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Comment by darcyparker | Hacker News Reader

Aspartame (Nutrasweet) is pretty controversial in how it got approved by the FDA.

See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robbie-gennet/donald-rumsfeld-...

When I was 8 years old, I started having grand mal seizures and my parents noted a strong correlation between drinking a Diet Coke and having a seizure. When they eliminated it from my diet, my seizures declined. Fortunately I stopped having seizures around 12 years of age. But given my experience, I continue to avoid all artificial sweeteners.

I know sources like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame#Safety_and_approval_... claim that it is safe... and I agree that for most people it is probably okay in moderation. But based on my experience and the history of how Aspartame (Nutrasweet) got approved, I have serious doubts about its safety.

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That article has a lot of fear mongering about artificial sweeteners and then at the bottom an ad for "certifiedorganicevaporatedcanejuice.com". Maybe it's not the most objective source of information?

certified organic evaporated cane juice.com

For those who struggle to parse without spaces :)

Rumsfeld was the CEO at Searle - the makers of Aspartame... And he used his political influence to replace the FDA commissioner so Aspartame could be legalized. That's a conflict of interest.

While scummy, that doesn't necessarily mean that Aspartame is dangerous.

its legal in plenty of other places and the bulk of research (some very recent) seems to show that it is very safe within the constraints of those studies, with the well documented and understood exception of people with phenylketonuria.

this makes it very hard for me to believe in the corruption argument, no one individual has the power or money to do something on that scale. maybe its a coordinated effort, but such arguments strain credibility. even if we assume corruption, it is not relevant to the safety discussion if we have piles of evidence that something is only dangerous in well understood cases.

on the other hand, we will never really know for sure, and we don't even have a complete picture until enough people have been consuming it for long enough 'in the wild'... but the same is true about anything discovered recently.

and of course, the individual case you point out is shocking regardless as to the safety of aspartame.

But then apart from the FDA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Singapore, probably many more, have all OK'd it and it's still approved. Surely his political influence doesn't cover dozens of countries over nearly half a century.

Aspartame is 50 years old now. Any researcher that showed a clear damaging effect would instantly be set for life, no? I know that isn't strong evidence, but it's some evidence.

I don't know what it is about artificial sweeteners in general, but I think people hate the idea of getting something for free, that you can literally enjoy a sweet dessert without paying for it in calories.

In SF, it's obnoxious, to the point of places not even carrying sucralose or aspartame, only <shudder>, Stevia. Or people saying, with a straight face, "Yep, our tea has real sugar, so it's far better for you."

Interestingly enough, a low carbohydrate (often including a switch to artificial sweeteners) is a well-established treatment for childhood epilepsy.

The validity low carb diets is generally orthogonal to artificial sweeteners and probably should not be conflated.

Thus the phrase "often including..."

I wasn't attempting to disprove or contribute to his claims. Just to point out an interesting intersection of diet and seizures.

Can you give a source for aspartame/artificial sweeteners being often included with low carb diet for treating childhood epilepsy? It doesn't seem intuitive to me that a diet to treat such a disease would often include something like aspartame.

Well a ketogenic diet is used to treat epilepsy, and artificial sweeteners don't generally conflict with ketosis. I didn't mean to imply artificial sweeteners are prescribed to epileptics. Maybe they're even specifically forbidden as well, I'm not sure.

> It doesn't seem intuitive to me that a diet to treat such a disease would often include something like aspartame.

It's the avoiding carbs part that means they look to eat something sweet that isn't a carb. They don't prescribe aspartame; they just say don't leave ketosis.

Really? Can you point to a source?

Many people with epilepsy and migraines have discovered different food triggers. In my case Aspartame was the leading trigger. Anyone who has seizures should seek out and eliminate potential triggers to see if it helps. I suppose a high carb diet could be a trigger for someone... I didn't have a high carb diet... but I know eliminating aspartame helped me.

I am still amazed how Donald Rumsfeld was able to influence its approval by the FDA.

They're likely referring to a ketogenic diet. They were quite common in the past before anticonvulsant meds were created, and are still used in intractable cases today, particularly in pediatric care. There's lots of information out there about their use in epilepsy.

Some to get you started:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898565/

http://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epilepsy...

http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/clinical-upd...

Interesting - thanks.

[Edit] - The ketogenic diet is interesting. And I can see how some would want to substitute sugar for an artificial sweetener to help achieve a low carb diet. But given Aspartame is a known trigger for many types of seizures, it should be introduced carefully.

Do you have a source re: aspartame and seizures? I did a cursory search and the only non-anecdotal thing I could find was a study[1] that showed there was no link in people who described themselves as sensitive.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7614911

Unfortunately I can't point to an official study - just many anecdotal claims from people like me. When you google, I am sure you will see many such claims - including the 'internet hoax'. (The internet hoax is unfortunate because it takes away credibility from the many anecdotal claims like mine that sincerely feel real. More carefully constructed studies should occur.)

That's tricky to evaluate, because you get the exact same narratives from people who claim sensitivity to glutamates, where we can be somewhat certain that there isn't a health connection.

It's easy to evaluate if you have seizures. You don't need to wait for it to be definitively proven to make use of the anecdotal evidence. If you learned that aspartame could trigger a seizure, wouldn't you be cautious and want to see if a change to your diet would reduce your seizures?

It is not at all hard to find people who believe MSG triggers seizures.

To add, most of the studies done on rats had "normal dosages" of aspartame for Humans not Rats. In other words the dosage was not relative to the rats mass it was relative to ours.

http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/2089.htm

The key thing to search for is "keto" or "ketogenic," the name for the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that puts you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet

- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898565/

- http://www.drperlmutter.com/study/dietary-treatment-adults-r...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ketoscience

You're definitely not alone. There's definitely a trend moving in this direction. We admittedly track the click data on our protein powder buyer's guide (https://blog.priceplow.com/guides/best-protein-powder) and far more people than you'd think have been choosing the natural sweetener path.

But interestingly, the number of products is still incredibly small in comparison. Hmmm...

Aspartame has been approved in many, many countries. It is unlikely that Rumsfeld influenced all of them.

forgive me for asking perhaps an obvious question , but did you reduce overall caffeine intake by switching from diet coke, or did you stick to something with similar caffeine levels and still experience the reduction in seizures?

I was 8 years old and my family rarely drank soda. I went from having a diet coke occasionally to occasionally having a regular coke, ginger ale, root beer, etc... So I don't recollect changing my periodic intake of caffeine.

I didn't do a thorough study of it... and I recognize that the logic that aspartame was a trigger could be wrong. But when you find something that appears to work and later hear of others who identified the same potential trigger and fix, then you start to believe it may be true. Personally I don't think there have been sufficient studies to show a connection or not. But people who have seizures shouldn't rule it out.

But people who have seizures shouldn't rule it out.

People that have any symptoms that correlate with consumption of foods shouldn't rule out anything a priori.

Depending on the severity of the symptom and their desire to eat certain foods, they may want to experimentally narrow down the trigger. I guess I would not be inclined to eat artificial sweeteners in an attempt to see if they triggered a seizure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria

I got a job at a company that had free soda. I was happy with that. I started drinking 1 diet coke in the afternoon every day. until after a few weeks I realized I was also getting a headache in the afternoon everyday. Fixed by switching to Perrier over the Diet Coke.

Granted, one person is an anecdote not data but switching from coke to diet coke lost me 20 lbs in a year. 500-1000 calories less each day.

You must have been drinking around 2 litres of Coke for that many calories. Have you tried switching from Diet Coke to water? You'll need a few trips to Starbucks a day (an americano has 0 kcal, it's like caffeinated air!) until you can reduce your caffiene dependence.

Given the college or hacker environment, a six-pack or 2l over the course of 18 hours isn't a lot to drink. Healthy, no, but then neither is doing a 12" pizza solo and that was pretty commonplace as well. Coffee shops didn't exist, and even if they did, it's hard to beat a quarter a can. Hacking without caffeine? Gunna take a while...

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