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.

Thanks for posting, I'm sure you have helped people by telling your story. I've preferred to drink water more than anything else for many years and I am curious to know what your beverage of choice is now.

6 to 10 cans a day? Even water in excess can be toxic. You also have a sampling error. How do you know it wasn't some other ingredient in the drinks that caused you a problem, maybe salt, a dye, flavoring....?

I would also wonder about a doctor who could not diagnose kidney problems. If staying away from artificial sweetener works for you good deal, but you have no actual proof that they had anything to do with your problems.

If you ate a chicken that made you sick to your stomach would you assume that chickens are poisonous? Or would you think perhaps you got a bad one?

Moral of the story: Aspartame is bad for you, don't drink it, but there are lots of others sweeteners like Lo han extract, stevia, xylitol, erythritol, and so on.

I don't doubt you had these problems and good for you for figuring out what to do to rid of them.

My 2 cents is, poison for one person isn't poison for every other person as well. I lost 60 lbs using splenda in my coffee and at least one glass of Crystal Light a day and doubt I could have had that success without them. Luckily, it's not poison for me, and I'm 60.

I think surely the thing with sweetners is that they should be taken in moderation? To drink as many fizzy drinks (you call them sodas in the US I think) as you describe just seems incomprehensible to me, I might occasionally have a diet coke if I'm eating out, otherwise here in France the choice would be wine, water or fruit juice (I'd be happy with water also).

I have a sweet tooth and from time to time make a dessert using a sweetner but try not to do that too often. Our tastes do change over time, if we give them time. As a child I loved Cadburys chocolate, about (well, looking on their website I couln't see a figure for cocoa content, lets just say the first two ingredients are milk then sugar, then cocoa) now I can't eat it, it's too sweet, over time I found I liked the sweetness less and moved up the cocoa percentage in chocolate, I have a bar of 75% in the cupboard and have a square from time to time for a choc hit.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you cut up the fizzy rubbish you cut out the sweet cravings eventually. Drinking cans is a habit, habits take a while to form and longer to break. Water is much cheaper.....

lots of people are sensitive or allergic to things that others are not. just because you had a bad experience with a product does not mean anyone else will.

some people have near fatal allergic reactions to peanuts.

Considering that all commercial diet drinks are chemical mixtures as others have said I wouldn't be so quick to blame the sweetener for your issues. Staying away from any drink other than water anyway is your best bet.

This is the problem with anecdotal conculsions...they are based on sloppy reasoning. (I did A and B resulted so A caused B)

Most definitely not necessarily the case.

There are many who regularly drink sodas and things with these sweeteners in them with no ill effects; should they concluded that these are harmless?

Not necessarily either.

I'm sorry you had a bad reaction but you reached a hasty conclusion.

Honesty said;



Since this was a first time post, I have no idea if you'll ever read this. But with kidney pain and cola intake, I'd wonder whether the phospate in the soda isn't having some effect. The kidneys regulate phosphate, one source I read gave 500 mg per liter as the phosphate content of cola, that's pretty major, at least if you're drinking a couple liters a day.



Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/5.../#ixzz27UzsHtfO

Of course, this is waaaaay speculative, but there is at least a tenuous connection.

I've noticed that people really, really enjoy being afraid of artificial sweeteners.

I think it's a morality thing--it feels like you're 'getting away with' something when you have a delicious dessert made with AS, so I think, for some people, there is a sense of guilt, or a sense that you'll pay for it in some other way instead. Then when they hear other scary stories on the internet--while lacking any basic scientific understanding of any of it--they feel justified in their fear/guilt, and (usually, at least in the case of my co-workers) go back to consuming sugar instead.

(My stats are still correct and represent a whole lot of sucralose, erythritol, and stevia.)

I think you are not being very fair here. I, too used aspartame for some time....until I started having "fuzzy thinking". I switched to Splenda and loved it!! Then, again I started having problems of a different kind which went away after giving up sucralose. I gave it up, but didn't go back to using sugar! I do use AS occasionally (erythritol and stevia) but learned that I can do without a lot of what I thought I needed.
I also believe that the OP can tell what is not agreeing with his body!! I had no problem with either sweetener for a long time, but now if I have either in any form (I don't drink sodas) I know it for at least 24hours. And I can tell if I get either by accident.
I am happy that you don't have any problems with your sweeteners, but don't try to make me (or the OP) feel guilty because we do have. I am not afraid of sweeteners, but I really don't enjoy the side effects of those two. My new favorite one is "Ideal" which has become hard to find here.
BTW, I have never looked either up on the internet! I don't need to!!!!

I couldn't agree more. I really hate this jump-on-the-bandwagon internet phenomenon, just because somebody's website says this or that is a terrible (or lifesaving) thing for your health. One person believes it, then another and another with nothing more than anecdotal 'evidence', or because someone said so. Pretty soon there is a groundswell with very little if any academic or scholarly support. Bleh. Show me the clinical trials, the research, the published studies.

*I know someone in post-grad research, and therefore know there are shady characters even there, who 'find' the results they are being paid to find, but according to her it's not prevalent.

It's called an "information cascade". Get enough people believing something and it enters into common knowledge and everyone believes it by default.

Sorry. The main thing I have a problem with is the scare tactic, such as calling AS poison and/or throwing pseudo-science in ("artificial sweetener is pesticides!"). I've heard enough RL friends complain of simple headaches with aspartame that my gut instinct says there's something to it, but it should be somewhat apparent that most people don't experience catastrophic health issues from AS. In my opinion, trying to scare the crap out of people is irresponsible.

It's one thing to say "this was my experience, take it as you will"; it's another to go screaming POISON from the rooftops, and to paint all AS with the same brush.

Again, sorry--just have seen so much of this and heard it from so many sugar-loving coworkers.

Also, the OP has one post and never came back, so we probably got trolled anyway.