For years, people have said aspartame is an unhealthy sweetener, but this recent study seems to prove it causes cancer. I drink 2-3 Diet Cokes daily, so maybe I just got pushed enough to swear them off. The FDA will investigate.

 

Yeah... well, it makes even more sense when you find out who approved it. I'm not sure if this would be a "Known Known" or a "Known Unknown", but I really doubt it was an "Unknown Unknown".

As far as cancer goes, one of the most effective known preventative substance occurs naturally in certain foods, but most of them are missing from our westernized diet. This whole mystery was solved years ago, but to this day hardly anyone knows about it, so they can't consciously choose foods that contain the compound 'vitamin B17'. Many studies of aboriginal tribes with no cancer history to the present day found that their diets were high in plants with B17, and when they leave their environment and consume 'normal' food they are just as likely to get cancer as most of us are. There has been a lot of high power drug company studies where they try to treat a patient with B17 extract, but usually only after the patient doesn't respond to surgery, chemo and radiation (in which case their immune system is thrashed) and in no way disproves any of the claims of successful use in studies, but in any case it wasn't meant to be a "cure" so to speak, although like finding a cure for scurvy it's primarily a dietary issue, but also as important are the triggers that 'set off' cancer in the body. Info on the foods with B17 can be found here: http://www.worldwithoutcancer.org.uk...ventative.html and some info about the history of it as a cancer therapy http://curezone.com/diseases/cancer/laetrile.asp

 

Sure, it will cause cancer as long as you drink at least 1000 diet cokes a day, every day, for 5 years. Did you know most vitamins are fatal too? Everything will kill you if you have a hundred or ten thousand times the proper dosage. Radiation can kill you too, and we're exposed to plenty of radiation every day also. It's all about the dosage.

 

The studies were done on rats with various dosages, all of them equivalent to normal human consumption rates. It's true that too much of anything can kill you, but when the amount that they say it "safe" can do you serious harm (enough for them to ban pilots from drinking it even before this study was done) then it's time to take a second look, especially considering all the previous studies were not lifetime length. There are other artificial sweetners that don't have the problems aspartame does, but they aren't as cheap to produce, so guess what we drink?

 

Should have mentioned that the rats had "normal" does.

Years ago, an Englishman drank a gallon of carrot juice, but what killed him two weeks later was a bottle of Vitamin E daily - body could not get rid of it like the juice. His body was bright yellow at death. No, he was not named Homer Simpsn.