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Throwing my experience into the mix:
I was pretty well convinced that aspartame is perfectly safe even though several years ago I had a problem I thought was connected to it. At that time, I was doing a Slimfast-type diet, and the product I was using was sweetened with aspartame. After a while I began to feel dizzy all the time; severe, reeling dizziness, the kind that when you lie down and close your eyes you feel like you're tumbling through space. I can't remember how I began to suspect aspartame, but I quit using the diet shakes and the dizziness soon stopped. For years afterwards I couldn't even look at any sort of shake product without feeling a little sick from the memory.
Since then I have consumed aspartame with no apparent effects, however. I've had diet pudding, gelatin and soft drinks and I never had the dizziness again. After reading a lot about it, I decided my reaction to the diet shakes must have been caused by something else. I thought maybe I had an electrolyte imbalance, was dehydrated, or had some other situation which was resolved by discontinuing the shakes, so it made it appear it was the aspartame bothering me.
But then a few weeks ago I started periodically - and with increasing frequency - having symptoms of low blood sugar. I felt weak, shaky, and dizzy. But very strangely, ingesting something sugary did not even temporarily relieve those symptoms. I thought maybe I was starting to have high blood pressure from the supplements I take, so I tested myself at a machine in a store. My blood pressure was normal, but I was shocked to find my pulse was 112. This made me suspect the supplements even more, but discontinuing them didn't help.
I was feeling increasingly worse, so I made a spreadsheet in Excel listing all the different things I eat and do which I thought might possibly be related. I color-coded everything so patterns would jump out at me. One day I was looking at the chart and I noticed that on every single day I felt dizzy, I had used aspartame. On all but one of the days when I had a rapid pulse, I had used aspartame. And on days I used aspartame, I either felt dizzy or had a rapid pulse on all but two of the days.
The night before that I made that connection, I was feeling particularly bad, and ironically enough, I was sipping aspartame-sweetened soda in an attempt to feel better. I usually drink no more than 4-12 ounces of soda on a day I drink it, but that one night I probably drank about 12 ounces in the evening alone.
I got to thinking that over the years I have periodically had aspartame-sweetened products, but never on a regular basis. I had a soda maybe a couple of times a month. I used other aspartame-sweetened products more often, but usually in very small quantities. Lately, however, I had been drinking aspartame-sweetened soda every day.
After I quit drinking the soda, I felt noticeably better the next day. I still had episodes of feeling weak and shaky for several days after that, but eventually that completely disappeared. And after about a week, my pulse returned to normal, 30-40bpm slower than what it had been before I stopped the aspartame. Yesterday I forgot that the jam I currently have in my fridge is aspartame-sweetened. I had a couple of teaspoons, and a few hours later my pulse was at 106.
This could all be purely coincidental, but I'm pretty well convinced by it.
I'm not saying aspartame should be banned. But if aspartame really caused me to have those symptoms, that's a pretty serious thing. Even aside from the possible health implications of what it was doing to me, if I had not figured out what was causing the problem and had continued using aspartame, we are talking about a MAJOR quality of life issue. I was barely functional. And I could have easily spent thousands of dollars on medical tests and prescriptions to control my symptoms. Since aspartame is not officially recognized as causing such problems, unless I'd gone to a particularly savvy doctor, he probably wouldn't have even thought to question me about my use of it.
If I was the only person to have ever had this sort of reaction then there would be no cause for alarm. But since thousands of people feel aspartame has caused them problems, it is very strange that these effects have never been supported by clinical data. I think a lot of the propaganda on the Internet against aspartame is probably blown out of proportion and in many cases outright made up. And aspartame almost certainly doesn't cause all the ills ascribed to it. But it is almost inconceivable to think that EVERYONE is wrong about aspartame causing them health problems.
I think part of the problem is that the studies done on aspartame usually do not include enough people (obviously not everyone has trouble with it), and/or are not done for long enough, or with high enough doses. For me, it took several weeks of increased usage before I began to notice negative effects. Prior to that, if I'd been in a study, I would have reported no side-effects.
I fully expect that someday aspartame will be removed from the market, or will start carrying additional health warnings.
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