Aspartame is an artificial, non-saccharide sweetener used as sugar substitute in some foods and beverages. In the European Union, it is codified as E951. Aspartame is a methyl ester of the aspartic acid/phenylalanine dipeptide – WHAT????
Okay – to make this easier, let’s look at the main ingredients in aspartame. It is compromised of 50% phenylalanine, 40% aspartic acid and 10% methanol. So what are these ingredients and why should I care?
Phenylalanine
Even a single use of Aspartame raises the blood phenylalanine levels. High blood phenylalanine can be concentrated in parts of the brain and is especially dangerous for infants and fetuses. Because it is metabolized much more efficiently by rodents than humans, testing and research on rats alone is not sufficient enough to denounce the dangers of Aspartame for human consumption. Excessive levels of phenylalanine in the brain cause serotonin levels to decrease, leading to emotional disorders like depression.Aspartic Acid
Aspartic acid is considered an excito-toxin, which means it over stimulates certain neurons in the body until they die. Much like nitrates and MSG, aspartic acid can cause amino acid imbalances in the body and result in the interruption of normal neurotransmitter metabolism of the brain.Methanol
Becomes Formaldehyde better known as embalming fluid. The most prominent danger of Aspartame is that when ingested, the methanol (wood alcohol) is distributed throughout the body, including the brain, muscle, fat and nervous tissues, and is then metabolized to form formaldehyde, which enters cells and binds to proteins and genetic material (DNA). Methanol is a dangerous neurotoxin and a known carcinogen, which causes retinal damage in the eye, interferes with DNA processes, and can cause birth defects.
Aspartame is best known by their brand names; NutraSweet, Equal, Sweet One and Spoonful and is consumed by over 1 billion people. There have been many claims that aspartame has been linked to cause weight gain, seizures, migraines, heart attacks, strokes and cancer. Health Canada debunks allegations that aspartame has no negative health implications and that it can be “safely consumed by most healthy individuals”. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/securit/addit/sweeten-edulcor/aspartame-eng.php
Over 200 studies have concluded that aspartame is relatively safe to consume without any serious side-effects. Who do we believe? What studies are accurate? I believe that we are not meant to put chemicals into our bodies – anything that is created in a laboratory can’t be good to ingest. From personal experience – I remember how drinking artificial beverages such as; Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Diet-Coke, Diet-Pepsi, Coke Zero, etc…have made me feel – I definitely suffered migraines. I also know that drinking diet-soda was not an effective tool for weight loss.
My advice – do a study yourself. Eliminate diet-soda and artificial sweeteners for a month (you may have a bit of anxiety and irritability due to the withdrawal) – take note of how you feel. Are you more alert, do you have more energy, etc…After a period of about two-months, re-introduce your body to the artificial sweeteners and record how you feel after a day, a week, a few weeks, a month etc….have you noticed anything different? Have you suffered weight-gain, headaches, mood swings, dizziness etc….Don’t rely on anyone else to let you know what your body is telling you. The best source to indicate whether or not something is good for you – is your body. Listen to it, what is it telling you?
Sources:
COALITION OF POSITIVE ENERGY 
Critics tout that aspartame causes 92 diseases or symptoms. But none of the critics have credentials as toxicologists. Were they toxicologists, they would know that no toxic substance causes a tenth or even a twentieth that number of toxic symptoms. But personal vitamin and related issues can cause many diverse effects. The regulatory people in the agencies of 100 nations know far more than these few misguided individuals, but sharing and explaining the facts will enlighten all about this conspiracy theory.
Here are the facts. Phenylalanine and aspartate are found in greater concentrations in normal foods, like milk and meat. Wurtman completely refuted his own earlier allegation that phenylalanine or aspartame caused any problem with their conclusion: “Large daily doses of aspartame had no effect on neuropsychologic, neurophysiologic, or behavioral functioning in healthy young adults,” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9734727. Only methanol amongst aspartame degradation products presents any risk to normal people and, since all risk is dose-dependent, at the concentrations involved it presents no risk. Methanol is oxidized to formaldehyde and formate–both are chemically directly converted by the (tetrahydro)folate vitamin system into very valuable methyl groups. These substances and the methyl groups produced detoxify really toxic homocysteine (see Wikipedia) and protect DNA (by converting uracil to thymine). For more on this cycle see the figure at the top of p 3000 here, http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/14/12/2999.full.pdf+html.
All adverse aspartame claims are easily and completely explained by the simple idea that PERSONAL health issues such as folate deficiency, folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms), homocysteine accrual, and/or B12 deficiency. All these are very interrelated vitamins and substances because they normally and naturally detoxify otherwise essential formaldehyde and formate produced from methanol. Problems with insufficient vitamins raise concentrations of the true and potent excitotoxin homocysteine. For more about the connections between folate, homocysteine, and vitamin B12, the ‘Metabolism of Folic acid’ figure under vitamin B12 at Wikipedia.
Formate and formaldehyde are [quoting another] “produced in the body during the endogenous demethylation of many compounds, including many foods and drugs. For example, the demethylation of the caffeine found in one cup of coffee produces 30 mg of formaldehyde (Imbus, 1988). Formaldehyde is essential in one-carbon pool intermediary metabolism. The metabolite of formaldehyde, formic acid, is a substrate for purine nucleotide synthesis (Sheehan and Tully, 1983). It can be calculated that more than 50,000 mg [that’s 50 g] of formaldehyde is produced and metabolized in an adult human body daily and that an adult human liver will metabolize 22 mg of formaldehyde per minute (Clary and Sullivan, 1999). Consequently, it is quite clear that the formaldehyde from aspartame provides a trivial contribution to total formaldehyde exposure and metabolism in the body” (p 18 in and refs from http://www.fte.ugent.be/vlaz/Magnuson2007.pdf).
Do these facts not make clear that any perceived problem is not with aspartame, methanol, formaldehyde or even formate, but with personal metabolism issues in normal processing? With folate, homocysteine and B12, see that cited p 3000) these are potentially numerous. Many people are deficient in vitamins and up to 40% of some populations have folate polymorphisms that require even more folate, but most don’t even know it. It is very uncommon to even test for this. For more read http://download.cell.com/AJHG/pdf/PIIS0002929707614001.pdf?intermediate=true. And that doesn’t include people with high blood concentrations of the true excitotoxin homocysteine or low concentrations of vitamin B12 (again see that figure on p 3000).
I will address the recently re-raised diketopiperazine issue last, but if you want the UNDENIABLE truth, teach yourself. Rather than deal with each of these 92 claims separately, I will choose just four as teaching examples: heart disease, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune diseases, and autism (taken from Monte’s ‘While Science Sleeps’). But everything I report is equally applicable to all 92 such claims. To teach yourself Google the National Library of Medicine’s primary literature site ‘PubMed’. Go there, and type the alleged diseases in the search line, separated by a comma from one of the following: folate, folate deficiency, homocysteine or vitamin B12. For extra understanding the very interested person can also add folate polymorphisms to this list, but I only report its results below with the heart disease category. Find these results heart disease first: heart disease, folate (1405); heart disease, folate deficiency (252), heart disease, homocysteine (2364); heart disease, vitamin B12 (691) [heart disease, folate polymorphisms (171). Be sure to read these independent citations and you will quickly understand they are far, far more relevant than anything connected to aspartame. Repeat and compare that with heart disease, aspartame (7). Then analyze these–the first can be excluded, because a spell checker induced typo-there is no such thing as ‘aspartame aminotransferase’. Spell checking errors have shown up alot lately arising from aspartate, the amino acid. The other citations can all be dismissed because folate status and these related issues were completely ignored, but with the numbers shown, these issues far better explain their results than could aspartame.
Repeat this process for multiple sclerosis and find the following numbers, folate (48); folate deficiency (20); homocysteine (41); vitamin B12 (134). FYI, multiple sclerosis fits with B12 far better than anything else. B12 deficiency is linked to vegetarianism and that must make one wonder about that a vegetarianism connection to multiple sclerosis. By the way there is only one connection between multiple sclerosis and aspartame; this same citation shows up frequently, but it is pure speculation, just like these unsubstantiated arguments.
Repeat this process again for autoimmune diseases like lupus, for example: folate (84); folate deficiency (21); homocysteine (157), and vitamin B12 (53). Again those alleging aspartame involvement NEVER evaluate the person’s underlying folate, homocysteine, or vitamin B12 status, so the one citation listed (#2) is dismissible. The other two are speculative (#1, above paragraph) or irrelevant, if not another spell check error?
Lastly, let’s try autism. There is only one speculative citation for any connection with aspartame, but many for the other issues: folate (71), folate deficiency (10), homocysteine (22), and vitamin B12 (19). In fact examine the following abstractless review http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22734130 that accompanies this scientific paper with an abstract, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22586289.
Again be sure and read the titles of all those citations these searches above provide. Then you will see for yourself the failure of this conspiracy theory. Do critics ever mention folate, folate deficiency, homocysteine, or vitamin B12? Ask yourself, why not? Critics steadfastly never ever consider these highly important factors when examining patients, be they rat or human. And there is the real conspiracy theory. There is a remarkably simple alternative to their speculation and it is strongly based in biochemistry.
I promised to return to the diketopiperazine issue. Diketopiperazines are heat-derived amino acid head to tail cyclization products. To minimize diversion to the non-sweet diketopiperazines, baking with-and sweetening of hot beverages with aspartame are discouraged on the label. Diketopiperazines (also called bisdioxopiperazines) can be formed from this head to tail condensation of any two amino acids and are by no means unique to aspartame’s two amino acids. Much work was done to understand the safety of the aspartame diketopiperazines, see review at http://www.fte.ugent.be/vlaz/Magnuson2007.pdf. But for completeness before its third review of aspartame safety and to take into account new discoveries, the European equivalent of our FDA, the EFSA, has requested more information about the aspartame diketopiperazine. Critics like Martini, who ignore all the former folate related issues, have turned to thinking the diketopiperazine is unsafe, but the fact is that much recent work has established this broad class of substances actually to be powerful anti-cancer agents, for example see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20950258 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21235436. EFSA is correct; these new discoveries need to be incorporated into the risk assessment of aspartame-derived diketopiperazines. It only makes aspartame safer.
So in summary, it is far more likely that any issues with aspartame safety instead reflect PERSONAL health and sensitivity issues involving folate deficiency, folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms), homocysteine accrual, and/or B12 deficiency. For more go to this critical website, http://beforeitsnews.com/health/2012/11/the-dangers-of-aspartame-2457120.html, then scroll to the bottom for direct refutation of even more claims.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)