Just received an email about this, thought everyone would be interested. I have cut back on soda a lot this year, but if this is true, I would be willing to quit.....

If you type Aspartame into Google search, it comes up with 250,000 links,
all bad except for companies using it. Where there's that much smoke,
there's got to be fire of some sort!

Hey, I know it sounds scary and accurate, but I think that this is essentially a hoax - an urban legend. Check out:

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/aspartame.asp

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/aspartame-0916.html

In reasonable portions, aspartame is safe for most people. If you want to quit drinking diet soda entirely, though, and this motivates you to do so, I suppose it's not a big deal, but if you aren't going to quit and are just going to worry about it, well, better to enjoy the occasional diet soda without worry. I bet the worry is worse for you than the aspartame.

Yes, this is a well-known hoax. Here is a post by MrsJim on another thread that promoted these rumors:

OMG!! Sorry about printing that then. Thanks for setting the record straight!!!
*cracks open diet coke*

I came over to this thread because I figured it'd be about aspartame. Glad to see it was all figured out quickly! I tried to help someone on another forum with regards to aspartame claims and I was jumped all over. I even was just about accused for working for an aspartame company because I said that there was nothing wrong with it.

Anyway, yep, aspartame is nothing to worry about as long as you don't have PKU (inability to process phenylalanine). In fact, because aspartame is just a combination of two amino acids, when you eat protein, you have more of the metabolites associated with aspartame than when you have aspartame itself.

I have read that diet drinks can make you crave carbs - the logic is something like this: sweet taste in mouth encourages body to release insulin into the blood stream, in anticipation of sugar. Drink gets digested... but no sugar enters the bloodstream because its a diet drink. Now there is to much insulin in the bloodstream, so the body tries to get back in balance, and the easiest way to do that is to eat something. Don't know how true that is, but it does make some sense. Just in case, I tend to only drink diet pop at meals.

Just a note about saccharine, you would have to drink 750 cans of diet soda EVERY DAY for 20 years to get cancer from the amount of saccharine in diet soda.

Bring on the TAB!

Actually, I'm finding that it's believed that caffeine is what causes insulin spikes, and that it's just the sweetness of the soda that causes more sugar cravings but doesn't have anything to do with insulin.

Can't say if all that is true or not. All I know is I can't drink diet pop with nutrasweet/asparteme without having severe migrains. I was on migrain meds and was having them a lot when I ran across an article in Womans Day saying there was a link between nutrasweet and migrains. I decided to stop eating or drinking anything with it in it for a while to see and I have basically stopped having migrains. I do get an occasional headache but not the migrain variety. So I guess you have to draw your own conclusions on the stuff. Have a great day.....Sis

There sure does seems to be a set of folks who react negatively to Nutrasweet. My great aunt reacts very negatively. It's never had any effect on me. YMMV.

I do think that aspartame "goes off" after a certain amount of time or being exposed to high temps for prolonged periods. On several occasions I have had to throw away a canned diet soda because it didn't taste right. Some of the times the product was past the expiration date, and other times it wasn't stored properly (I knew that for a fact.)

Lately I've been sticking with Splenda, but its only a matter of time before something comes up about that, too.

Artifical sweetners taste nasty to me anyways, so I try to avoid them as much as usual. It's kinda funny that you posted this as I just wrote a lil blirp in my journal about this same subject.

How often do you have anything with caffeine in it? Many times it's been found that it's the caffeine that's been triggering headaches in people when they drink diet soda.

And unfortunately, many groups are up in arms already about Splenda. It's a sugar (sucrose) molecule with chlorine atoms substituted for some of the oxygen molecules, which makes it too large of a molecule to digest. A lot of people forget that table salt is sodium chloride when they mention the chlorine in Splenda.

It’s easy to believe what one reads on the Internet but remember, anyone can create his or her own web site and act knowledgeable about a subject. I’ve been drinking diet soda for about ten years now so when I heard about this rumor, I decided to find some answers of my own. I looked at the studies that had been done on aspartame and they showed aspartame is safe. In addition, other sites show this is a hoax! Try this link www.aspartame.org

That's a good point. In many cases, there are political and other personal motivations for a vast majority of people expressing an opinion to try to cavalierly besmirch the reputation of a perfectly safe product.