Going Deaf With Diet Drinks

May 31, 2009 by JD
Filed under Health, Information, Slice of My Life

I don’t drink much in the way of sodas except for the occasional Diet Coke. But I do like Diet Snapple Tea. And I usually have a pitcher of Crystal Lite in the fridge. I probably suck down 8-12 glasses of some kind of powdered or bottled tea concoction during the course of a day. Especially in the Summer.

And in my goal to stay away from sugar, it’s always the “diet” version. What do all these drinks have in common?

Yep, artificial sweeteners. Most of them contain aspartame to be specific. Never really thought too much about it until yesterday when I woke up with a slight buzzing in my ears. Sort of an annoying little tone that you might expect to have for a couple of days after a really loud rock concert. Really really annoying.

So did some research. Turns out that, depending on who you believe, this buzzing could be a mild case of tinnitus. Tinnitus is the medical term for sounds in the ear that are not caused by any type of external noise. The sounds? It can be a buzzing, a ringing, or snippets of Celine Dion tunes. No, sorry, that last one comes from Titanicitus, not tinnitus. Equally annoying.

Anyway. Tinnitus, again depending on what sources you believe, can be linked to aspartame “poisoning”. But before we get into the whole “are sweeteners dangerous?” debate, let’s throw out some fun facts.

There are five artificial sweeteners that the FDA has approved for use in the United States.

Saccharin

First produced in 1878, this was the first of the artificial sweeteners and became popular during the sugar shortages of WW1.

Commonly seen in little pink packs labeled Sweet ‘N Low and is the diet ingredient in Tab, the Coca Cola soft drink that was big back in the 60’s and 70’s.

In 1977, Saccharin was shown to produce cancer tumors. In rats. The FDA mandated that the use of saccharin be restricted and warning labels be attached to any consumer food or beverage product that included it.

Well, turns out that the cancer producing qualities of saccharin are limited to rats and their unique metabolism. Or at least that’s what the FDA claims. They removed all warning labels on saccharin products.

Aspartame

You know aspartame. It’s in the the little blue packets that are labeled Equal, NutraSweet, and Canderel. And in addition to my Snapple Tea and Crystal Lite, it’s an ingredient in over 6,000 other consumer food and beverages.

Aspartame, tentatively approved by the FDA in 1974, is 180 times as sweet as sucrose, or common table sugar. After experiments demonstrated that aspartame caused cancerous tumors in lab animals, the FDA backed off.

However, in 1981, aspartame was officially approved under “interesting” circumstances. The FDA Commissioner at the time refused to approve aspartame.

He was fired.

His replacement, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., pushed through the approval for aspartame to be used in consumer foods and beverages. And then he left the FDA to take an executive position with G.D. Searles.

G.D. Searles?

Oh yeah, they make aspartame.

Do a search on aspartame. Look at the ingredients. A real smorgasbord of methanol and other seemingly toxic substances.

Sucralose

Okay, these are the yellow packets. We see them as Splenda, SucraPlus, and other sugar substitute brands.

Approved in 1998, sucralose can be found in over 4,500 consumer food and drinks. It’s twice as sweet as saccharin, four times as sweet as aspartame, and 600 times as sweet as table sugar.

And an ingredient list that appears to be far more “natural” than aspartame.

Going forward, I’m sticking with drinks that contain sucralose based sweeteners. At least til we find out what happens with the latest round of rat experiments.

There are two additional sweeteners that have been approved by the FDA. They are far less common and are typically, due to taste, mixed in with one of the previous three we have discussed. They are:

Neotame

Made by NutraSweet, this artificial sweetener is over 10,000 times as sweet as table sugar. It’s chemically similar to aspartame, which means it has some really potentially toxic components. But the sweetener content of one “packet” of Neotame equals over ten “packets” of aspartame.

However, due to the bitter aftertaste, it is usually blended with aspartame or one of the other substitutes.

Acesulfame Potassium

Marketed under the names Sunett or Sweet One, Acesulfame Potassium is 200 times as sweet as ordinary table sugar. It has roughly the same sweetness factor as aspartame, but also delivers a slightly bitter aftertaste.

It is also usually blended with aspartame or sucralose.

Artificial Sweeteners

You do some studying on this sweetener stuff and you begin to realize that when they say “artificial”, they really mean chemically not found in nature. In other words, probably not stuff we want to be eating or drinking. Or at least not in massive quantities.

I’ve sworn off aspartame for awhile. Found some tea mix that uses sucralose, which, although still “artificial”, appears to be far more compatible with the human body.

I’ll let you know what happens with the buzzing.