When you are a recovering drunk, you don’t have a ton of options at parties. I used to be an avid Diet Coke drinker. But last summer my sister scared the, well you know what, out of me when she started talking about what aspartame can do to your system. I am chemically sensitive as it is, and many of you are, too, probably — which is why I don’t drink alcohol and gave up smoking.
But I was curious if Diet Coke was really that dangerous. I did some research, and as you well know, every paranoia will be confirmed eventually by some article on the web.
I found an article about Diet Coke on John McManamy’s website. What was particularly interesting to me was the relationship between aspartame and depression and bipolar disorder.
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”So now I’m back to my boring sparkling water and lime again. Snore.” ,
i like your sense of humor 
. Ya! might be boring ,but it’s sparing you the endless list of harms by aspartame, try fresh juices , they are anti-boredom & good for your health 
..
I should note that it should be of no great surprise that the research McManamy cites found a disturbing relationship. Why? Because the people in the study received a lot more aspartame than is contained in a typical can of Diet Coke. From the study –
7 x 300 = 2100 mg of aspartame per day. A can of Diet Coke, according to the Coca-Cola company, contains 125 mg of aspartame. So you would need to drink nearly 17 cans of Diet Coke per day to get to the equivalent of these researchers’ dosing level. Frankly, I don’t know of anyone who comes close to 17 cans of Diet Coke a day.
Sometimes researchers stack the deck in order to “find” data of significance. In this case, it’s not clear why the researchers chose such a high dose to give to their participants, as the study doesn’t say.
Awesome article! So many people out there consume aspartame (because it is in EVERYTHING…our soda, our ice cream, and even our gum) and don’t even know how harmful it is.
Yes, if I drank 17 cans of Diet Coke a day I probably wouldn’t have any teeth or intestines left. And that WOULD be depressing.
My daughter who is sensitive to aspartame and was drinking a lot of regular coke has switched to sparkling water and cranberry juice – it’s really good!
I don’t drink a lot of soda but I do like Crystal Light added to my water for a bit of variety. Nestea makes a similar product that doesn’t contain aspartame.
I actually do know someone who consumes close to 17 cans of caffeine free diet coke a day. This family member of mine drinks between 2 and 3 2-liter bottles of diet coke a day, and has for years. I’m not sure what’s in the stuff but this family member is totally addicted.
The only soda I drink is diet. I do prefer the kinds with alternative sweeteners, like Splenda.
@John: A can is 11-12 oz. A bottle of soda (more easily available) is 20 oz. – almost twice the size. So that would be 7.5 bottles. Then also consider restaurant drinks with free refills. It is easily possible (though not smart) for a person to consume close to that much. I used to have a Diet coke addiction and would rack up about 3 bottles and two restaurant refills a day before I made a mood connection of my own & weened off of it. : / You’d like to think the study dosages are way off, but for a portion of america, it may not be that far fetched…
This article is going straight to my mother’s house, where all the women drink Diet Coke by the barrel.
don’t forget the effects of the caffeine, as well. coming off caffeine is quite difficult, and (in my experience), caused shaking, distress, anxiety and an increase in depression for a time.
I keep pretty tight control of mood and find too much caffeine causes the mood problems for me, not artificial sweeteners. Dosing with 17 times of what a serving would be is sloppy science and takes advantage of people who just want to be able to control their mood. The fact that no others have repeated this study shows that it’s sort of junk science.
Avoiding soda in general is probably a good idea for bodily health not just mental.
This makes Diet Coke seem even worse. I haven’t fortunately been drinking fizzy drinks or processed foods for some time but this keeps me wanting to stay clear. I understand that the sugar intake of these drinks can also have an effect on depression and other illnesses.
”Sometimes researchers stack the deck in order to “find” data of significance. In this case, it’s not clear why the researchers chose such a high dose to give to their participants, as the study doesn’t say.”
John, aspartame is used in many other things like chewy gum, flavoured water, cookies, cakes, ice cream, everything that is going to be lower in sugar and most of stuff that isn’t but they add it any way as a sweetener. So lest get someone who drinks a 500 ml bottle of coke a day plus a pack of chewy gum and a sweet snackthat says low in sugar and has lots of aspartame instead, then some other, maybe low sugar jam that in order to be sweet needs somethig..BANG! ASPARTAME it is;)
Now you know that average consumer who loves sweets and fast food takes much more in of this crap then 125 mg. So good luck to all of us, cus you will find aspartame in stuff you couldn’t never thought it be in. :/
I feel your pain!! I gave up alochol & smoking in the same day almost 2 years ago. I tried energy drinks, diet drinks, juice & they are all a bunch of crap…loaded with sugars and unhealthy substitutes. So like you….I am condemned to a life of water & unsweet tea. Very boring indeed.
Rhene — Unless you’re going out of your way to eat foods that have aspartame in them, I’d hazard to guess that most people don’t come anywhere close to 2100 mg/day of the stuff. (The average gum contains only 6 to 8 mg of aspartame per piece. You’d have to chew 100 pieces/day to reach just 600 – 800 mg!).
Of course, a good researcher would actually determine the average amount of aspartame the average American consumes before deciding on a “dose” to use in a study. This was not done here.
Just imagine! Healthy Americans! Folks so in shape that Diet anything would not be necessary! Would we look as thin and fit as the Chinese, the Japanese? Would our cars need so much power to cart us around? Could we get by on less than the advertisers want us to believe? Are we the victims of a vicious Corporate, Capitalist plot to make us consume more, so they can make bigger profits? Is Hollywood really their biggest propaganda machine? Are we really entranced by advertisements? Do we really expect TV and Internet to tell us what to think?
“In 1993, Dr Walton, who is a psychiatrist, conducted a study of 40 patients with unipolar depression and a similar number without a psychiatric history.”
And just why would a psychiatrist have 40 patients hanging around who did -not- have a psychiatric history?
Let’s get real here, kids … a sample of 40 individuals sliced 4 different ways is just too small to be relied on. Even if the study was well-intended, it’s still junk science. Bumping the dosage up made for obvious and immediate results, but not good science. Moreover, bumping the dosage up brings the Dr.s motivation and ethics into question. He was taking risks with the lives of known unstable people.
Let’s see a study of at least 500 individuals (to allow for drop-outs) with a lower, more realistic, dose for a longer time period … a year or more to catch enough slow-cycle mood swings to avoid that skew.
I recently tried to quit Diet Coke but wasn’t quite able to do it. I am down to 1-2 cans a day now and I mix in the occasional Splenda-based Waist Watchers soda.
I’m not sure I buy how dangerous it is, but I figure the fewer artificial sweeteners we put in our bodies, the better.
There is a Splenda-sweetened Diet Coke — same aisle as the evil stuff.
@John:
“Frankly, I don’t know of anyone who comes close to 17 cans of Diet Coke a day.”
Unfortunately, it’s more common than you might think.
Although 2100mg seems too much, who is to say what dosage is toxic for you? There may be more sensitive individuals who may react to lower dosages than that. And it is easy to stack on aspartame: diet drinks, chewing gums, ice cream, yogurt, ice tea, etc. An uninformed person doesn’t read labels on products and may consume aspartame from many sources in the same day.
Diabetics have a VERY difficult time finding some things without Aspartame. I’m diabetic, and Aspartame is a migraine trigger for me. (Believe me, I would love being able to use it – I miss Dr. Pepper so much!) I’ve only found one brand of cough drops that aren’t sweetened with either sugar or Aspartame, and I can’t find them locally, so I have to order them online. It’s difficult to judge just how many to order, too – cough drops are something one normally gets as they are needed! There are other things, but that’s the one that comes to mind right away.
Just the other day, it was suggested I change from Aspartame to Splenda.
I’m going to search the internet for Splenda drinks and food.
I do find water and tea help me a whole lot better than fizzy drinks.
Let’s remember what the article is focussing on and that is aspartame. Diet Coke is not the only drink with aspartame. Even many fruit drinks contain aspartame. Just because something is “resembling” a fruit drink does not mean it is healthy. A cranberry drink or orange drink or any other fruit drink can contain aspartame. Let’s keep our focus on the topic at hand. Diet Coke is not the only beverage with it.
The dangers of aspartame go far beyond influencing depression and headaches. See the work of neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock, both in his Youtube videos and in his book, Excitotoxins — The Taste That Kills.
Dr. Blaylock makes a good case that excitotoxins, such as aspartame and MSG, by causing the exhaustion and death of nerve cells in key areas of the brain may be increasing the risk for neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s, and Alzheimer’s Disease.
Then there are also the tumors found in lab rats given similar doses of aspartame as humans might consume on a weight-adjusted basis.
The only reason aspartame ever got approved over the objections of the FDA’s scientific review committee was by the political string-pulling of Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld. It’s an interesting story.