Aspartame

I was having some trouble starting my homework today because I was tired, irritable, and a just unfocused. So, what did I do? I didn't take a nap or eat an apple or anything good for me like that. I trundled down to my house basement where there's a vending machine and got a Diet Pepsi (OneCards are like credit cards; once you swipe them once, it's over and over again... and then you have no printing money!). This drink is like my lifeblood - I don't think there's a day that goes by where I don't have either a bottle or a glass of it at one of my meals (excluding breakfast, that's just weiiird!). I've tried to quit it, but it's just so difficult!

Ooohmmm

Thus my topic was born. Aspartame, a chemical sweetener that goes into many diet drinks. I decided to do a little digging; aspartame is an artificial sweetener (this I knew) that is TWO-HUNDRED times sweeter than table sugar. I was surprised by this, really surprised. It makes sense though. I regularly use Splenda to sweeten drinks like coffee, and am always a bit annoyed when I use an equal amount of sugar and find my drink to be not as sweet as I would like. I have my explanation for this phenomena!


Now, zero calories is a lie. Technically there are 4 calories per gram of aspartame, but remember how it's 200 times as sweet as table sugar? If one used a whole gram heads might start exploding all over the place. It doesn't take nearly that much to make things palatable, so scaling down the amount down make the calorie content truly  negligible.

Part of me was waiting to here that my ingesting of this chemical was slowly killing me. According to Wikipedia the FDA approved the use of aspartame in all foods in 1996, which makes me feel a bit better. The FDA says aspartame is "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved," but even I've heard about the panics involving artificial sweeteners. I've heard things like "EQUAL GIVES YOU CANCER" and "ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS ARE MAKING YOU FATTER,"  (the latter seemed argued a bit more convincingly) from biased sources. Sometimes it's hard to make the right choice in the matter. After all, look at FDA's track record with some of the other foods we put into our body. It's a bit scary, but for now I'm sticking with my fake, sticky soda until someone truly trustworthy tells me otherwise.

Happy Easter!