Sweeteners, diet pills and fake fat: Dangerous diet aids? Part I

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Nov 30, 2002

There's one thing to be said about America and it's obsession with weight-loss - everyone wants to lose weight, but few are willing to work for it. Instead of working out and eating smart many of us use everything from sweeteners and diet sodas to fake fat and diet pills in order to save calories. When we cut calories and fat by using fake versions of it, we end up opening the door to an entirely different set of health problems that may be much worse than being overweight.

I used sweeteners religiously for years because I thought sugar (which is 100% natural), was going to lead to weight gain. After weaning myself off sweeteners, my weight didn't go up or down. Basically, nothing changed, which made me wonder why I started using sweeteners in the first place.

I'll state the facts and let you decide what's best for your diet and your long-term health. Aspartame/Nutrasweet is a synthetic sweetener used in place of sugar to sweeten food and drinks without adding calories. While there are few reports of side effects that can be directly linked to aspartame, one of the main points about it is that there are no long-term studies on the effects on humans over time.

Aspartame (Nutrasweet), made up of two amino acids, was thought to be the perfect sweetener, but questions have arisen about the quality of cancer tests, which some believe, should be repeated. People have reported adverse behavioral effects (dizziness, hallucinations, headache) after drinking diet soda, but such reports have not been confirmed by controlled studies. For several years, saccharin was under investigation as a potential cause of cancer; its use was banned in Canada in 1977 for that reason, but public reaction in the United States helped keep saccharin on the market.

In 1981, then Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes approved aspartame as a food additive, based in part on a Japanese study about the possibility of aspartame causing brain tumors. The same study, according to the Public Board of Inquiry (PBOI) chairman, would have caused the panel to give aspartame an "unqualified approval." They initially recommended against the approval of aspartame and concluded that further study was needed.

Walle J.H. Nauta, M.D., Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote, "As the data stood, we were unable to reach a communal feeling of confidence in aspartame's innocuousness on this score and expressed this unease to you, by the same token, we wish to express our endorsement of your final decision to this matter."