The Campaign for Artificial Sweetener Free Fizzy Pop
The Campaign for Artificial Sweetener Free Fizzy Pop doesn't actually
exist. Yet. In the meantime, here is the rationale behind the idea.
It all started when a friend nipped to the corner shop to buy a bottle
of fizzy pop to keep our carbohydrate and fluid levels up during the
long car journey we were about to set off on. To his horror, he was
completely unable to find any which didn't contain any artificial
sweetener, and most contained both saccharine and
aspartame. Understand this: we're not talking about diet drinks here,
but the regular kind. People want a sugar-free drink, for whatever
reason (I have enough diabetic friends and relatives to appreciate
that it's not just buying into the diet cult, or having poor control
over calorific intake) and there's no reason they shouldn't have it,
but why should everyone else also have to put up with nasty tasting
and potentially harmful additives?
Saccharine
has been around for years. It was the first
"artificial" food addative, and has a pretty good track record. The
MSDS database
may have bad things to say about it, but MSDS is notoriously
paranoid. However, there is little question that saccharine leaves a
nasty taste in the mouth, otherwise why would there by a market for
other artificial sweeteners?
Aspartame
fulfils this role, usually under the trade name of
NutraSweet. One component of it is phenylalanine, and it is this in
particular which gives cause for concern. It's a little difficult to
separate the hysteria from the facts, but there is an increasingly
large body of evidence that the metabolites of aspartame/phenylalanine
include a number of toxins (such as methanol) and that it is possible
to ingest sufficient quantities through soft drinks for them to be
harmful. There is something of an anti-aspartame campaign going, but
when issues like this are presented in such a form, it can be hard to
take them seriously. A quick
web-search on "aspartame" will find you public awareness
and
other pages.
The irony is that during the artificial-additives scare of the late
'80s, which amongst other things removed useful preservatives from our
foods, aspartame, possibly the only really dangerous chemical of the
lot, came through virtually unscathed. Don't ask me why, but I suspect
it may be something to do with the wonderful, and largely natural,
foodstuff known as sugar being seen as a health-defeating villain.