I sank into the cushions of a well-worn couch, and sipped my bottled water. I wanted to burrow into my book, but the cafe – sometimes a refuge for readers – roared with blenders and laughter and small talk. So I watched the barista make a caramel-this for one guy, and a mocha-that for an older woman. I listened to her ask for extra chocolate, and I had to laugh when she surrounded her request with sighs of nutritional guilt.
“I wish chocolate were a health food,” she said.
“It can be,” one of her coffee cohorts countered. “They even make diet candy now.”
Diet is a term sometimes used in place of “sugar-free,” and if that’s to what that man referred, I truly hope he reads this. He, and countless others who equate sugar-free with healthy, probably stock their kitchens with sugar-free cookies, sugar-free cake, diet candy and Diet Coke in hopes to enjoy what they love while losing weight, or despite diabetes and other diseases.
One to hit store shelves in America last fall, Diet Coke Plus, might seem pretty pleasing. But I brought the soda up during a conversation with a self-taught nutritionist named Sherman, who works at Abby’s Health and Nutrition on North Dale Mabry in Tampa. He’s done a big share of independent study on nutrition.
“I think it’s a ploy,” Sherman said. “They’re using (vitamins) as a gimmick.”
But Diet Coke seems to take the stuff seriously. According to its Web site, “Diet Coke Plus is everything you love about Diet Coke, plus several essential nutrients.” I checked the soda’s list of ingredients, and I must say I was pretty impressed.
So I pulled out my borrowed copy of “Prescription for Nutritional Healing,” which is an 800-something page monstrous collection of drug-free remedies, to dissect the difference between the vitamins Diet Coke added.
There’s vitamin B3, which can benefit circulation, skin and metabolism. There’s vitamin B6, which can boost cancer immunity and help make PMS bearable. And there’s vitamin B12, which can keep cardiovascular systems running and can prevent anemia. But then, there’s aspartame.
“I can’t think of one positive thing about sugar,” Sherman said to me. “As bad as sugar is, artificial sweeteners are worse.”
And aspartame is one of those artificial sweeteners. It first appeared in some soda pop and packets back in 1983, instead of sugar. The chemical is made up of amino acids, phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methyl ester. Methyl ester, during digestion, turns to methanol. And methanol, to formaldehyde (which is part of what’s used to embalm bodies. Dead ones.).
A researcher discovered it accidentally in 1965. What we know as Nutrasweet, Equal and the chemical used to sweeten most diet sodas started out as a substance used in the creation of a drug for ulcers. While the researcher researched, he got the powder on his hands. Later, he licked his finger before grabbing a sheet of paper. And for him, how sweet it was.
But countless others say not so much.
There are DVDs and books, Web sites and support groups for people who call themselves victims of aspartame. There’s a list of 92 symptoms attributed to aspartame and found in complaints about it to the FDA, from headaches to gran mal seizures. And there’s research behind it.
According to research conducted by Dr. Woodrow C. Monte with the University of Arizona, methanol in aspartame is poison, despite what supporters of the substance say. Many of them, including the creators of aspartame.org, say humans get as much (if not more) methanol from fruits and veggies anyway. But according to psychiatrist Ralph Walton during his appearance on one of those DVDs, called Sweet Misery, the methanol in fruit is different from the methanol in aspartame. Walton, some of whose patients suffered from side effects associated with aspartame, used the chance to research what the stuff is made of. “In nature,” he said, the methanol in fruits and vegetables is bound to pectin. To separate the methanol from the pectin requires the presence of a specific enzyme. And according to Walton, it’s an enzyme humans don’t have.
His point, in other words, is that methanol made in nature, bound in pectin and found in fruit passes through us without collecting in us. The body also has ethanol on its side while we eat fruits or vegetables since when there’s naturally occurring methanol in something, there’s also ethanol and enough of it to negate the effects of the toxin.
The argument, like many, will probably never end. The FDA may always back its decision to approve aspartame, and people may always blame that for their diseases. I may never be able to prove that aspartame causes those diseases, and that’s probably because I will never use it.
So here’s a thought: if you aren’t supposed to have sugar, maybe you just shouldn’t have sugar. To replace it with a sweet, toxic substance just so you can still drink soda is silly. There is nothing we need from soda in order to survive. That’s why I’ll never understand why so few seem interested in trying to survive without it.
