Links-off-of-links on one of postvixen's 'conspiracy' posts make some pretty nasty claims about aspartame - You're probably the only person I know who could provide any real perspective on these - Are any of these things grounded in reality?
(Yes, I know the rest of the site reads like 'Conspiracy Theory 2', but... Three years ago I thought that the United states setting up ethnically oriented interment camps, strip searching airline passengers and invading foreign countries, would have been tin-foil-hat talk, too...)
Not particularly, no. Aspartame's a small peptide (protein), and probably one of the most-tested food chemicals around. It will take a lifetime of people drinking the stuff to even vaguely see if there are any chronic effects, of course. But American palates and American policy don't want to wait that long to put new technologies in the foodstream.
It's not really a great sweetener, though it was a big improvement over saccharin when it came out. It's not very heat-stable or pH-stable.
It's very bad for people with a rare disease called phenylketonuria. And I'm sure there are some people who don't respond well to it. There's not any actually reason you need to consume it either, so if it worries you, don't. I'd only worry about saccharin and cyclamate, if I were prone to worry about these things. Or red dye. Red dye is worrisome.
Or you can worry about Donald Rumsfeld, which I think was actually the vixen's concern.
People are very prone to psychosomatic illness, and to trying to find causes for everything, in our culture as well. Remind me to tell you a story about my Pepsi days in a less public forum sometime.
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Date: 2003-04-03 07:40 am (UTC)Links-off-of-links on one of
(Yes, I know the rest of the site reads like 'Conspiracy Theory 2', but... Three years ago I thought that the United states setting up ethnically oriented interment camps, strip searching airline passengers and invading foreign countries, would have been tin-foil-hat talk, too...)
no subject
Date: 2003-04-03 09:10 am (UTC)It's not really a great sweetener, though it was a big improvement over saccharin when it came out. It's not very heat-stable or pH-stable.
It's very bad for people with a rare disease called phenylketonuria. And I'm sure there are some people who don't respond well to it. There's not any actually reason you need to consume it either, so if it worries you, don't. I'd only worry about saccharin and cyclamate, if I were prone to worry about these things. Or red dye. Red dye is worrisome.
Or you can worry about Donald Rumsfeld, which I think was actually the vixen's concern.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-03 09:14 am (UTC)