Bad reputation of aspartame is seemingly exaggerated
“I don’t have a problem with my clients using aspartame-sweetened drinks, yogurts, or other products.” – Erin Armitage, Campus dietician, on the curious case of aspartame.
If you reached for a stick of gum, a diet soft drink, or a low-fat yogurt today, chances are good that you consumed some aspartame.
Commonly found in packaged foods and drinks, aspartame is an artificial sweetener popular among people looking to limit sugar intake. Unlike table sugar, sweeteners such as aspartame are low in calories and do not spike blood sugar levels or promote tooth decay.
Whether or not this food additive is detrimental to human health has been the subject of controversy since it was approved by Health Canada in 1981. Its reputation is dreadful; in fact, you have probably caught a friend with a diet soft drink only to have them explain, flustered, “I know! It’s bad for me.”
But is it?
Not really, according to campus dietician Erin Armitage.
“I don’t have a problem with my clients using aspartame-sweetened drinks, yogurts, or other products,” said Armitage. “It’s been really extensively studied and I’m not concerned really about the health risks.”
Indeed, the two amino acid compounds that make up aspartame, phenylalanine and glutamate, are harmless. They are plentiful in the body and occur naturally in many foods.
Health Canada has set the acceptable daily intake (ADI) of aspartame at 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. For an adult weighing 150 pounds, that amount is equivalent to 20 cans of diet soda or 97 packets of sweetener each day.
In reality, dozens of research studies show that when giving laboratory animals doses of aspartame many times greater than the ADI, even throughout their lives, this does not result in a shorter lifespan or a higher incidence of cancer, the one disease that is brought up again and again in the debate over aspartame’s safety.
Headaches are the only widely reported symptom as a side effect of consuming aspartame.
Headaches, unlike cancer, are not life-threatening, and can be avoided by cutting out aspartame if it is the suspected cause.
“I have no way of knowing or objectively evaluating whether it’s the aspartame causing headaches or something else,” said Armitage.
Still, many people are convinced that aspartame is unhealthy or even deadly.
The Internet abounds with speculation that aspartame consumption causes diseases such as lupus and Alzheimer’s or that it was approved by the American Food and Drug Administration only because of intense financial pressure from the food industry. Conspiracies notwithstanding, there is absolutely no proof that aspartame is harmful in typically consumed amounts.
‘Not harmful,’ however, should not be misconstrued to mean ‘good for you.’
“I usually advise people to limit diet sweets and drinks in general,” explained Armitage. “They don’t offer any health benefits.”
There is one emerging area of artificial sweetener research that is very troubling: it does not appear that replacing sugary foods with artificially sweetened alternatives actually promotes weight loss.
A recent study in Behavioural Neuroscience found that animals use sweet taste to predict the caloric value of food. When dietary sugar was replaced with sweeteners, rats consumed more calories to compensate. Hunger, weight, and body fat levels subsequently increased.
The public has been uneasy about accepting sugar substitutes for thirty years now. Perhaps consumers have always known – just not consciously – what scientists are only beginning to understand: enjoying natural sugars in moderation is a fundamental part of eating.