Aspartame: An Early Internet Hoax

Aspartame has circulated the internet for years now being touted as the deadliest ingredient in the world. To make it scarier you probably have already ingested it today. Did you eat cereal this morning? Did you drink a diet soda for lunch? Are you chewing gum right now? All these products contain aspartame, an artificial sweetener created by accident in 1965. It took the Food and Drug Administration 16 years to approve of the substance in select food and drinks. And by 1996 aspartame was approved for general use as a sweetener. You may know it us Equal or NutraSweet.

So how is aspartame different from sugar? Where sugar is composed of two carbohydrates, aspartame is created by linking two amino acids. (Did you understand any of that? Because I don’t) It’s composition allows it to be capable of being 200 times sweeter than sugar. Because of its intense sweeting effect much less aspartame is needed to sweeten a drink than if sugar was used. This is why it is considered a low calorie option and used in essentially all products labeled “diet.”

But why has aspartame gotten such a bad rap? There are thousands of claims of aspartame causing lymphoma, leukemia, brain cancer, cardiovascular disease and depression. The one claim that set the early internet ablaze was written by “Nancy Markle.” Now you are wondering why I put Nancy Markle in quotes. Well its because she is not real. “Markle” claimed that aspartame was the cause of all diseases but also headaches, blurred vision memory loss, gulf war syndrome (what ever this is) and what seems like a thousand other problems. But Nancy Markle is actually Betty Martini, an early internet troll. Using chain mail, the hoax quickly spread through everyone’s inbox and quickly made it onto thousands of websites. Some sites took it a step further and started using some real medical research to attach to the hoax. They claimed that aspartame when digested breaks down to methanol and phenylalanine when in large doses are harmful. Yet the amounts of aspartame in all products breakdown to negligible amounts of both methanol and phenylalanine.

To help put it in perspective your body produces and uses 1000 times more methanol than what is created in aspartame. As well, there is 8 times more phenylalanine in milk than in the respective amount of aspartame.

So the question is, is aspartame safe? As of now yes. All current research done by the FDA, CDC and private labs indicates aspartame is a safe alternative to sugar and other natural sweeteners. This is important because as more and more American’s face struggles with obesity we must find more low calorie products to help facilitate healthy changes within our society .