I'm surprised to see the "artificial sweeteners are toxic" myth, here of all places.
🙄
FACT:
No artificial sweetener has ever been shown to be harmful
at a sensible dose level, or even at levels 10x or 100x what anybody would actually use -- not even the cyclamates, which is why the former ban on them was repealed. The only experiments which have demonstrated harm were done at such ridiculously huge dose levels (equivalent to a human consuming kilograms of the stuff every day) as to render the whole exercise meaningless and pointless, for
anything is toxic if a large enough dose is given -- even
water. Oxygen is lethal at dose levels not far above those needed to sustain life, so the same "logic" which says that we shouldn't use sweeteners also says that we should all stop breathing.
🙂
It's ironic that the crackpot websites have singled out aspartame for particular vilification, because its breakdown products are two amino acids (aspartic acid and phenylalanine) which occur naturally and copiously in nearly all foods; it is probably thus the safest of all sweeteners. Some nutcases have siezed upon the fact that a small amount of methanol is also produced, ignoring the fact that the amount of methanol in an aspartame-sweetened diet drink is only about half that in the same size serving of fresh orange juice. (A few nutcases haven't ignored this last fact, but have attempted to explain it away by claiming that "artificial" methanol is more than twice as harmful as "natural" methanol, but this is of course nonsense; methanol is methanol, regardless of source. And methanol isn't a cumulative poison, so you'd have to drink gallons of orange juice at a single sitting to suffer the effects -- except that you'd die of water intoxication long before you did.)
It's notable that all the anti-aspartame websites lean heavily on the ever-popular Post Hoc fallacy, e.g. "My dad consumed masses of aspartame-sweetened drinks and he died of cancer, therefore aspartame causes cancer". As one myth-debunking website pointed out, this ignores all the millions who drink a similar or greater amount and don't get so much as a headache.
And it wouldn't surprise me if there were aspartame bans in the US; bear in mind that this is the country in which at least one town legislature passed a local law making pi equal to 3, "thereby" (as one commentator pointed out) "making all circle calculations in that town either illegal or wrong". Likewise, bans by supermarkets here of artificial sweeteners from their own-brand products prove only that whoever is responsible has been reading the wrong websites.
Artificial sweeteners are a lot safer than sugar, especially for us lot.
