Saying that I know if I drink more than a small amount of diet drink I get a stinking headache- which I can only attribute to the aspartame!
I have found that I get a headache if I take too much saccharin — but not from any other sweetener.
The breakdown products of aspartame are aspartic acid and phenylalanine, plus a tiny amount of methanol;. the first two are also found naturally in nearly all foods, in vastly greater quantities than in diet drinks; so if aspartame were even a tiny fraction as toxic as the nutcases would have us believe, we would all be dead by now.
😱🙄 As for the methanol, some of the nutcases have seized upon that; ignoring the fact that an aspartame-sweetened diet drink has only about half the amount of methanol contained in the same size serving of fresh fruit juice, or trying to explain that away with some nonsense about "artificial" methanol being far more than twice as toxic as "natural" methanol.
🙄 (It's the same line of "logic" which likes to pretend that there's somehow some difference between "natural" and "added" sugar, or indeed between sugar and other carbs.)
Also, not only do I drink a lot of diet drinks, but my insulin (Novomix 30) is made from aspartic acid, so if there were any problems with it I would be in deep trouble.
🙄
I remember when Coke Zero was introduced (I was in Kings College Hospital, suffering from the kidney stones which were the first warning of my CKD); I read a letter to
New Scientist from the president of the Soil Association (which regulates organic foods), calling on aspartame to be banned because "it has no nutritional benefit". Because of that, ever since then I have refused to buy organic food; to my mind, that letter showed that those idiots have never heard of diabetes, for as we know, type 2 is usually diagnosed in middle age (as is an increasing number of cases of type 1), by which time (thanks to the poor nutritional advice of the last 40 or so years) the patient has usually acquired a sweet tooth which doesn't magically disappear on diagnosis; and use of sweeteners (which have been used for decades, so if there were really anything wrong with them, there would be hard scientific evidence by now) allows this tto be gratified without the use of dangerous carbohydrates.