aspartame is… | odds
…good for you | very unlikely
…harmless | plausible
…bad for you | plausible"Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression in the amygdala"
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213120119
"“What this study is showing is we need to look back at the environmental factors, because what we see today is not only what’s happening today, but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer,” said co-author Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Biomedical Sciences."
"Led by doctoral candidate Sara Jones, the study involved providing mice with drinking water containing aspartame at approximately 15% of the FDA-approved maximum daily human intake. The dosage, equivalent to six to eight 8-ounce cans of diet soda a day for humans, continued for 12 weeks in a study spanning four years.
Pronounced anxiety-like behavior was observed in the mice through a variety of maze tests across multiple generations descending from the aspartame-exposed males.
“It was such a robust anxiety-like trait that I don’t think any of us were anticipating we would see,” Jones said. “It was completely unexpected. Usually you see subtle changes.”
When given diazepam, a drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, mice in all generations ceased to show anxiety-like behavior.
Researchers are planning an additional publication from this study focused on how aspartame affected memory. Future research will identify the molecular mechanisms that influence the transmission of aspartame’s effect across generations."
https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2022/12/08/fsu-res...
in the research paper there is a math:
"The FDA recommended maximum DIV for aspartame for humans is 50 mg/kg (33). Based on allometric conversion utilizing pharmacokinetic and body surface area parameters (43), the mouse equivalent of the human DIV is 615 mg/kg/d. Therefore, the male mice received a daily aspartame dose equivalent to 14.0%, 7.0%, and 3.5% of the FDA recommended human DIV, and the females received a dose equivalent to 15.5%, 7.7%, and 3.9% of the human DIV. The estimated average daily aspartame intake in humans is 4.1 mg/kg (44), corresponding to a mouse equivalent dose of 50.68 mg/kg (43), which was the dose delivered to mice consuming 0.015% aspartame."
The "mouse equivalent dose" calculated by this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804402/
- Larger animals have lower metabolic rates
- Physiological process of larger animals is slower
- Larger animals required smaller drug dose on weight basis
Until then, I'll enjoy my occasional diet coke.
> After aspartame is consumed, it immediately breaks down into three naturally occurring chemicals. Even large amounts of aspartame cause smaller fluctuations in those chemicals than normal food. The current science says that the health impact of aspartame is essentially zero. Every credible body that has studied this question has reached the same conclusion.