Thursday, August 20, 2009
Ban Aspartame
The Cancer Prevention Coalition is calling on the FDA to ban aspartame, according to this article by the Organic Consumers Association. Aspartame is used in food, sodas, and gum--but it's been shown to cause cancer in lab rats. The article gives a brief history of how this dangerous artificial sweetener was even approved in the first place. If you're drinking diet sodas or chewing sugarless gum -- or worse giving it to your kids, please read this article.
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2 comments:
Oh, Cathe, I wish people would have figured this out SOOO long ago! When my job moved 40 miles closer to my house, I was suddenly able to COME HOME for lunch every day. While this SHOULDn't have meant healthier eating habits, it did. I could keep fresh stuff nice and cold in the fridge, or just pluck it out of the garden at lunchtime and eat it live.
As I began eating healthier lunches (or what I THOUGHT was healthier) I began to have headaches, terrible headaches, and I'm not typically a headache kind of gal. But it came and went. Mr. B told me to go back to the way I'd been eating before (catch as catch can), but I balked.
One day I was in a rush and had merely a banana and a Yoplait Fat-free yogurt. Couldn't be much more healthy on the run, right? It was very long after lunch that I was overtaken by a TERRIBLE headache which led to a vomiting session alongside the road somewhere between my house and the office 3 miles away.
I returned home, called in sick, then decided to look up EVERY ingredient in the yogurt. I could figure out what everything was, to some extent, except aspartame. Then I read on, researched more. I wasn't alone.
I was lucky. I learned the truth about aspartame before my children were born. I tried to tell my family and friends, but to this day they all think I'm just nuts. Come on, they say, it's FDA approved! It MUST be OK! Oh...sad.
In 2007, my OtherMother died of cancer. She was one who scoffed at my efforts to draw people away from aspartame, who didn't believe that, yes, I really can taste it in my food. She also drank diet sodas throughout any given day - it was her coffee, her water, her milk, until the cancer returned that last time.
Then she tried to eat better. Then she stopped trying to push crap on my kids. Then she knew.
Did it cause her cancer? Who's to say.
Does it cause headaches for me? Without a doubt.
Do I allow my children to consume it? ABsolutely not!
Thanks, Cathe, for helping to spread the news.
Gosh Jen -- what a story! But I don't doubt it at all. In my 20's I had a co-worker who drank diet coke all day long and she had the worst headaches and was always taking Tylenol along with her soda. The boss at our job even had to talk to her to say she needed to take less pain-reliever -- it was noticed by the whole company!
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