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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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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
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old hand
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old hand
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Here's what Snopes.com has to say about aspartame, as of September 2003: http://www.snopes.com/toxins/aspartame.aspDoesn'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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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
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old hand
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old hand
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The symptoms are being attributed to something else? [not a doctor, just a conspiracy theorist-e]
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Pooh-Bah
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Money talks - and I don't like some of the things it says. Nicely put Dr. Bill
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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old hand
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This is graphic, but it's written from the perspective of a real person. http://www.zug.com/pranks/olestra/
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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veteran
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veteran
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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'.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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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.
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Pooh-Bah
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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sounds great, insel!!
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
TEd
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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"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.
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