America is Kidding Itself About Diet Soda

Since the introduction of Diet Coke in 1982, low calorie sodas have taken America by storm. After all, who wouldn't want a soda that keeps you skinny, and tastes just as good as the original. It turns out that the promise of guilt free sipping just isn't a reality, yet the American public still clings to that belief, and it's going to be a problem. The scariest part though, is that it's openly promoted right in our public schools.

The most common sweetener used in diet sodas is aspartame. Aspartame is roughly 200 times sweeter than sugar meaning only a fractional amount is needed to achieve the same sweetness. Despite the small amount usually used in sodas, aspartame has proven to have seriously adverse effects on the human body.

Aspartame is actually a combination of two amino acids, L-phenylalanine and L-aspartic acid. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), these amino acids are broken down in the intestine into methanol, aspartic acid, and phenylalanine. Methanol causes liver damage on its own, but it is further metabolized in the liver into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde, which is commonly used to preserve dead bodies and in the process of making plywood and insulation, is recognized by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, National Toxicology Program, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a carcinogen to humans. According to the NIH, the products of aspartame metabolization are widely considered more toxic than aspartame itself. 

Aspartame is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as group 2B (possibly carcinogenic). This means that there is limited evidence of aspartame causing cancer, but not yet enough to change laws or recommendations on it. If you go to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website on aspartame the very first thing you see is "FDA Response to External Safety Reviews of Aspartame." The page goes on to quickly state "Aspartame being labeled by IARC as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer." That is actually exactly what that means. 

Contrary to popular belief, aspartame often has the opposite effect of what it's intended to do. The NIH says that statistically, aspartame is more likely to increase obesity. Although aspartame tastes sweet, it does not satiate your body's need for calories. It tastes sweet while it's in the mouth, but the body will still seek out new sources of energy, and most of the time it overcompensates. People end up consuming more calories from other sources than they would have by just drinking a sugar soda in the first place. 

So if aspartame is so unhealthy for us, why is it so widely used? It turns out that not all government agencies agree about how aspartame should be treated. While the NIH (National Institute of Health) has a page dedicated to the effects of aspartame, which goes into detail on all the consequences mentioned in this article and more, the FDA strikes a more positive tone. It is worth noting that the FDA is primarily a regulatory organization, while the NIH is primarily a research organization. They do serve different purposes and therefore they should provide different perspectives. However, they should not provide contradictory information. 

So who's right? It's not easy to say a trusted government/U.N. organization is wrong, yet logically one of them has to be. Think about the purpose of each of these agencies. The NIH is a research organization. Their job is to fund, orchestrate, and collect reliable information and distribute it to the American public. They don't make laws. They inform people. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) is a regulatory body in charge of setting rules and standards for food and drugs in the U.S. Their job is not to distribute reliable information to the public, although they probably still should. Their job is to set safety standards. They both are intended to protect the people; one through information, the other through regulation. 

Historically, the FDA lags severely behind the NIH and independent scientists in their regulation. To give an example, in the 1950s several landmark studies (Doll and Hill; Wyder and Graham) definitively showed that smoking causes lung cancer. In 1957, the U.S. Public Health Service, working alongside the NIH, officially declared smoking a cause of lung cancer. It was not until 2009, over half of a century later, that the FDA began to regulate cigarettes. Similarly, in the 1990s, NIH supported research that showed that bisphenol-A (commonly known as BPA), which was commonly used in plastic food packaging, mimicked estrogen and affected human development. It was not until 2012 that the FDA banned BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups, and to this day, they still have not banned it from food packaging.

This is exactly the situation we are in. Although the NIH lists and explains many negative effects of aspartame, it is still legal. It's still in our schools. Oddly, in some schools such as Vashon Island High School, it's the only soda option.

It seems wrong that we serve any kind of soda in schools. We definitely know that sugar isn't good for people. We know aspartame isn't good for people. We know they are bad, it's just a matter of how bad. Why does our school, the same school that wouldn't allow community service organizations to hand out candy during the service fair, knowingly give developing children sodas that contain aspartame.

Some organizations, such as the FDA will argue that the evidence of negative effects of aspartame is too weak to draw conclusions. When pilots see a warning light before takeoff, they don't take off. They figure out what's wrong and fix it, and if they don't, that's how planes crash. The studies from the NIH aren't just warning lights, they are alarms, and we are mid flight. 

As a country, we have a backwards approach to this. When there is a possibility of aspartame being harmful, people decide to drink up now and ask questions later. They do this because they want to believe that diet soda is ok. They want to believe it so badly that they convince themselves that legitimate scientific studies are fake. Let's not pretend that Americans haven't bought into crazier ideas than that of aspartame being unhealthy either. According to the University of Minnesota, 12% of Americans think that vaccines contain toxic ingredients such as antifreeze. It's not that Americans want to thoroughly study things before we draw conclusions, it's that people choose to not believe in the effects of aspartame because even if the "fake studies" happen to be true, people would rather get cancer in 20 years than be overweight now, and no one wants to give up their precious soda altogether. 

It would be amazing if there was guilt free soda. But the hard truth is that there just isn't. There is no magic sweetener.