Blame it on all those free-at-work Frescas* I’ve consumed lo these many months.
Last week, I was feeling off balance. The source of my sudden discombobulation was not immediately obvious to me, but then, half-way through a “Sprite Zero”, I observed a slight turn in my tummy.
So I dumped the rest of my drink, tossed the Splenda packets I stashed in my desk and on the homestead, moved the diet soda to the back of the fridge on the bottom shelf well out of my line of sight (good to keep them around, though, for guests).
It’s been a little over a week since I’ve consumed any diet soft drink or artificial sweetener of any kind. Since then, I’ve felt noticeably more energetic throughout the day, especially in the afternoons. Plus, no carbonated beverage bloat: a good thing.
Still, wtf? I thought Splenda was “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar”, which somehow made it not as nasty as aspertame. How wrong I was! I quick Wikipedia search revealed the following:
Splenda (Sucralose): It is 500–600 times as sweet as sucrose, making it roughly twice as sweet as saccharin and four times as sweet as aspartame. It is manufactured by the selective chlorination of sucrose…Sucralose is a chlorocarbon (an organic compound containing at least one covalently bonded chlorine atom), like many insecticides.
Also learned this interesting factoid about the NutraSweet Company:
Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by James M. Schlatter, a chemist working for G.D. Searle & Company. Schlatter had synthesized aspartame in the course of producing an anti-ulcer drug candidate. He discovered its sweet taste serendipitously when he …In 1985, G.D. Searle was purchased by Monsanto. In this acquisition, Searle’s aspartame business became a separate Monsanto subsidiary, the NutraSweet Company.
Having read all this, followed by a well-timed viewing of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and The Corporation, I am left paranoid that there is nothing left that is safe to buy/eat/wear/consume that also doesn’t cause harm to myself or someone else (the planet and all of its living creatures qualify as “someones” in this case). Again, I ask - WTF?
* A special note to MC: it was Fanta, not Fresca, that was branded by Coca-Cola in 1939 and sold in Nazi Germany in order to keep profits during the war - tsk tsk. Fresca is also a Coca-Cola product, but wasn’t introduced until 1963. Fresca was the favorite drink of Texan and former president Lyndon B. Johnson, who dispensed the stuff from a soda tap installed in the Oval Office.
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