The truth about ASPARTAME!

let's talk about a spart tame the sweetener that is in drinks equal gum sugar-free lollies and more some say it's really bad and it's a chemical it's not a natural product the chemical is called aspartame Aspartame is one most common carcinogens found in the entire world negative side effects of aspartame potentially include headaches there toxic to your nervous system damage the liver cause glucose intolerance and diabetes seizures weight loss nausea three time greater risk of stroke and dementia ringing in the ears and others say it's fine don't worry about it we're going to take a deep dive into some of the claims and see who to believe but first off how do you even pronounce it if you're in the US it's said aspartam and the rest of the world a spart tame I'm going with a spart tame now it's a sweetner that is 200 times sweeter than sugar which means you could take a can of Coke which has this much sugar in it and swap it for this much sweetener that sounds great but is it safe to consume there was an article from back in 2006 that said aspartame was originally developed as an ant poison and it was only changed to being non-poisonous after it was realized that a lot more money could be made on it as a sweetener said an FDA spokesman and further down in the article it says that the ants take the aspartame back to their nest and it will kill them all within 24 hours or you may have seen this picture circulating on the internet which says that ants avoid aspartame because it's toxic for them and we should avoid it therefore too let's do an experiment and figure out what's going on I found a queen ant in my garden on flying ant day last year and I captured it and put it into an ant farm and it's been happily laying eggs and I've been feeding eating it all year so I really hope that this does not kill them I'll give them some drops of caffeine-free Pepsi light now it generally takes them a little while to find new food there's one ant that I call The Scouting ant that goes out looking and if it finds something good it goes back to the nest and tells the other ants to come and get it so I left them overnight and in the morning the Pepsi was gone and the queen ant was looking very very still now if you kill the Queen the whole Colony will eventually die because there are no more eggs being produced looking from the other side I still can't see any signs of life but wait nope she's moving pH we're all good so then I went back and watched the stop motion footage from overnight to see what had happened and found that the ants didn't touch the Pepsi light it had just evaporated so that proves nothing so for my second experiment I gave them a bigger pool of Diet Pepsi and some sweetener which has powdered aspartame in it and some sugar water water with lots of aspartame dissolved into it to try and tempt them it doesn't take long for word to spread that there's sugar so the other ants have come out to get it and now that we know they're getting a spart tame let's set up a time lapse and see what happens overnight they have got plenty of the aspartame laced sugar water and taken it back to the nest and in the morning the ants seem fine but I cannot see the queen let's just turn it around and there she is she's fine is just hiding from the filming light behind a pile of eggs in the corner ideally when you do an experiment you should only change one thing I've changed two I've added the aspartame and I've added light normally my answer in the dark so they obviously didn't like the light but the combination of the light and the aspartame didn't kill them so we can assume that the aspartame on its own would not kill them either and if you go back and look at the original article you can see that it says a funny story it was published on the satirical website the spoof.com it was never meant to be taken seriously it was just a joke and as for this picture well that originated from chaper chaps themselves it was an ad campaign they were running trying to show that they had lollipops that were sugar free so they thought ants was the best way to show that it didn't have sugar in it I don't know but it just has been taken completely out of context and because the belief became so widespread that there have actually been studies looking at ants and aspartame there was one study in particular where they took 14 colonies of ants and they fed them aspartame for 35 days and there was no ill effect on any of the colonies they even then took the queen ant and dipped her in a solution of aspartame and they all survived as well so that you would think totally debunked the theory but that was with the concentration of a spame you might find in a soft drink what if you concentrate it and fed that to ants well in 2017 a Chinese study did just that in a test ants that were fed arrol aspartame and sacaran had a mortality rate higher than 80% so that study showed an 80% mortality of the ants in 72 hours which is pretty crazy right now what if I told you that that study didn't use colonies of ants like the first one did instead it took a box and it put 30 worker ants in the box and then gave them the sweetener now hopefully you'll realize then that's not quite as significant because one you're not using as many ants you've got a smaller sample size and two you've changed multiple things there you've taken it out of its Colony away from its Queen and away from its home and put it in a separate box with the sweetener that's not the same as only changing the food remember you should only change one thing if you're studying something so that makes it a little less significant but 80% is pretty convincing right what if I also told you the control group of ants there was a box of 30 ants and they gave them sugar water and 70% of them died well hopefully now you're wondering what's wrong with the box or the environment it now wasn't necessarily the asart time I mean there is a slight increase there three more ants died on this side than this one that's not as convincing is it so that shows the importance not just to read the headline or the summary but actually to read the full study in detail to read the study methods and go was this a scientifically significant study before we move on to human studies let's talk about what careers are the best use of your time valuable thing you might have in your life majority of Our Lives will actually be spent at work today's sponsor 80,000 hours wants to help you find a career that is fulfilling and does good they're a nonprofit and everything they do is free just go to 80,000 hour.org h2c and there you'll find the in-depth career guide or if you prefer to read things on paper they'll send you this book for free it's not your typical career questionnaire that you've seen before instead they've spent 10 years researching which jobs have the biggest positive social impact and the results might surprise you things like being a teacher or a social worker or a doctor they're all great jobs but they're not necessarily the only or the best pick if you want to make an impact and do good with your career and as well as that they also give you IES as to how you can find a career within all of that that is the best fit for you personally so you can actually enjoy making a difference if you work 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for 40 years that's 80,000 hours use them in a career that is fulfilling meaningful and does good go to 80,000 hour.org H2 C today so that's ants what about humans is it toxic to us well because Aspartame is such a popular additive and it's in so many foods and people have quite a lot of it if they're using sugar-free drinks there are a lot of studies this is a portion of the studies that are just about aspartame and cancer there are so many of them now to get the full picture you would need to read all of these not just the title not just the summary but the full study so that you could see which ones are good and scientifically have good methods and which ones might have flawed methods in them so we can't rely on their results as much for example there was a study back in 2006 in fact that was the first study that showed a link between aspartame and cancer they took rats and they fed them a very high dose of aspartame and the control group had less tumors than the group that were fed aspartame which of course sounds alarming and it makes a great headline if you're making a Tik Tok video or something else but if you actually look at the study then the results were not 100% trustworthy and here's why normally if you do this sort of study you would feed Rats the diet that you've predetermined to feed them so in this case High aspartame to the one group and a normal without the aspartame in it same diet to the other group and then at a set date let's say a year later or a year and a half whatever you've predetermined you would euthanize those rats and you would test both of them to see how many tumors the rats have and you would say the control group has less and the aspartam group has more therefore it must cause cancer but in this study they didn't do that they didn't euthanize them on a set date they let the rats just live out their natural life and when they died they then would test each one and see how many tumors it had and record that amount now the problem with that is the aspartame group actually lived longer than the control group we have no idea from this study was the increased number of tumors from older age and longer lifespan or was it from being fed the aspartame in their diet there have been a lot more studies since then as you can see now I understand to read through all of these studies you would need a medical or a health science background in order to understand the mo and an awful lot of spare time on your hands because this is just ones on cancer there are heaps more on all different areas in a spart and its effect on your health but luckily for us there are people who that's their job that's what they do there's whole committees set up to review anything that's used as a food additive so they have read all of these studies they have decided which ones are scientifically significant and which ones are not and made a decision on whether they believe it is safe for human consumption or not and so far all of these bodies have said it's safe the FDA the food and agricultural organization of the United Nations the World Health organization's expert committee on food additives and food standard authorities all over the world world including in Australia and in the UK but then to add to the confusion the World Health Organization as well as having the expert committee on food additives has another committee which is the international Agency for cancer research and they also reviewed a spar tame and this was the results breaking news to get to out of the World Health Organization which just in the last couple of minutes says Aspartame is a possible cancer risk the World Health Organization now classifies the loow calorie sweetener aspartame as a possible carcinogen the who's International Agency for research on cancer is now classifying aspartame as a carcinogen meaning it's capable of causing cancer specifically liver cancer so what does that mean how can the World Health Organization have one committee that's an expert on food additives that say it's safe to eat and then one committee that's an expert on cancer that says it's a possible carcinogen how do those two things add up well we have to have a look at how this cancer committee rates different carcinogens they actually have multiple groups the first group being group one is things that we know are actual carcinogens they definitely cause cancer we know that without a doubt there have been plenty of studies that prove in humans this causes cancer and they're welld designed they're topof the range studies we know without a doubt there's no arguing at causes cancer now being in a group doesn't tell you the risk of getting cancer from an it doesn't tell you how much exposure or what dose you would need of that item for example in group one is plutonium if you have one microgram of that and you inhale it humans will get cancer 100% of the time from one microgram crazy stuff now in that same group is smoking cigarettes and in that same group is drinking alcohol and in that same group is processed meat now now if you ate one microgram of processed meat I'm pretty sure you're not going to get cancer from it so it's not telling you the dose amount and if you want to know how much of it is going to be a risk factor for actually increasing your risk of cancer you'd need to go back to the actual research and the information about that particular item that's not what being in the group does being in the group tells you that there is a definite link between those two items the next group is probable carcinogens things which the body of research is currently showing it is likely that it causes cancer it's not as strong a link in the research as what we've got for the group one but it's likely that they do things like breathing in the fumes from deep frying food in fat or drinking super hot drinks all the time which is probably linked to throat cancer but more research would be needed to confirm it to put it up into group one the next group down is possible carcinogens this group is things that might cause cancer can't completely completely rule it out there have been some studies but the results are either limited or inconclusive so I think we'd agree it's not limited there are a lot of studies so that means they're saying it's inconclusive and they're saying it's specifically for one area which is liver cancer they want more studies done on that but the World Health Organization is still saying it's safe to have up to 14 cans of diet soda a day and why is that because it's not dose related the main conclusion of the panel was there no convincing evidence for um from experimental or human data that aspartam has adverse effects after ingestion uh within the acceptable daily intake level of 0 to 40 milligrams per kilogram uh body weight so overall all of those different bodies have spent a lot of time looking at all of this and they have said it is safe I just want to say that safe doesn't mean it's necessarily good for you it's not giving you any benefit they can sell it in the store because it's not dangerous but it's not actually giving you anything additional or good in your diet so if you want to cut it out go for it but think about yourself as a whole person holistically what is the biggest change you need to make to improve your health for me that would be do more exercise for you that might be have less processed meat drink less alcohol don't smoke if you're smoking who knows you know you already know what you need to do probably to make your health better find the biggest thing and tweak that rather than something very small like this if you're having a lot of a spy te every day I'd suggest probably cut some of that out and have some more water would be a much better choice with thanks for my patrons for your amazing support that allows me to do all this research for you if you would like more videos like this make sure you hit the like comment subscribe all that stuff that tells the algorithm that you liked this sort of video make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday

Channel: How To Cook That

Views: 666,144

Keywords: aspartame, artificial sweeteners, the truth, uncovering the truth about aspartame, is apartame safe?, does aspartame cause cancer?, food scientitst, dietitian, ann reardon, howtocookthat, debunking, new, youtube

Id: mDgZz7qZoVo

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023