The theory is that the sweet sensation of artificial sweeteners triggers Cephalic Phase Insulin Release (CPIR), which acts to lower, if only nominally, your blood sugar, which in turn makes you hungry, which forces you to eat and gain weight. But that's all it is: a theory, which seems to be based largely on a correlation, which does not imply causation. There simply isn't enough research to prove or disprove it at the moment.

However, to counter your link, this one suggests aspartame does not trigger the response. http://www.ajcn.org/content/82/5/1011.abstract

And then there's this: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73E4YH20110415

Diet soda and other artificially-sweetened drinks - previously implicated in raising the chance of developing diabetes - are not guilty, suggests a new study from Harvard University researchers.

When nothing else was accounted for, men who drank a lot of diet soda and other diet drinks were also more likely to get diabetes. But once researchers took into account men's weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol, those drinks were not related to diabetes risk.

That finding is "confirming the idea that it's really these differences between people who choose to, versus don't choose to, drink artificially-sweetened beverages" that is related to diabetes, Dr. Rebecca Brown, an endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health, told Reuters Health.

"People who are at risk for diabetes or obesity ... those may be the people who are more likely to choose artificial sweeteners because they may be more likely to be dieting," said Brown...


My pancreas stopped producing insulin when I was four years old, which at the time really limited the things I could eat and drink, so artificial sweeteners helped to make things a bit more interesting. When it comes down to it, the healthiest thing we can do is just to drink water, but if you ask me, life is too short for boring beverages.

In my personal case I have both started drinking diet drinks, and also reduced and controlled the other foods that I eat. And I'm not feeling too hungry, and am snacking quite rarely now. When pre-diet I was snacking all the time. Hence I think that I am benefitting from the lower calories of diet, artificially sweetened, drinks.

If I suddenly become ravenous, then I'll look into it again.

Returning to the topic of the thread, diet drinks are starting to taste much more 'normal' to me now. It's a slow, and ongoing process.

lol at your 'crackpot websites' did you watch the whole video?

Where's your evidence from research that aspartame is 100% totally safe and research that isn't biased as it's funded by the manufacturers?

As I've seen you input nothing worthwhile to this thread apart from fobbing off what's being said with your own personal opinion.

Unless I'm missing something, I don't believe this research was funded by by the manufacturers: Lim U., Subar A.F., Mouw T., Hartge P., Morton L.M., Stolzenberg-Solomon R., Campbell D., Hollenbeck A.R., & Schatzkin A. Consumption of aspartame-containing beverages and incidence of hematopoietic and brain malignancies. Cancer Epidemiol. Biomarkers Prev. 2006. Vol. 15.

This particular study conducted at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, found no increase in cancer risk in a sample of 500000 people.

Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives on earth, and not one reliable study has found it to be a danger to humans. In fact, aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by the regulatory agencies of more than ninety countries worldwide. I find it hard to believe that aspartame manufacturers are behind some mass conspiracy to dupe us all. I haven't watched the video as it's quite long, but would you be able to cite the specific studies that were funded by the manufacturers?

And, here is Snopes answer to Sweet Poison: http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/aspartame.asp

I also have a major issue here. I STRONGLY object to artificial sweeteners being used in NON DIET drinks. There is hardly a soft fizzy drink left which I can drink because of this. ALL UK versions of Tango & Fanta whether or not they be diet have this foul tasting artificial muck in them. Disgusting! If you think that these sweeteners are perfectly OK for you, then please watch the 2 min. video below. You may change your mind.

http://youtu.be/O9BWgJrx13c

More scaremongering Youtube videos providing zero scientific evidence. Do you have any peer-reviewed, published scientific studies we can read?

No. But as I actually despise the taste of these things anyway, this is good enough for me.

So because you don't like the taste, you'll just automatically believe anything bad anyone says about it, despite there being no actual evidence to back it up and stacks of real, scientific evidence concluding it's not dangerous?

Awesome.

Yes, I keep being shown videos like this.

There are claims at the beginning of the video saying that the sweeteners are neurotoxic, carcinogenic, but no references were given. The people being interviewed aren't described as having any qualifications that would imply that they should be taken seriously. The person claiming that aspartame is neurotoxic is Stephanie Moore, is discussed here: http://brianwernham.wordpress.com/20...perts-on-tv-5/

They then apply all sorts of emotional and invalid arguments. E.g. they say that Monsanto also creates Agent Orange, and try to tar aspartame with the 'chemical warfare' brush.

We get one person who says that after she stopped drinking aspartame her health improved. Anyone who knows anything about medical research knows that anecdotal evidence is very unreliable, which is why people do large scale double blind experiments.

As I've said before, this is what happens in this thread. We don't get any evidence that aspartame is dangerous, we just get emotive arguments. Where are the hard facts saying that aspartame is dangerous?

If there were hard, reliable, facts then I might 'think again'. But since there aren't, there isn't any reason to 'think again'. And given that aspartame is quite likely the food additive that has had most research done on it and is extremely widely consumed, we need to ask why solid evidence of harm hasn't come to light.

Oh, look I found a Youtube video too. It seems my links to scientific studies are going to be ignored, so maybe some moving pictures will hold more water with some of the people here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlqKzeCQvYg

Is the blonde woman in that video Samantha Brick of Daily Mail "I'm so beautiful everyone hates me" fame?

I have no evidence it is 100% safe, but then no-one in the world does. But I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that it isn't.

There are lots of situations in life where you have to balance up risk and benefit, or one risk against another. In my case drinking artificially sweetened drinks definitely works out. I'm currently overweight, and that's a health risk. (Not as overweight as I was a few weeks ago BTW). Maybe there is some small health risk from artificial sweeteners that we don't know about yet, but that's amply balanced by the fact that artificially sweetened drinks are helping me lose weight.

I do take the one point that has IMHO been successfully raised against artificial sweeteners. And that is that if some just drinks diet drinks without thinking about what is happening with the rest of their food intake, then there seems to be good evidence that people may over-compensate for the lost calories from diet versus regular drinks. But in my case I'm controlling overall calories quite strictly. So that doesn't apply to me.

Is there any food in the world that anyone knows for sure is 100% safe. But you can't stop eating and drinking. And now that I'm more used to it, I actually enjoy drinking some artificially sweetened soft drinks.

Whether or not sweeteners are actually toxic or not has no relevance to me. As far as I am concerned they taste toxic & that is good enough reason for me to avoid them completely. I just think it is a bit out of order that this stuff is used at all in non diet drinks.

What's also out of order posting propaganda laden Youtube clips in attempt to scare people just because you don't like the taste of something. That is confirmation bias of the highest order.

And just out of curiosity, I wonder how many of the people who try to argue aspartame is toxic, also drink alcohol.

As it happens I don't drink alcohol. And the youtube clip is just there as a guide. People can make up their own mind.

Do you believe the youtube clip?

Well, whilst I agree with you that it IS overladen with propaganda, I do believe parts of it. But to compare artificial sweeteners with chemical warfare is a bit outrageous.

And I've made up my mind that it is scaremongering crap.

Just to return to this thread, I've continued drinking sweetened drinks. Just adding an update (which I admit no-one asked for ) and some additional information.

Because I found it slightly more palatable, I've been drinking drinks sweetened with sucralose, including co-op fizzy drink which has both sucralose and acesulfame-k. These now taste normal to me.

However, the other day I drank a can of diet pepsi sweetened with aspartame. At the beginning of this thread I found aspartame just a bit less palatable than sucralose.

Not now though. I thought that getting used to one sweetener would make the others less 'strange'. Quite the opposite. I found the drink to be really foul and hated. I drank it all, but felt queasy afterwards. I was very surprised, as previously I was able to drink it OK, it just tasted a bit wrong.

This might say something about having to be used to various sweeteners for them to be palatable, and how getting used to one affects how palatable other sweeteners are. Or since it's just me, it might not