basic knowledge
Aspartame (trademarks include Equal, NutraSweet and NatraTaste) is a mixture of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. This substance is produced by G.D. Searle &; Jim Schlaadt, a chemist of Co. Pharmaceutical Company (now affiliated to Pfizer), found it in 1965. Schlaadt licked his fingers and picked up a piece of paper while testing a new anti-ulcer drug, and aspartame was born.
The sweetness of aspartame is 180 to 200 times that of sugar, so a very small amount of aspartame is enough to sweeten food or drink. Aspartame will be decomposed into three components after digestion: aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol (lignin).
Patients with phenylketonuria (PKU) are a rare hereditary disease, so aspartame should be avoided because they lack phenylalanine lyase. If the food or drink taken or quoted by such people contains a lot of phenylalanine, phenylalanine will accumulate in the body, which may eventually lead to nerve damage and brain damage. Usually the hospital will check the PKU of the newborn.
use
Aspartame is not usually used to bake or heat food because it decomposes when heated. According to the official website of Aspartame, there are more than 6,000 products containing this substance, including carbonated soft drinks, soft drink powder, chewing gum, candied fruit, edible gum, assorted snacks, puddings, fillings, frozen sweets, yogurt, table flavoring agents and certain drugs (such as vitamins and sugar-free cough syrup). 198 1 year, the FDA approved aspartame as a food additive.
debate
Among various artificial sweeteners, the safety of aspartame seems to be the most controversial. Since artificial sweeteners were approved, 75% of the complaints received by ADR monitoring system were related to aspartame. Among the people who have encountered such problems, only 1% reported them to the relevant departments [reference].
Although there is no officially recognized research showing that there is something wrong with aspartame, many consumer groups and individuals have quite different views on it. People blame aspartame for some health problems, such as headache, epilepsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, memory loss and dizziness. At the same time, it is believed that this substance is also related to the increased incidence of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and cancer.
Critics of aspartame believe that although two amino acids of aspartame are natural components in human diet, when people ingest these two amino acids in daily food, they will coexist with many other amino acids in the body, thus offsetting the side effects of these two amino acids. However, when these two amino acids exist alone like aspartame, people will worry that they will enter the central nervous system at an abnormally high concentration.
Similar problems exist in methanol (lignin) decomposed after aspartame is digested by human body. For methanol in fruit juice and alcoholic beverages, these methanol are usually accompanied by a large amount of ethanol, which can eliminate the toxicity of methanol. 10% aspartame is absorbed by blood in the form of methanol. The United States Environmental Protection Agency recommends that the daily intake of methanol should not exceed the limit of 7.8 mg. However, the content of methanol in 1 liter beverage containing aspartame is about 56 mg, which is 8 times the recommended limit.
In 2005, the European Journal of Oncology published an article about aspartame, which showed that aspartame could cause lymphoma and leukemia in female mice. It was also found that adult rats ingested aspartame, which could increase the incidence of lymphoma and leukemia at the lowest level, which was equivalent to drinking 8 cans of soft drinks containing aspartame every day (2 cans for young rats). The prevalence of brain tumors in animals that ingested aspartame was 12/ 1500, while the prevalence of brain tumors in animals that did not ingest aspartame was zero.
On the other hand, studies on many groups show that aspartame is a safe sweetener and will not cause health problems.