I was very much surprised to learn that some well qualified
physicians believe that the popular sugar substitute, aspartame, brand name Nutrasweet is really hazardous to your health, specifically to your vision. Here is a URL
about it:
http://www.321recipes.com/aspartame.html

Hi Dr. Bill. All I know is that the stuff gives me horrifying headaches... and I hardly *ever* get headaches (unassisted, that is). Tastes like %@#& besides.

In sjmax's URL site I noticed an article about aspartame.
I did not see mention of credentials of the author, but did
see one place in which he made a serious mis-statement, that
the opponents of aspartame reported "anecdotal" cases
The US opponents include thirty qualified physicians.
There was one statement in the article that I would like
to see verified, is that a serving of fruit may produce
a slightly greater amount of methyl alcohol.

I have gone to "Splenda" which is sugar with calories removed. Can even cook with it, put it on morning oatmeal etc etc. Tastes like regular sugar. Recommended by Atkins which is where I found it.
http://www.splenda.com

Dear wow: I went to the site, but there were agitated popups
that prevented my reading anything. The only way I can see
that sucrose could "have calories removed" would be to block
place on the molecule where digestive enzymes attack it. I probably couldn't underestand the changes if they described it, it's been so many since I had organic chemistry. But my
daugher-in-law is a dietitian, so I'll ask her.

Here's what Snopes.com has to say about aspartame, as of September 2003:
http://www.snopes.com/toxins/aspartame.asp

Doesn't make it any more true than the source you cite. Unless maybe you think Snopes is usually non-biased, acccurate, authoritative. Thirty qualified physicians speak out against aspartame; most (unquantified) others don't feel it's dangerous. Many I am sure have no-data-therefore-no-opinion, and some of us just avoid the stuff anyway on general principles.

There. That settles the issue once and for all, doesn't it.

Snopes is quite correct about brain tumors,etc. But the article I cited spoke specifically about optic nerve damage.
It bothers me that if is a hazard why there has not been
a thousands of cases, since it is so widely used.
But remember how long it took to convince physicians
that smoking was hazardous to health.

Here is a URL to a site with information about some of the
sugar substitutes not covered in previous siteS:
http://66.218.71.225/search/cache?p=Diet+sugar+substitutes&ei=UTF-8&cop=mss&url=85TScYomOFQJ:www.dietlowcarb.com/resources/sugarsub.php

The symptoms are being attributed to something else? [not a doctor, just a conspiracy theorist-e]

It is easy to get a bit paranoid, when you read about how
Monsanto was able to get a couple top-notch reporters fired for exposing errors and omissions in the testing procedures.
Money talks - and I don't like some of the things it says.

Money talks - and I don't like some of the things it says.
Nicely put Dr. Bill

regarding the safety of Splenda (sucralose)

http://www.holisticmed.com/splenda/

Thanks, insel. I have always had a feeling about that. I know sugar is bad enough for you but it must be better than any of the substitutes available. I'm not *even going to go into the sugar/honey debate.

This is graphic, but it's written from the perspective of a real person. http://www.zug.com/pranks/olestra/

Dear IP: thanks for that site. I think the bottom line is
that it takes many years of carefult study to detect long
term toxicity. And even though we now know tobacco is
a killer, kids are being sold cigarettes. Good old Joe Camel.

I was interested in the etymology of aspartame. A-H gives this: "aspart(ic acid) + (phenyl)a(lanine) + m(ethyl) + e(ster)". Aspartic acid gets its name from the lovely sparrow's grass (asparagus); one would hope that phenylalanine got its name from fennel, but no such luck; methyl is from the Greek word methus 'wine' and hule 'wood; stuff'; and finsally, keeping up with the foodstuffs, ester is from German Essigäther from Essig 'vinegar' and Äther 'ether'.

phenyl- means a derivative of phenol, benzene with one hydroxyl.

Dear Fiberbabe: That Olestra ingester didn't think of one
thing. I wouldn't let kids eat those chips. They could
prevent any fat soluble vitamins being absord.

Oh, yeah. You can hear me singing the bass line of the first verse of "Sweet and Low" (a setting of a Tennyson poem in four-part harmony) on the -- you guessed it -- Sweet 'n Low site. Well, you might be able to hear me; it's a little tough on computer speakers. Needless to say, my name was misspelled.

Oooooooooh, insel! I have a bass speaker, and...[swoon e]! Here 'tis:
http://www.sweetnlow.com/gallery/index.html

sounds great, insel!!

I'll be darned. I assumed that this was the same song as in The Music Man, my all-time favorite schmaltzy musical. But it certainly sounds different to this tin ear.

When I was a lad, we learned to put sprains in the hottest water you could stand, to put butter on burns and to apply a tourniquet to stop bleeding. Then, as an adult, I learned that sprains were best treated with ice, that butter is not an appropriate spread for burns and that a tourniquet is a bad thing which ought not be used except to prevent someone from immediately exsanguinating. Okay. These observations stand in the great tradition of "Everything you know is wrong." What medical science solemnly told us in ancient times (my youth, that is) has now been reversed on many fronts.

The end of it all came for me one day, long ago, while driving a grain truck in Eastern Washington. I was listening to the WSU campus public-broadcasting station on the truck radio and there was a discussion about things that cause cancer. One of then studies offered was a Canadian study which "proved" that crisply-fried bacon was more likely to produce cancer than limp undercooked bacon. Or so it appeared, if the diner were a Canadian rat. Then one of the people participating in the discussion revealed that, if one translated the amount of bacon consumed by the test animals into human terms, one would have to eat twenty-some pounds of crisply-fried bacon per day for a year to get anywhere near the "dosage" which produced the Canadian results in rats.

In that I prefer my bacon crisp and in that I don't eat bacon more often than once a month in any event, I have plugged my ears to such silliness and will cook my bacon any way I like, thank you very much, medical "science" notwithstanding.

"Proof" is hard to achieve. There is still a lot of bad science. Such as getting grants to find ways of keeping cows from passing flatus, because methane contributes to
global warming. The anal orifices never stop to think that
the cow feed is inevitably going to turn to CO2, no matter
what is done with it.
I remember a top British scientist sneering that American studies on rats getting lung cancer from tobacco smoke
"proved conclusively that rats shouldn't smoke." Very funny.
But, who's laughing now? At least a half dozen of my physician friends died of lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking.