Carol Simontacchi
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 Equal or 18 cans of diet soda) every day of her life and it wouldn't make a bit of difference."26
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) urges caution when considering using aspartame-laced products, writing "Aspartame (Equal, NutraSweet), made up primarily of rwo amino acids, was rhought to be the perfect artificial sweetener, but questions have arisen about the quality of the cancer tests, which should be repeated. |
Judith J. Wurtman and Susan Suffes
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 Instead, when you have eaten all you should, drink a glass of carbonated water or diet soda. That action can become the signal that a meal is finished. Or chew gum or suck on a lollipop or a piece of hard candy. If you like, crunch on some ice cubes. Whatever you do, make it a new habit to replace your old one.
A LAST WORD
One of the best things you can do for yourself is to take advantage of smoking-withdrawal behavior-modification groups during the acute phase of giving up cigarettes. |
The Complete Book of Alternative NutritionSelene Y. Craig, Jennifer Haigh, Sari Harrar and the Editors of PREVENTION Magazine Health Books
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| While sugar-free liquids like diet soda, coffee or tea can be counted toward your daily water quotient, milk, fruit juice and sugary drinks cannot. "They count as carbohydrates that will raise your blood sugar," says Thom.
Drink cautiously. Most experts agree that a moderate intake of alcohol—one or two drinks a day—usually won't cause problems. For people taking insulin or oral diabetes medications, however, caution is advised.
"The danger is that you may think you're feeling the effects of a drink or two when actually your blood sugar is getting dangerously low," Beebe says. |
the Editors of PREVENTION Magazine Health Books
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 Then there was that diet soda later that morning, along with some sips of water every time you passed the fountain. You chased down lunch with a can of soda and had another Java jolt later in the afternoon as a pick-me-up. During dinner, maybe you had a large glass of milk or water. And don't forget that evening beer in front of the TV.
Do you still wonder why you go to the bathroom so often?
There's no standard for how frequently you should go to the bathroom, urinary experts say. Urinary frequency varies from person to person, even from day to day. |
| Don't expect to have a lot of muscle stamina if you're restricting yourself to diet soda and rice cakes," says Dr. Clarkson. Your daily diet should include protein, which is found in red meat, milk, cheese, eggs, chicken, fish, lentils and soybeans. You should also have generous helpings of complex carbohydrates, found in pasta, breads, fruits and vegetables. Your body breaks down these foods to glucose, for muscle power. These foods also provide a mix of vitamins and minerals that assist in the chemical reaction needed to fuel muscles. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
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 In the case of the most recent study, rats had been fed concentrations of saccharin equivalent to a daily dose of 800 cans of diet soda. Predictably, comedians and editorial cartoonists had a field day. Johnny Carson joked that Canadian researchers who fed rats large quantities of saccharin in their coffee went broke paying for the coffee. The nation simultaneously laughed and stormed over the FDA decision.
Some people, though, weren't laughing. |
| The superficial absurdity of a rat consuming the human equivalent of about a thousand cans of diet soda per day from fetus to adulthood has been exploited by industry, misinterpreted by the press, and misunderstood by the lay public, which has come to believe that anything given in large enough doses will cause canmature death, will generally result in a decreased tumor response (competing toxicity), and such tests cannot be accepted as valid evidence of noncarcinogenicity. |
Lita Lee, Lisa Turner and Burton Goldberg
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 Consider the following gruesome examples: a nursing infant convulsed when his mother drank a diet soda. A woman with epilepsy convulsed within minutes of chewing a piece of sugar-free gum sweetened with aspartame. A 16-year-old female with previously unexplained seizures experienced a seizure in a clinical experiment after eating one serving of chocolate pudding sweetened with aspartame. A 31-year-old nurse had a grand mal seizure within hours of drinking two liters of an aspartame-sweetened drink. |
Arthur C. Upton, M.D.
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| Industry critics, for example, argued that to equal the amount of saccharin given to animals in a cancer study, a person would have to drink some 400 cans of diet soda daily.)
Decades of testing on animals, however, have shown that a chemical that causes cancer in multiple species can be strongly suspected of also doing so in humans. Of the thirty-plus agents that are definitely known to cause cancer, almost all have been found to cause cancer in animal tests. |
Ralph Golan, M.D.
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 ASPARTAME
ASPARTAME, made up of two amino acids, was thought to be
Artificial sweetener the perfect artificial sweetener, but questions have arisen
Drink mixes, gelatin desserts, about the quality of the cancer tests and persons have other foods reported severe adverse behavioral effects after drinking diet soda. If you use aspartame, be careful! People with PKU need to avoid it, also.
/ BETA CAROTENE
Used as an artificial coloring and a nutrient supplement. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
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| As former charin in one and one-half cans of diet soda. * This argument has been simply explained in R. W. Rhein and L. Marion, The Saccharin Controversy (New York: Monarch Press, 1977), p. 58.
NCI Director Frank Rauscher, Jr., admitted to an American Enterprise Institute round-table on saccharin on April 21, 1977, "In protecting the public's health, there is no choice but to assume that the extrapolation is linear. |
Robert W. Hill, Ph.D. and Eduardo Castro, M.D.
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 He had been purposely drinking diet soda in an effort to avoid sugar, thinking it was a harmless, although a non-nutritional, drink. After removing aspartame from his diet, he has been seizure-free for over ten months. A repeat EEG done recently showed that the abnormality in the previous EEGs had reverted to normal.
We have no way of proving that the aspartame caused Antione's seizures or if discontinuing it led to his apparent recovery, but it is at least as likely as any other scenario food additive apologists may propound. |
David Brownstein
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 Ellen was drinking three diet soda's per day and using aspartame in her coffee every day. When I counseled Ellen on eliminating aspartame from her diet, she couldn't see how this could help her condition. "I thought the artificial sweeteners were good for you since they don't have calories in them, " she said. After three weeks of avoiding aspartame, she noticed an improvement. "My headaches began to go away. I couldn't believe it. It was like a vice had been lifted off of my head. I can't believe aspartame could do all that to me. " Ellen also noticed an improvement in her brain fog. |
Natural Prescriptions: Dr. Giller's Natural Treatments & Vitamin Therapies For Over 100 Common AilmentsRobert M. Giller, M.D.
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| One of my patients who drank enormous quantities of diet soda noticed a possible connection between her soda consumption and her headaches. When she eliminated all artificial sweeteners from her diet, her headaches occurred far less frequently.
Many women find that certain stimulants such as alcohol which have no effect on them regularly can trigger an attack if they're consumed just before a menstrual period or at the time of ovulation. If you are a menstruating woman who suffers from migraines, be sure to make note of your menstrual cycle on your headache diary. |
Jean Carper
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 Lewis on a hunch asked the parents if they had given the boy diet soda, thinking it was a good "clear liquid." They
Diet drinks are particularly dangerous, warns Dr. Lewis, because they contain no nutritional value and but a single calorie. Thus, they leave the child starved at a vulnerable time when he needs nourishment to fight the diarrheal disease.
Nor is tap water acceptable, says Dr. Lewis. For an older child Gatorade, though not ideal, is better than tap water or soda pop of any kind, he says. babies.
Thumbs Down: had. |
Donald M. Epstein
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 Because Christine did not want to get fat, her diet consisted primarily of low-fat packaged foods and diet soda.
When the baby was due, they checked into the local hospital, where Christine was "prepped," given an enema, and confined to bed. An IV was inserted into her arm and a fetal monitor placed on her abdomen. Because her contractions were painful, painkillers were added to the IV drip, thus drugging the baby through the mother's bloodstream. Christine's contractions were slow, so doctors gave her another drug to hasten labor. |
Kathi Keville
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 Chairman of the Biochemistry Department, University of California, Berkeley, has said that the risk of one cup of root tea is comparable to that of a peanut butter sandwich, a diet soda containing saccharin and one raw button mushroom. Mice given an extract made from the whole comfrey plant had their immune systems stimulated. When people were given small doses of safrole, it did not create any cancer-producing substances. This led researchers to suggest that the toxic reaction in humans is different from that in rats. It seems that we have much more to learn about determining herbal toxicity. |
The Editors of Prevention Magazine Health Books
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 We see a number of young women in their teens who, I believe because of poor dietary habits such as drinking diet soda and not getting enough calcium, have the jaws of much older women," says Dr. Wical. "And by the time they're in their thirties, they're wearing dentures."
Reduce your sugar. In addition to promoting dental decay, sugar is thought to harm gums. Many dentists believe that sugar feeds the bacteria that cause the infection leading to gingivitis, although there are no definitive studies to prove this.
Why the damage? |
Ann Blake Tracy, Ph.D.
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| It is rare for me to interview someone who is using Prozac who is not drinking at least a gallon or generally two to three gallons per day of diet soda sweetened with NutraSweet! The patients have noted that they were both amazed and confused by their extremely high consumption of these diet drinks. This craving for drinks with a substance which lowers brain serotonin is, to me, a strong indication that the brain is desperately attempting to balance its levels of serotonin as Prozac triggers a drastic fluctuating of the balance of this neurotransmitter. |
Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.
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 A key member of the Calorie Control Council was the Coca-Cola Company, which manufactured the saccharin-sweetened diet soda Tab. In its 1976 Annual Report, the ACS acknowledged that "a generous grant from Coca-Cola supported transportation" for a large delegation of the Society's executives and volunteers who visited the Soviet Union in that year. In addition, a vice president of Pepsico, another prominent Calorie Control Council member was on the ACS Commission on Smoking and Public Policy (ibid.). |
H.J. Roberts, M.D.
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 Fortunately, I noticed a severe increase in symptoms after two cans of diet soda, and began to research it on my own."
RFIEUMATIC COMPLAINTS
My experience suggests that unexplained rheumatic discomforts in persons using aspartame products warrant a trial of avoidance before embarking upon expensive diagnostic studies and potent drugs.
Fifty-eight aspartame reactors in this series suffered joint pains (arthralgia) that improved or disappeared after abstaining from this additive. |
| She had switched to an aspartame-sweetened diet soda ten weeks previously. These nodules disappeared after avoiding it for one month. Within 10 days after resuming the beverage, many more comparable nodules appeared . . . and again abated after cessation. Comparable lesions reappeared on her legs within 10 days after challenge with pure aspartame.
OTHER ASPARTAME-ASSOCIATED ALLERGIES
Respiratory Tract
Clinically significant allergic reactions to aspartame products have involved the nose, sinuses and bronchial tubes. |
| I drank diet soda for the obvious reason—to avoid sugar and to avoid weight gain. The interesting thing is that I remember often thinking, 'My body knows that it is not sugar . . . it's not fooled,' and I would go looking for the real thing. In other words, it did not accomplish my goal of finding a sugar substitute. I cannot be sure it increased my
T. S. Eliot
Representative Case Report craving for sugar . . . No matter how much I exercised, eating light, etc., I could not lose even a pound. All of the foregoing symptoms disappeared after discontinuing aspartame. |
| A 30-year-old female executive had a radial keratotomy performed on the left eye because "my eyes would intermittently go out of focus" while drinking three cans of diet soda daily. A second keratotomy was done on the same eye six months later due to persistent visual complaints. I subsequently saw her in consultation for other aspartame-related complaints and concluded that the aspartame product probably contributed to her persistent problem. |
| She was ingesting 10-15 cups of diet soda, up to 15 glasses of presweetened tea, and considerable amounts of diet cranberry juice daily.
• A 35-year-old pilot with convulsions, severe drowsiness, slurred speech, severe depression, irritability and intense headaches evidenced dramatic improvement within two weeks after stopping aspartame products. |
James A. Howenstine, MD
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 Pregnant women often use diet soda during pregnancy to attempt to prevent weight gain. Pregnant mothers should not use aspartame and children should stop taking this toxic agent.
Take a multivitamin. Be sure the multivitamin does not contain iron. Iron in the pills can mask a serious iron deficiency and cause a delay in the diagnosis of iron deficiency anemia. Iron deficiency anemia frequently is caused by serious conditions such as cancer and ulcers that are slowly bleeding and should be discovered as quickly as possible. Don't cover it up with iron in your vitamins. |
Gary Null
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 Therefore a person having a diet containing a high saccharine content—in foods such as diet soda and chewing gum, diabetic candies, bread or other items—would, over a period of years, increase their cancer risk rate far above that of a person not consuming these as regularly. Additionally, the person's state of health when consuming the saccharin could make the saccharin more potent in its effects. |
| This means, according to the FDA, that at the highest level of risk for humans, 4 persons out of 10,000 would develop bladder cancer if they drank just one twelve-ounce can of diet soda a day for a lifetime. That's 90,400 out of 226 million Americans.
U.S. law requires that the FDA immediately ban the use of any food additive shown to cause cancer when fed either to animals or to human beings. There is good reason for this clause, called the Delaney amendment (after New York Congressman James D. Delaney) in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. |
| Thus, the aggressively asserted and widely publicized argument of the powerful agribusiness and food industry interests, that the Canadian study was irrelevant because the rats were fed such a large quantity of saccharin (they equated it with 800 cans of diet soda a day), is so much hot air. Should industry really have the right to sell you a carcinogenic soda just because you or your children are likelier to come down with bladder cancer at the age of fifty rather than seventeen if you drink it habitually today?
No two people have the same tolerance level for any nutrient or nonnutrient. |
Elizabeth Somer, M.A., R.D.
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 Dieters can eat diet-friendly foods such as raw vegetables, diet soda, skinless baked chicken, and fruit for just so long before the sensory deficit entices them to indulge. Although this doesn't mean they have to eat fatty foods, since flavorful low-fat fare can tantalize taste buds just as easily, they turn to salty, high-fat foods because they are readily accessible.
Cravings also are triggered by their positive rewarding nature. Cookies are an example of how well-established patterns of food and good times (positive rein-forcers) lead to future cravings. |
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