A Nice Little Sweetener
After the whole Covid debacle, you could be forgiven in thinking that the government doesn’t really have your best interests at heart, and sadly Covid is not the only place where you can find clear evidence of this.
Let us look at the seeming innocuous example of Diet Coke. You know, that drink that be-muscled builders drink in front of fawning women on their lunch break. Well according to The Food Standards Agency, the government’s branch of foodstuff regulation, Diet Coke is literally the most healthy thing you can drink. According to their traffic light system, Diet Coke scores a green light across the board on the essential scoring categories of fats, saturates, sugars and salt. Surely it must be some kind of super food? Unfortunately not.
The ingredients list states that it contains the colour (Caramel E150d), which whilst sounding like a delicious type of brulee pudding, is in fact the result of a complex industrial process that results in ammonia and sulphites. Also on the list is phosphoric acid which not only rots your teeth but also leeches minerals out of your bones and reduces bone density. But by far the most damaging and certainly the most controversial of the ingredients are the artificial sweeteners Acesulfame K and Aspartame.
Aspartame has a long and chequered history. It was discovered by chance in 1965 when a chemist who was studying anti-ulcer drugs accidently licked his hand and tasted something sweet – something 200 times sweeter than normal sugar in fact. By the late 1970s it was being introduced in to foodstuffs as a zero calorie substitute for sugar. However several studies suggested it may cause brain cancer and it was quickly withdrawn from use. In the early 80s the patent for Aspartame was bought by Monsanto, the company famous for its genetically modified organisms, mass polluting pesticides and other horrors. At this point in the story, everybody’s favourite warmonger, Donald Rumsfeld gets involved. Using his connections with the then president Ronald Reagen and his links with the chemical industries, Rumsfeld petitioned for Aspartame to be approved as a food additive. This allegedly included a $12 million sweetener of his very own and by 1983 Aspartame was reintroduced as an acceptable food stuff. This was despite many prominent researchers and Doctors at the time claiming that Aspartame may cause tumours, cancers, headaches, memory loss, vision loss and comas. It is also said worsen or mimic the symptoms of existing diseases and conditions such as fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue and depression.
Despite all of this aspartame is reported to be the most tested of all food additives. It is found to be so safe that it is has been added to over 8000 food and drinks worldwide. However with further investigation, it turns out that many of these studies were seemingly performed by the owners of the sweeteners themselves and in a very recent development the World Health Organisation has added aspartame to a list of possible carcinogens.
From a Chinese medicine perspective, the ways in which artificial sweeteners impact your health are obvious and clear. Digestion actually begins in the mouth, and when the tongue detects sweetness, messages are sent to the stomach, spleen and pancreas to get ready. Imagine that the stomach is like a cauldron and under that cauldron there is a fire which is stimulated when we eat. The stomach fire is then under the impression that it is about to receive some high energy foodstuff that usually comes with sweetness. When no actual food is received to digest then the stomach fire blazes all out of control. After a while the fuel of the fire will burn out and the spleen and pancreas organs become weak and deficient. This leads malabsorption, Qi deficiency and damp – which is another term in Chinese for fat. This is why people who drink diet drinks all the time rarely look like the ones in the adverts.
In 2016, the UK government, in all their wisdom and who obviously only have our best wishes at heart, brought out the sugar tax – a levy on soft drinks. Since then the use of artificial sweeteners has increased exponentially. Now there is barely a soft drink, squash or even lolly pop that doesn’t contain at least some percentage of artificial sweetener. Obviously sugar is not really that good for you, but at least our bodies know how to deal with it as it has been doing for thousands of years. This new non-nutritious chemical confuses the brain and creates havoc within the digestive and endocrine systems. Unfortunately we are living in a Nanny-state, where the Nanny turns out to be a cross between Mrs Doubtfire and Norman Bates.