Patrick Gallagher
NaturalSociety
October 17, 2011

Aspartame, the artificial sweetener found in many diet sodas and used as an ‘alternative’ sweetener, has been found recently to possess detrimental cancerous effects.

A study performed by researcher Victoria Innes-Brown shows how harmful aspartame can really be. The study was inspired by her family’s heavy consumption of diet coke and she wanted to see what they were really consuming. The study showed that of 48 rats experimented on, up to 67 percent of all female rats developed tumors roughly the size of golf balls or larger. The male population didn’t do too well either with 21 percent of the males developing similar cancerous growths.

For the course of her 2 and a half year study, Innes-Brown used a dose of NutraSweet (found on shelves in food stores across the nation) comparable to that of 14 cans of diet soda for her 24 female test subjects and 13 cans for her other 24 male subject Both of these amounts are approved by the FDA (a 50mg per kilogram ratio) as a reasonable dose, and this same amount is likely consumed by some uninformed individuals.

Though it may seem as news to some readers, aspartame has been a known carcinogen for quite some time.

Artificial sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet) still included in countless products despite tumor link

Aspartame researcher Dr. Soffritti did a similar pair of studies to Innes-Brown’s. The first study found that consumption of the equivalent of 4 to 5 bottles of diet soda per day yielded high rates of cancerous growths among many of his subjects; the highest dose producing 25 percent of females with cancerous cell growth, compared to 8.7 percent of the control group females. With this study, Soffritti concluded that aspartame at a ratio as low as 400 parts per million (ppm) was considered carcinogenic.

Initially these findings caused quite some controversy and sparked mass denial and nay saying worldwide. Now, after over 900 published studies on the health hazards of the sweetener are released, the nay saying has been curbed substantially.

Such studies have indicated that aspartame is nothing more than a bond of two amino acids found in our own amino acid profile, with a disproportionately large quantity of each bonded together with a known poison. Metabolized in the body, aspartame can yield other more dangerous chemicals such as methanol and formaldehyde.

Sources:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17805418

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/04/09/victoria-innessbrowns-aspartame-experiment.aspx

http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1289/ehp.8711

Explore More:

1. The Aspartame Trap: You May Be Unknowingly Ingesting this Toxic Sweetener
2. Made from Genetically Modified Bacteria Waste, Aspartame Risks Public Health
3. Aspartame Exposed – GM Bacteria Used to Create Deadly Sweetener
4. Aspartame: A Toxic Consumption
5. Diet Sodas Don’t Help with Dieting
6. Diet Soda Increases Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke