamin supplements The last figures released by NutraSweet, (the brand name under which Monsanto market this junk) were for 1987. In that year an estimated 17,100,000 lbs. of aspartame were consumed.What started as the slow poisoning of the U.S. by diet drinks is a process which now reaches across continents as Monsanto have set up markets in South America, Eastern Europe, South East Asia, India and China. It's hard to imagine the kinds of marketing strategies that must be in place to sell diet products in some of these places. If you want to learn more about aspartame there is an
excellent website at www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/
In the meantime, avoid: NutraSweet anything and Diet drinks. Check labels on cereal packets, or any processed desserts etc. Some products contain sugar and aspartame...the mind boggles! Diabetic foods, again check labels and some vitamin supplements. If you're now worrying how you can give up your diet coke and not put on weight, here's one last piece of information. It has been discovered through tests by neuroscientists at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that high doses of aspartame instil a craving for calorie-laden carbohydrates, calling into question its very purpose as a diet aid. Sweet enough? |
