Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Is Aspartame Safe?
My colleague Denis was just doing some research on Aspartame and came back with "it appears to be pretty safe." Here's my opinion:
While they are "safe" perhaps, from the FDA point of view, something in diet soft drinks is leading to obesity and illness. The rates are worse than those on regular soda. We'll see how this shakes out. My guess is that these artificial sweeteners are going to end up shouldering a lot of the blame. This, however, is hard to show in this type of article because there's a lot of "safe science" out there and a a lot of money behind it making sure it trumps the negative research, which is sounding more and more like Phillip Morris' tobacco research each year. But when you now have huge, cross cultural, long term studies all pointing to the exact same direction, something in diet soda is likely worse than the hypothesis of "it probably makes you crave other sweet foods". I, for one, have had a client who contradicted this. So even though the evidence is now pretty clear, the question still remains as to which is the evil ingredient, or is it the combination.
More on this topic here,