A little truth about "Artificial Sweetners" and "Sugar Substitutes"
I saw a thread in this forum of a guy asking "Can we stop calling them Artificial Sweeteners?" To that I'd say yes, you should call them poison instead. Here's why:
So I have a true story about artificial sweeteners from my personal experiences. I was trying to lose weight and was looking for a substitute to the couple liters of soda I was consuming daily. At first I tried a "water product" with a lemon flavoring added that was sweetened with Splenda. It seemed great. Zero calories, and no real sugar was just what I needed.
After about two months of drinking this stuff non stop my lips had become cracked and were bleeding non stop. Sores had also begun to form in my mouth, and it burned horribly every time I tasted the water. Which forced me to stop drinking it, not having a clue the water was doing it at the time. So I stop drinking the water and all the mouth problems disappeared. Yet still I wasn't aware it was the water, as I thought I just had developed some odd issue. I started drinking again, and it immediately returned to it's former glory. I then realized what it was and cut it out for good.
So I start researching Splenda, and side effects. I'm finding people who developed migraines that lasted days at a time, people with the exact same mouth problems as my self, and even people that were LOSING THEIR HAIR. This wasn't one or two crazies mind you, this was forums of people claiming to have insane problems that would just stop when they quit consuming Splenda, as mine had. So now I'm surely not messing with Splenda again, and it was time to find a new zero calorie drink..
So I start trying various kinds of diet soda with Aspartame in it. I ended up deciding on Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, as the flavor I liked the best. So I start drinking this stuff like water. I was drinking probably 6-10 cans of it a day, thinking what could be wrong, it's completely free of anything bad for me right? Wrong. After drinking this stuff daily for about 8-10 months. I developed lower back pain that basically crippled me. I would lay down each night and writhe in pain for at least 1 hour before it would stop and allow me to fall asleep, every single night. I would wake up in the morning with at least an hour of teeth gritting pain before subsiding. After being awake, I could not stay in one position for longer than 4 hours or that pain would return. Forcing me to go lay down and face another hour just to go back to sleep. Also it got worse as time went and I got to where I couldn't sleep longer than 4-6 hours because the pain would start there too. So now I'm at a point that I am only without this mind numbing pain for 4 waking hours out of my day. I'm completely miserable, I'm contemplating suicide, doctors can't figure out what's wrong, and I'm swallowing prescription narcotics for pain 3 times a day that does little more than take the edge off. I lost my job, filed for disability, and basically became a recluse because I could not function in any normal daily life with this.
This pain just radiated through my lower back constantly. This went on for 6 months. I could not figure out what the problem could be, no one could. I was tested again and again, and it was mind boggling. So finally one night the pain wasn't seeming to come from the middle of my back it was only coming from the lower left side. So it dawned on me that it could have been kidney pain, and if both kidneys were hurting like that at the same time it made it "feel" like it was in the middle of my back rather than the sides. So now I get to looking into Aspartame and it's side effects. Well I found a forum with a guy who had the EXACT same problem and a whole host of people behind him claiming to have a multitude of issues stemming from this Poisonous Artificial Sweetener. So at that moment I stopped drinking Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. Within THREE DAYS the pain was GONE. Completely. Some soreness stayed in my kidneys for about a week, but after that not one iota of pain. The day after stopping the Pepsi I was no longer taking meds. Now the withdrawals from those narcotics lasted a couple weeks and that was pretty bad, but after that I felt like a new man. Like I never had a problem in the world.
By the way you're probably reading this and thinking I'm some old man, or an "older" guy with all these problems. The Water incident happened when I was 27 years old. The Diet Pepsi was 28-29. The morale of this story is that even if you're not seeing extreme side effects from consuming this stuff, it's still a poison for your body, and it is killing you slowly over time. Please don't eat or drink this stuff. It's not safe, and it's terrible for your body. Also I am not allergic to anything, and have no other ailments or issues that would lead one to believe I'm prone to have any different issues than anyone else. I'm healthy, I frequent the gym, and I've been into sports most of my life.
I've never had any other problems with food, other than gaining a bit of weight after losing someone close to me. The above is 100% accurate as it happened to me, and if you do some research you will find more of these types of stories than you can imagine. It's scary that these products are not some back alley 3rd world products you'd have to hunt to find. These are on every shelf, in every store, and in every home across America. Something needs to be done about this. If this post convinces even one person to stop consuming this stuff, it was worth the time to write it.
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