Sweet Misery

My friend sent an video to me, she knows that I'd like eat candy. She said I need to see this video. After I watched Sweet Misery I was shocked, this was my first time to hear about aspartame. I don’t realize aspartame exist in many kinds of food, almost every food which I’d like to eat contain aspartame. Aspartame can cause many terrible influences for people’s body, like brain damage, brain cancer and some neural problems even can cause people death.

Aspartame is one kind of additive of food, to make food taste sweet. In this movie, there is a woman who gets the diabetes said, she thought sugar free contain no sugar so she drinks sugar free drink, one day after she dank four or five drinks, she fall in a faint. I was scared, because I’d like to drink coke, since I was young, coke is my favorite beverage. I thought coke is bad for my body because it contains caffeine and sugar, so I choose diet coke which contains none caffeine and sugar, now I know the diet coke contains aspartame which also can damage my body. I think I should stop drinking this kind of beverage.

When I do some research I find that it is nearly 180 to 200 times sweeter than sugar, so aspartame is widely used in many foods like tea, coffee, pudding and yogurt. I don’t know if aspartame can cause many problems for human’s body. The movie showed in the year 1967 Dr. Harold Waisman made an experiment called “week oral Toxicity study in the infant monkey”, he used 7 monkey babies and feed them with milk which contain aspartame. This experiment took 52 weeks, after 52 weeks one or two monkey died and five of monkeys were epilepsies. They sent the experiment result to FDA, but FDA still allowed aspartame add in food. Why FDA allowed aspartame? Because “the FDA calculated that an individual's daily consumption level would not likely exceed 1.3-1.7 grams per day. These calculations were based on the intake of the following foods sweetened with aspartame shown in the following table. Because of the conservative nature of the no-effect level derived from the animal tests and the 100-fold safety factor employed in relating the tests to man, the FDA believed that the uses approved by its regulation constituted an acceptable daily intake of aspartame with a sufficient margin of safety” (LEDA at Harvard Law School, 2005) from this I know, people can eat aspartame just don’t eat more than 1.3-1.7 grams per day, for me I will avoid to eat food which contain lots aspartame.