Aspartame

From RationalWiki

Aspartame (better known by its tradename NutraSweet®) is an artificial sweetener consisting of a derivative of a dipeptide of aspartic acid and phenylalanine.

Contents 1 Color coded packets 2 Controversy over safety 3 See also 4 External links

[edit] Color coded packets

It has also been marketed as "Equal®" in the form of a beverage sweetener (in most places it's the stuff in the blue packets) and, after being developed in 1965 at drug maker G.D. Searle, went on the market in the United States and much of Europe in the 1980s. It gained popularity due to being a better-tasting alternative to the slightly bitter saccharin (the pink packets), and in turn has lost market share in recent years to sucralose (the yellow packets, at least the ones that aren't marked "Sugar Twin", which is saccharin). Stevia (the green packets) tastes like stale licorice. If cyclamates were still marketed, they would probably be in the black packets, but they have been spotted in some countries in candy-stripe packets (as in a miniature version of the old airmail envelopes). Sorbitol and maltitol don't come in color-coded packets, but they do cause gastrointestinal issues in some laboratory rats.

You can avoid all this confusion by just using sugar. (That's the stuff in the white or brown packets.)

[edit] Controversy over safety

While generally considered safe, the approval process was rather protracted due to concerns about possible cancer risk. Aspartame is known, due to its phenylalanine content, to be unsafe for sufferers of the genetic disease phenylketonuria, but this so far is the only proven risk (other studies on the matter have been widely disputed). However, many people, citing the complicated and sometimes overly chummy approval process (among other things, Searle's CEO was Donald Rumsfeld, the much-reviled Secretary of Defense under both Ford and Bush II), have blamed aspartame for any number of ills (including allegations that it causes brain tumors), and much has been made about the presence of trace amounts of methanol in the metabolites of the substance.

However, due to a lack of reproducible evidence either way, aspartame remains on the market, much to the relief of diabetics everywhere.

[edit] See also

• High fructose corn syrup

[edit] External links

• Wikipedia's article on aspartame
• Wikipedia's article on the aspartame controversy (sadly, not quite neutral on the subject)
• Snopes.com aggregation of articles on the subject