Aspartame: A Formaldehyde Cocktail
Chances are you have consumed the sweetener aspartame without even knowing it. As the most widely used non-nutritive sweetener in the world, aspartame, sold as NutraSweet or Equal, can be found in thousands of foods, personal care products, and pharmaceuticals.
Though it is FDA approved, aspartame is far from safe. In fact, the FDA has received more complaints about adverse reactions from the artificial sweetener than for all other food additives combined.
While the FDA reports it has received thousands of complaints about aspartame, they admit that only 1 percent of those who experience a reaction to a product ever report it. In other words, millions of people may have experienced headaches, mental confusion, seizures, depression and even blindness and brain cancer, as well as gastrointestinal symptoms related to aspartame without reporting it.
Researchers believe ingesting aspartame is much like drinking a “formaldehyde cocktail.” When the sweetener breaks down in the body, it is absorbed as methanol. Methanol can spontaneously break down to formaldehyde, which can accumulate in your cells and cause health problems. Formaldehyde, which is used in paint remover and embalming fluid, is a poison several thousand times more potent than ethyl alcohol.
Formaldehyde creates the waste product formate. An accumulation of formate in your body can cause excessive acidity in your blood, which can result in blindness, fatal kidney damage, multiple organ system failure, and death.
And if it doesn’t maim or kill you, aspartame can still make you fat. The two main ingredients in aspartame, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, stimulate the release of insulin and leptin. These are the hormones that tell your body to store fat.
Better to stay with old fashion sweeteners liagave, raw honey, rapadure and of course in strict moderation.
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Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Food, Inc. is a powerful, startling indictment of industrial food production, revealing truths about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here. Warning: you may not eat again.
