Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Kiss My Aspartame

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease, and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."
--R.D. Laing

Scientists working out of Britain announced grim news today: everything in the known universe, to some degree or another, causes cancer.
Cancer, the leading cause of death among US citizens, has been traced back to a variety of factors in the past, including cigarettes, radiation, and, more recently, high sugar intake. But if the British scientists are correct, humans will soon have to treat everything as they treat the aforementioned cancer-causing agents.
"We don't wish to alarm anyone," said John Starkley, lead researcher in the project, "but our results speak for themselves: there is not a single thing in the world that cannot give you cancer."
Silent in disbelief initially, the press quickly reacted with questions related to the announcement.
"What about telephones?" asked one reporter.
Starkley nodded in affirmation. "Telephones, in our laboratory studies, have been found to cause high levels of brain cancer."
Starkley was then asked if computer use could cause cancer, and he gave another assenting nod.
"Yes, computers have been found to cause brain, liver, and tooth cancer," he said.
Various reporters asked Starkley as to the cancer-causing properties of a number of objects, including desks, compact discs, houses, other human beings, shoes, sex, automobiles, homosexuals, and religion; it was clear, however, that Starkley and his team were not exaggerating with their claim of universal cancer-causing objects.
"Yes, yes, and yes," Starkley said in reference to the last three questions, showing a trace of annoyance. "Everything causes cancer. In fact, you don't really need to ask me anymore if something causes cancer, because the answer will always be 'yes'."
"But," one reporter protested, "what about puppies?"
Starkley nodded grimly. "Especially puppies."

--Josh Reiter

The above is obviously satire. But sometimes it doesn't feel that way. And some things, I'm really sad to say, actually do cause cancer.

You can't work a day in a grocery store without running into a customer who wants to talk about her health. It's almost always "her"...men will only discuss their health with their friendly neighbourhood dairy stranger if they're old enough to talk down to God.
It's amazing how many people will proselytize as they fill their carts. Just in my dairy aisle alone, you get

--the people who shun butter like the plague (fat!)
--the people who shun certain margarines like the plague (hydrogenated fat!)
--the people who shun all margarines like so many plagues (I got a long lecture from one elderly lady, the gist of which was "butter has two ingredients--milk and salt--and each is four letters long; margarines have ten ingredients and I can't pronounce half of them. My grandma ate butter...that's good enough for me.")

Milk: well, to some people, milk is liquid poison. We sell double the lactose free milk we used to, and the market for soy "milk" continues to explode. (If you look at a carton of soy "milk", you'll find it doesn't say "soy milk" at all, which is good. If you can find the tits on a soybean, I wanna see 'em.) No, they're "soy beverages". Not quite as bad as "Grated Cheese Product" (doesn't 'product' fill you with confidence? Isn't everything a product?)...but close.

Eggs: Once, you had a choice between small, medium, large, and extra large, and that was it. Oh, I suppose I'll throw brown or white into the mix, but that's an illusion: other than the colour of the shell, there is no difference whatsoever between brown and white eggs...except brown eggs cost more. It's incredible how many people insist otherwise.

Then again, you can't really blame them, because most of the "premium" eggs out there are brown.

I don't stock everything I could. Even so, I have organic eggs, free run eggs. large eggs with added omega-3, extra large eggs with omega-3, "omega choice" eggs with even more omega-3, "healthy natural" eggs with added vitamins, and"premium brand" eggs in a 12 or 18-pack (no extra health benefits, just a stronger shell that resists cracking and a thicker egg white). That's in addition to my core egg line up: small, medium, large (available in 8s or 12s), extra large (available in 12s or 18s) and something called "747 Jumbo", which are so big they probably ripped the hen to shreds coming out.

Incidentally, they all taste like...eggs.


Overwhelmed yet?


Don't get me started on the various yogurts. Each yogurt company touts its particular exclusive strain of bacteria as a cure-all. You want to just tell people that yogurt is yogurt is yogurt and have done with it, but that's a heresy.

Besides, there's been a bit of a revolution in yogurt, a revolution that's starting to spread to other products. It has to do with aspartame.


The Brigade of Elderly Lonely Ladies (BELL) wasted no time sounding off on the evils of aspartame. Starting on my second day and continuing at least once a week thereafter for a period of years, I'd hear the ringing voice of the BELL denouncing aspartame as the nutritional equivalent of 666. Where do they get this stuff, I wondered privately. Aspartame's been around for twenty years. I'm sure it was tested before it was approved. If it was half as bad as these ladies say, it wouldn't be in food you eat, now, would it?

That was about the time my
heel pain really started to take off. Along with physio, a night splint, and orthotics, the doctor put me on Vioxx. I joined some eighty million people worldwide popping that particular pill. Eighty million people...the drug was obviously perfectly safe, right?

Uh, not so much. Turns out Vioxx has this tendency of bringing about what the medical profession calls "adverse cardiovascular events." You know: heart attacks, strokes, fun stuff like that. First they put a warning on the bottles, then they yanked the drug right off the market.

It seems thalidomide taught the profit-obsessed pharmaceutical industry the cube root of frig-all.

Not long ago, I read that
diet pop seems to make people gain weight. Hello? Prominently displayed on every can of diet pop I've ever seen: 0 CALORIES. Doesn't that violate some law of physics or chemistry or something? I mean, I'd always been taught that the simplest, fail-safe diet was to eat fewer calories than you burned. So it follows that something with zero calories couldn't possibly contribute to weight gain, right?

In examining any situation, I have two mutually exclusive blind spots: either I try to make everything too complicated, or too simple. In this case I was being too simpleminded. Yes, diet sodas have zero calories. However, it seems they have all sorts of interesting and not-so-healthy effects on the human body. Among the mildest are cravings for carbs (which will make you gain weight); a
slower metabolism, and fluid retention.

But that's not all. Aspartame
leads to cancer...and makes cancer metastasize faster. (MSG, too, apparently.)

How did this happen? This is a weapon of mass destruction!

Well, see, there I'm making it too complicated. All I really needed to understand was that
Donald Rumsfeld's behind all this. Then it all becomes clear. Literally hundreds of studies were done on aspartame. About half of them found no problems even with high doses; the other half raised serious concerns. Interestingly, the half that found no problems tended to be funded by sources within the industry, i.e., the people who make aspartame. This isn't the first time science has been co-opted by big business and it certainly won't be the last, but I find it disgusting when health and well-being lie in the balance.

Back to the dairy aisle. Aspartame has slunk off the shelves over the last three years. It's no longer an ingredient in any of the dozens of skus of yogurt I stock. That BELL has rung. It's ringing down other aisles in the store, as well. Both
Coca-Cola and (according to recent newscasts) Pepsi plan to use stevia in its diet soft drinks. Stevia appears to be a considerably healthier choice than either aspartame or sugar.

I like my pop. I don't like it enough to let it kill me. I'm on my last pack of Diet Pepsi, at least until that stevia-stuff hits the market. Until then, I'm going to have to subsist on plain old water.

Of course,
water causes cancer, too...but only in boys.

5 comments:

Rocketstar said...

I heard bloggin may also cause cancer.

For me it is plastic. I hate mixing food and plastic, I won't do it.

Plastic is BAD

Rocketstar said...

Watch the movie Blue Vinyl, a great documentary about poly vinyl chloride, or PVC, NOT GOOD.

Anonymous said...

One reason aspartame as in diet Pepsi makes one gain weight is that the liver has such a hard time detoxing the poison, it has no energy to metabolize fat.

Recently, it was the Purdue University study that showed diet drinks actually caused weight gain.

Check out this graphic report on aspartame.

http://myaspartameexperiment.com

Anonymous said...

Ken,

I've decided to over-simplify it. I don't care what it is, there's chemicals in whatever I eat that's going to kill me.

Stress is also a major cause of heart attacks.

So, I'm aiming for full of chemicals and stress free. It seems that you can't do both.

At least my way I get sensory explosion. (mmm... gotta go out and buy a bag of Doritos, dem's good chemicals!)

konfuzd1 said...

From your source: Though the controversies deepened and the evidence proving the poisonous nature of his company,s product continued to accumulate, Rumsfeld and his team continued to push for FDA approval of aspartame.

So is wikipedia a Republican conspiracy as well? What happened to all that evidence? On aspertame, they say:

'In 1999, FDA officials described the safety of aspartame as "clear cut" and stated that the product is "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved."[35] A 2009 study concluded there is no controversy over the usage of aspartame.[36]'

Footnotes:
Henkel, John (November–December 1999). "Sugar Substitutes: Americans Opt for Sweetness and Lite". FDA Consumer. http://web.archive.org/web/20071214170430/www.fda.gov/fdac/features/1999/699_sugar.html. Retrieved January 29, 2009.

^ Samuels A (2009). "There really is no controversy". Eur J Clin Nutr 63 (8): 1044. doi:10.1038/ejcn.2008.38. PMID 18545263