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This is crap... How dramatic can they be????

About 400,000 people in the US are victims of MS, a horrible autoimmune disease that devastates the central nervous system.

If you care to look there are a bunch of websites, with little or no scientific basis, that are devoted to bashing diet colas. I admit to drinking lots of Coke and Pepsi but I never switched to diet till 6 months ago. Two years after my diagnosis.
Terry.

Terry,

Be that as it may, there could be some truth to the detriment of your health by way of diet soda (aspartame). Especially for those who over used, like myself. I used to only drink Diet Pepsi, with in a two year period I went from drinking mostly water and an occasional pepsi, to drinking only diet pepsi, and very little water. With in that two years I went from being a healthy care free kind of guy to having my first flare-up and slapped with the diagnosis of MS. Could be a conicidince (probably is), but maybe not??? I am not the only one who can speak to this.

Best Regards,
Brock

I can tell you that in my lifetime, I have had maybe 10 diet pops of any kind all together. Never liked the taste. Still have MS. I however, was never a big fan of fake anything. Sugar may not be good for you but at least it has been around for a long time and there is a lot that can be done for the damage that sugar causes. Not so much for tumors and whatever else is caused by fake things like aspartame. The way that we live has changed and it obviously does not agree with us. Eat less sugar but eat sugar. In its more natural form.

I just switched the type of soda that I drink and won't even drink regular Coke anymore. We have a new Mexican grocery store close to where I work and all their soda is made with cane sugar. All of ours' is made with high fructose corn syrup. Not the same, nor does it taste as good as cane sugar colas.

I've become like Neda, I don't like to eat 'fake' stuff anymore. My rule of thumb at the grocery is to stay on the outside perimiter. That is where all the real food is. The interior aisles of a grocery store have so much processed and chemical laden food. It may not all taste so 'savory', but after you get used to it, it's hard to eat processed stuff and high fat stuff. I have a belief in the back of my mind (although not a shred of evidence) that all the changes in our diet in terms of preservatives and fake sweeteners and all that are a big part of, if not the, trigger for MS.

By the way, the Coke is incredible made with cane sugar. It takes me back to my youth when we would get the old wooden cases with the returnable bottles.

I've always thought that examining the huge discrepancy between the number of male compared to female incidence of ms would provide some clues as to what might trigger ms. I'm to be convinced on the aspertame issue but at least someone is looking at what may lie behind the difference. There may be other factors- a couple of things that spring to mind include the contraceptive pill and its effect on female hormone levels since its introduction in the 60's or maybe the monthly fluctuations in female body temperature at different stages of the monthly cycle and particularly during pregnancy.
muu

By the way, the Coke is incredible made with cane sugar. It takes me back to my youth when we would get the old wooden cases with the returnable bottles.

The good old days Member when you went into the general store and they had the big coca~cola ice chest and inside was the cold glass bottles of coke and the opener was on the side, none of the twist offs. Nothing like it on a hot day.

I know, the whole thing is somewhat of a dilemma. Either get fat drinking sugar or stay thinner and drink artifical sweetners. I work nights so I need some form of caffeine and coffee is not the greatest on hot summer nigbts. Two of my brothers have MS and have never had aspartame in their lives. As far as Coke, our Coke is made with high fructose corn syrup, maybe because this is Nebraska and corn is our number one crop.
Maybe we could get some of the original Coca-Cola that actually had cocaine in it. I could work all night on that !
Terry

Although almost two years old, this article from August 2005 Discover Magazine has much information that may be relevant here, especially the clause in the last paragraph: "animal studies suggest that artificial sweeteners can also trigger the release of insulin...."


The Chemistry of . . . Artificial Sweeteners
08.06.2005
Pour a little 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy-beta-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-alpha-D-galactopyranoside on it, baby
by Jocelyn Selim

In the past year, shares of Tate & Lyle, one of the world's largest manufacturers of sweeteners, have nearly doubled in price. And sugar has had nothing to do with it. The company sold its stake in Domino Sugar four years ago, then came up with something much more profitable: sucralose, also known as Splenda. The sweetener is sold in yellow boxes and sachets with royal-blue script reminiscent of Domino's packaging. "Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar," the slogan claims, but like all other sugar substitutes, sucralose was born in a laboratory. The country's entire supply is produced in one well-guarded and famously secretive facility in Alabama, where truckloads of common table sugar are shipped in weekly, to be modified via a complex chemical process involving chlorine and phosgene gas. The result is so intensely sweet that Tate & Lyle has to cut it with 600 parts filler to approximate a natural sweetness.

SACCHARIN


ASPARTAME

SUGAR


SUCRALOSE

Seen at 40 times their natural size, without the various bulk fillers that make all sweeteners look alike, saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, and sugar reveal dramatic differences in their chemical structures.

What can make a chemical so sweet? And is it bad for us? The questions aren't trivial: Eight out of 10 Americans now consume some sort of artificial sweetener. Last year alone the food industry introduced 2,225 reduced-sugar and sugar-free foods, many of them made with sucralose. Chemical additives are nothing new, of course—most processed foods contain more than one artificial flavoring, emulsifier, coloring, or gelling agent—and sugar substitutes are among the most-studied additives in the world. Yet rumors of their side effects persist, and their escalating potency demands attention.

"There are a lot of people who have been looking for the perfect sweetener for a long time," says Eric Walters, a biochemist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. Walters himself has studied artificial sweeteners for nearly 25 years, so he's well aware of the central irony of his field: The most successful sugar substitutes have all been discovered by accident. Saccharin was invented in Baltimore about 130 years ago by two chemists at Johns Hopkins University who were experimenting with coal-tar derivatives. Aspartame was found in the 1960s by a medical chemist in Illinois who was investigating a drug for gastric ulcers. Sucralose was discovered in 1976 by a graduate student at King's College London. His head researcher had told him to test some compounds, but he misunderstood and tasted them instead.

Of the three sweeteners, sucralose has been touted as the most natural, but that claim "has more to do with clever marketing than with chemistry," Walters says. Although sucralose is made from sugar, its chemical structure is significantly different: A molecule of the artificial sweetener has three chlorine atoms, whereas sugar has three pairs of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. By contrast, the only unnatural component in aspartame is a methyl ester bond that connects phenylalanine and aspartic acid, two amino acids abundant in the human body. The body's digestive enzymes recognize aspartame as a protein and break it down much as they would a natural compound. Sucralose, on the other hand, slips through undigested, as does saccharin—a compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur atoms. "The body doesn't know what to make of it, so it doesn't make anything," Walters says.

HOW SWEET IT IS
The relative potency of sugar compared with artificial sweeteners.

sugar 1x

cyclamate 45x

aspartame 180x

saccharin 300x

sucralose 600x

neotame 13,000x
How can such different structures all taste sweet? Until very recently, the answer was anyone's guess. Thousands of sweet-tasting compounds belonging to more than 150 chemical classes have been discovered, including low-molecular-weight carbohydrates, aminoacyl sugars, amino acids, peptides, proteins, terpenoids, chlorinated hydrocarbons, halogenated sugars, N-sulfonyl amides, sulfamates, polyketides, anilines, and ureas. Scientists have long known that our taste buds contain receptors that react to all these compounds, but no one knew exactly how they worked.

Then four years ago Charles Zuker, a rather aptly named neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, made a startling announcement: All the sweet things in life are perceived by a single receptor. Zuker used the human and mouse genomes to isolate genes associated with taste. He found more than 30 that code for bitter receptors but only a single receptor devoted to sweet. "Evolutionarily, it makes sense," says Grant DuBois, a chemist for Coca-Cola. "The theory being that there are a lot of varyingly toxic bitter compounds we have to know how to distinguish between, but everything sweet can be lumped together as good."

The one-receptor theory had a lot of explaining to do. The biggest problem was what corporate chemists call synergy. "If you ever look at the sweeteners in sugar-free gum, you'll notice that there's nearly always a list," DuBois says. That's because certain sweeteners amplify one another. When you add saccharin to, say, cyclamate (a compound of carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen), as in the original Tab recipe, the result is notably sweeter than if you simply add up the sweetening power of each. "Synergy is a well-known phenomenon in drug design, and it always means at least two receptors working together," DuBois says. By the same token, factors such as temperature (cold) and caffeine can inhibit some sweeteners but not others, which also suggests that multiple receptors are at work. Still, Zuker was adamant: Knock out either of the two subunits on the protein receptor he identified and laboratory mice lose all sense of sweet, regardless of which compounds they're given.

But what if each subunit had its own binding site, Zuker wondered? Finally, last September, biochemists from Senomyx (a company cofounded by Zuker) proved him right. There is only one sweet receptor, they concluded. But unlike any other receptor in the body, it has more than one region that can be activated by different molecules. "It's like having a gun with two triggers," DuBois says.

Chemists have only begun to tap this receptor's true potential. Cyclamate is 45 times as sweet as sugar, aspartame and saccharin are 180 and 300 times as sweet, respectively, and sucralose is 600 times sweeter. But the next generation of aspartame, known as neotame, is 13,000 times as sweet as sugar, and other compounds have been isolated that are more than 100,000 times as sweet. "The differences are because the molecules have different affinities," Walters says. Sucralose, for instance, fits more snugly in the receptor than sucrose, partly because its chlorine atoms carry a stronger charge than the oxygen atoms they replaced. Neotame, which was recently approved by the FDA, locks in so tightly it keeps the receptor firing like a machine gun.

Even when they've been cut with fillers, none of these sweeteners can truly pass for sugar. Saccharin has a disconcertingly metallic aftertaste—not, thankfully, because it leaches aluminum from cans but because it also triggers bitter and sour receptors. Aspartame and neotame are fragile molecules that break down relatively quickly on supermarket shelves and can't withstand the heat of cooking. Sucralose can take the heat and is stable, but it lacks the bulk, the browning ability, and the "mouthfeel" of real sugar.

That these sweeteners were invented by chemists has long made them suspect. Saccharin was listed as an "anticipated human carcinogen" in 1981, sucralose has been shown to weakly mutate genes in test tubes, and aspartame has triggered fears about everything from autism to multiple sclerosis. Still, no concerns have held up under scrutiny. Food additives have to meet much higher standards than drugs, Walters points out, because their drawbacks aren't weighed against their medical benefits. Aspartame, for instance, has been studied more than any other substance in FDA history, yet it has consistently been declared safe. Sucralose has shown no carcinogenic effects in animals, even at high doses. And saccharin was rehabilitated as a safe additive in 1997, when scientists found that rats used in earlier studies had a predisposition to cancer unrelated to the sweetener.

The best reason to be sour on artificial sweeteners is more familiar. Although sucralose and saccharin aren't absorbed by the body, they're not quite calorie-free: The dextrose and maltodextrin that manufacturers use to bulk them up contain about a quarter of the calories found in sugar. And although diabetics choose sugar substitutes over sucrose, animal studies suggest that artificial sweeteners can also trigger the release of
When the sweetener aspartame is digested, its methyl ester bond is broken down into methanol, which further degrades into formaldehyde. Both methanol and formaldehyde are toxic in high doses, but a person would have to drink 600 cans of diet soda to get as much of either substance as is contained in a single orange.
insulin—albeit in much smaller quantities. Studies show that people who drink sugar-free sodas can lose more weight than those who drink regular sodas, but some nutritionists worry that catering to the body's craving for sweets will only increase the appetite for them. Sugar by any other name is still best in small doses.


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robbie wrote:

The good old days Member when you went into the general store and they had the big coca~cola ice chest and inside was the cold glass bottles of coke and the opener was on the side, none of the twist offs. Nothing like it on a hot day.

There's an old general store in the middle of nowhere about 25 miles north of here with the old Coke ice chest and the pop floating in icewater. My kids love it when we stop, except they usually go for the grape Nehi and not the Coke.
Bob

All I know is that I do feel better when I cut out the diet soda and drink just water. Water helps the body clean out the toxins in our bodies and it is the only thing that really curbs my thirst.

I'm not a fan of "fake" foods either. Over the years I came to rely more and more on microwave ready meals, partly because I was no longer able to cook for myself, and partly because I was seduced by the "healthy, low-fat, low sugar, natural" marketing. Then my sister bought me a slow cooker and I began having carers in to do my cooking for me, and I've never looked back: its economy means I can afford organic food, and batch cooking means I can make and freeze my own ready meals.
I switched from margarine back to real butter after an e-mail was circulated a few years ago. It may well have been a marketing ploy or someone with an agenda, but it certainly persuaded me -- especially the bit about margarine being just one molecule away from being plastic, (although I'm well aware that, chemically speaking, that's not as shocking as it first sounds), and that until the colouring is added in the factory, margarine is actually black.
Over the years our bodies have been bombarded with synthetic chemicals in our food and environment -- substances we could never have evolved to cope with -- and also lacked some of the things we should have encountered, (parasites, childhood infections, vitamin D/sunshine etc), it's no wonder we are out of balance, and might explain why MS is more prevalent in "modern" societies.
I don't believe these things can entirely be responsible for the existence of MS, but they surely can't be good,

Guys, guys, guys.

I have been thinking about this for awhile. This post makes Bromley look like a troll even though we all know he is not like that at all.
Now I ask of you:
Who do you think consumes more aspartame? Is it the U.S.A. or Japan? Whichever country you choose, you might not counter with "Scotland, with the highest prevalence of MS, ingests more than anyone else".

TwistedHelix wrote: and that until the colouring is added in the factory, margarine is actually black.

I really don't think this is true. Margarine is made from plant fats and uncolored margarine is white. The added yellow coloring is meant to mimic butter.
However, unrefined soybean oil is greenish and smells like fish. Well, it smells fishy to me. Maybe this is what they were talking about when trying to illustrate the difference in raw materials used. Unrefined soybean oil compared to milk looks most unappetizing.

Its,

This post makes Bromley look like a troll even though we all know he is not like that at all.

Don't shoot the messenger - I just copy articles I see (not ones I necessarily agree / disagree with).

Ian