[Noobert]

I have to write  a research paper about a scientific topic that is controversial such as global warming etc.... I am planning to do mine on aspartame. My thesis will be something like  "The artificial sweetener Aspartame may be very hazardous to one's health."


I am thinking I can use this as my topic but am not sure if there are enough reliable internet sites to get information from.... Can you help me find if there are any sites that I could get information from that are reputable?  I know there is tons of information, but there are also tons of irreputable sites.... If anyone can point me towards some reputable sites that would be very helpful

[nj_bartel]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

[Yggdrasil]

How can you have reached a conclusion (aspartame may be very hazardous to one's health) without having done any research yet?  Now, I'm not saying that aspartame does not have any negative health effects, but a more proper way of approaching a research paper is to ask a question (is aspartame safe?) and weight the evidence from both sides to decide on a conclusion, rather than to begin with a conclusion and cherry pick findings that support your conclusion over alternatives.

[Borek]

Check references section in wikipedia - .edu and .gov sites can be usually trusted.

[billnotgatez]

This was a recent article posted on yahoo main page

  By CLAIRE SUDDATH Claire Suddath   – Tue Oct 20, 2:20 pm ET

Too much sugar will make you fat, but too much artificial sweetener will ... do what exactly? Kill you? Make you thinner? Or have absolutely no effect at all? This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Food and Drug Administration's decision to ban cyclamate, the first artificial sweetener prohibited in the U.S., and yet scientists still haven't reached a consensus about how safe (or harmful) artificial sweeteners may be. Shouldn't we have figured this out by now? (See the top 10 bad beverage ideas.)

The first artificial sweetener, saccharin, was discovered in 1879 when Constantin Fahlberg, a Johns Hopkins University scientist working on coal-tar derivatives, noticed a substance on his hands and arms that tasted sweet. No one knows why Fahlberg decided to lick an unknown substance off his body, but it's a good thing he did. Despite an early attempt to ban the substance in 1911 - skeptical scientists said it was an "adulterant" that changed the makeup of food - saccharin grew in popularity, and was used to sweeten foods during sugar rationings in World Wars I and II. Though it is about 300 times sweeter than sugar and has zero calories, saccharin leaves an unpleasant metallic aftertaste. So when cyclamate came on the market in 1951, food and beverage companies jumped at the chance to sweeten their products with something that tasted more natural. By 1968, Americans were consuming more than 17 million pounds of the calorie-free substance a year in snack foods, canned fruit and soft drinks like Tab and Diet Pepsi. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

But in the late 1960s, studies began linking cyclamate to cancer. One noted that chicken embryos injected with the chemical developed extreme deformities, leading scientists to wonder if unborn humans could be similarly damaged by their cola-drinking mothers. Another study linked the sweetener to malignant bladder tumors in rats. Because a 1958 congressional amendment required the FDA to ban any food additive shown to cause cancer in humans or animals, on Oct. 18, 1969, the government ordered cyclamate removed from all food products. (See the 10 worst fast-food meals.)

Saccharin became mired in controversy in 1977, when a study indicated that the substance might contribute to cancer in rats. An FDA move to ban the chemical failed, though products containing saccharin were required to carry warning labels. In 2000, the chemical was officially removed from the Federal Government's list of suspected carcinogens. (Read TIME's 1974 article on cyclamate and saccharin.)

In 1981, the synthetic compound aspartame was approved for use, and it capitalized on saccharin's bad publicity by becoming the leading additive in diet colas. In 1995 and 1996, misinformation about aspartame that linked the chemical to everything from multiple sclerosis to Gulf War syndrome was widely disseminated on the Internet. While aspartame does adversely effect some people - including those who are unable to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine - it has been tested more than 200 times, and each test has confirmed that your Diet Coke is safe to drink. Nor have any health risks been detected in more than 100 clinical tests of sucralose, a chemically altered sugar molecule found in food, drinks, chewing gum and Splenda.

The fear-mongering and misinformation plaguing the faux-sweetener market seems to be rooted in a common misconception. No evidence indicates that sweeteners cause obesity; people with weight problems simply tend to eat more of it. While recent studies have suggested a possible link between artificial sweeteners and obesity, a direct link between additives and weight gain has yet to be found. The general consensus in the scientific community is that saccharin, aspartame and sucralose are harmless when consumed in moderation. And while cyclamate is still banned in the U.S., many other countries still allow it; it can even be found in the Canadian version of Sweet'n Low. Low-calorie additives won't make you thinner or curb your appetite. But they help unsweetened food taste better without harming you. And that's sweet enough.

[JGK]

How can you have reached a conclusion (aspartame may be very hazardous to one's health) without having done any research yet?  Now, I'm not saying that aspartame does not have any negative health effects, but a more proper way of approaching a research paper is to ask a question (is aspartame safe?) and weight the evidence from both sides to decide on a conclusion, rather than to begin with a conclusion and cherry pick findings that support your conclusion over alternatives.

If you have ever read papers published by doctors in the UK medical Journals you'll find it's quite common for a question to be posed and answered in the paper's title especially in epidemiology papers

[Borek]

If you have ever read papers published by doctors in the UK medical Journals you'll find it's quite common for a question to be posed and answered in the paper's title especially in epidemiology papers

Stating both in the paper title has nothing to do with assuming conclusion before starting research.

[Noobert]

Yes i geuss I should not assume it is all bad right off the bat but I have looked into it and it seems pretty bad considering the body can not handle many of the chemicals in it... I suppose I am a little biased because I have had some terrible experiences with it myself, but I am supposed to research a controversial topic and take a firm stance on it.

[renge ishyo]

it seems pretty bad considering the body can not handle many of the chemicals in it...

Which chemicals might you be referring to? From its chemical structure, I've always understood that aspartame broke down directly to aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol...all of these are natural products that the body can surely break down further. I know that the phenylalanine warning on the can scares a lot of people, but this only concerns people with phenylketonuria, an inborn genetic disease, who need to abstain from anything containing phenylalanine from the time of birth onward.

While there are probably long term effects with using this in place of sugar (mostly because it is NOT sugar and many organs such as the brain need "real" carbs to function), to be quite honest there are much scarier things we are eating than this. At least aspartame is very close in structure to a natural peptide. Compare that to the artificial sweetner, Splenda, for instance, which is basically sucrose with three chlorine atoms on it. That is a much more foreign chemical structure for the body to handle, and one can only wonder what happens to a chemical like splenda as our body tries to break it down.

[Noobert]

I can see this will be tough to research because both sides  seem to be quite biased... Although many of you might not quite see the harm in it I think we will see in the near future how bad it really is for you. Some of us react quicker to it ( which is probly better) than waiting longer and being seriously injured by it in the future... I for one began chewing gum with aspartame in it. I did not know why but I was having terrible pulsing headaches, tinnitus, problems with my vision, and dizziness. I kept chewing the gum until a family member told me how harmful it was. Immidiatly after I stopped the symptoms all went away. Unfortunatly this is not scientific evidence, but I think all of us just need to have our sweets with real sugar every once in a while, rather than synthetic sweeteners all of the time. That way you wont get fat and you wont get ill.

p.s. Aspartame breaks down into other toxic by-products, namely formaldehyde, formic acid and aspartylphenylalanine diketopiperazine (DKP).
 
You can say what you want... But nothing above is good for you.

If anyone can find any reputable sites for either side (preferably mine) please post them.

Thanks.
EDIT:Wow I got way to into this... I do not mean to be dis respectful to anyone...I geuss I am very biased on this issue and feel quite strongly about it...

[nj_bartel]

What's the half life of aspartame in the body?  What are the half lives of those chemicals you listed?  What is the average %mass of aspartame in an artificial sweetener?  Chances are you're going to find those things don't accumulate to any appreciable extent in the body.

[renge ishyo]

Some of us react quicker to it ( which is probly better) than waiting longer and being seriously injured by it in the future... I for one began chewing gum with aspartame in it. I did not know why but I was having terrible pulsing headaches, tinnitus, problems with my vision, and dizziness. I kept chewing the gum until a family member told me how harmful it was. Immidiatly after I stopped the symptoms all went away. Unfortunatly this is not scientific evidence, but I think all of us just need to have our sweets with real sugar every once in a while, rather than synthetic sweeteners all of the time. That way you wont get fat and you wont get ill.

Whenever the FDA decides what is "safe" they are trying to base their decision on how a certain chemical will respond with a very large number of people. If they were to ban food if any single person had an adverse reaction to it we would all starve to death because there would be nothing left for us to eat.

For instance, I am gluten intolerant so if I eat anything with wheat in it I get horribly sick. So does this mean we should ban wheat from society because it makes me horribly sick?!?  NOOO!! ( ). Most people have no problems dealing with gluten even though my body does. It probably has something to do with a "leaky" gut that allows gluten to trigger an immune response in my body so it feels like I have acquired a virus whenever I go off the diet and eat certain foods with wheat in it (which is practically everything  ). The point that I am making here is that the problem ultimately is with *my body* and not with the gluten per say. There are other people with my condition as well, but that still isn't enough for the government to pull wheat off the market. Most people can handle eating wheat just fine.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that we shouldn't be messing around with all these artificial chemicals in our food to begin with. It not just the chemical structures that raise questions but the amounts of the chemicals that are being added to certain foods. It would seem pretty reasonable to suggest that the diabetes epidemic and the growing number of young people in the last 20 years who are getting all these horrific food related diseases (including myself) has as at least something to do with all the artificial crap we are eating. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the massive increase in diabetes cases isn't eventually linked to the "low fat" diets food craze in the 80's (companies took the fat out of diet foods and pumped them full of extra sugar so that they could say they were selling a "low fat" or "no fat" food). However, that isn't the whole story. The advent of computers for instance has made people exercise far less than earlier generations which can also wreak havoc on the body's digestive systems and increase sensitivity to even common chemicals (which reminds me, I have to go for my mile walk here in a minute before it gets dark  .

P.S. I realize that all of this is not really helping your essay any, but I am a very firm believer that you should think about things before you write. If your opinion is that artificial sweetners are bad you should research what all the artificial sweetners are and see what negative effects are possible with each. This will help you place the risk involved with eating aspartame in the proper context.

[Noobert]

Thanks for your response and yes I researched it quite a bit while I was recovering from being sick. STILL I am a firm believer that aspartame has long term effects...


Anyway thanks for all of your help and oppinions... But.... Do you think I can find enough sources to back my oppinion? Thanks.

[renge ishyo]

Oh, you certainly can find enough sources to back up your opinion. Start with reading the wiki on the controversy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy

The wiki article in and of itself is not a good reference to use, but it contains a "references" list of about 100 articles that you can use on the subject to back up your point. Happy writing!

[Borek]

STILL I am a firm believer that aspartame has long term effects...

You are still doing the same mistake - you are assuming you know better. If your intent is to write a good research paper - stop and try to be objective, and don't generalize your personal experience to the whole population. If your plan is to write a paper that will be example of biased, bad journalism and fear mongering - stop asking us for help.