the 60-day aspartame experiment

My dad refuses to drink regular soda at all. Not surprisingly, if you know my father, he views any sort of modern health news (particularly that meat and dairy products are, in fact, bad for you) as complete rubbish. Thus it is going to be an enormous, titanic struggle to get him to even consider the fact that the aspartame in diet soda may in fact be quite toxic.

I was reading http://www.dorway.com, though, and a lot of the evidence there makes a frightening degree of sense. I still get anxiety attacks (though see last post as well about this... ), chest pains, and heart palpitations despite having quit caffeine, and there's always the matter of my occasionally rather disturbing short-term memory issues. I figured the latter was due to DXM, even though I've had these issues since way before I ever ingested that stuff.

Moreover, I wonder if some of the actually somewhat unusual side effects I used to get from DXM (serotonin syndrome, for one) were not in fact caused more by the effects of the aspartame I would consume in vast quantities. Aside from being converted at temperatures greater than 86 degrees F (or 30 degrees C) to methanol, aspartame is also converted in vivo to aspartic acid, also known as aspartate.

DXM works on a vast number of neuronal receptors, including but not limited to sigma opioid (function is largely unknown), PCP2 (dopamine blockade, AKA when you come off DXM addiction you're subjecting yourself to the equivalent of cocaine withdrawal), and serotonin receptors, , but its primary means of action is through blockade of NMDA receptors. Let's flesh out the acronym: N-Methyl D-Aspartate. DXM blocks these receptors.

In other words... DXM is something of an antidote (albeit with horrible side effects) to aspartame. It kind of makes sense. I started drinking diet sodas when I was 14 or 15, and also began having all sorts of weird psychological issues which I attributed, probably at least partially accurately, to the situation I was living in. However, when the situation ended, some of the issues remained. It's not too far-fetched to imagine that I may have picked up my DXM habit in a bizarre attempt to self-medicate my apparent aspartame poisoning.

NMDA receptors are named thusly because they show a higher affinity for NMDA, a synthetic substance, than for glutamate. Glutamate is present endogenously, however, and so NMDA receptors could also be referred to as glutamate receptors. The glutamatergic system is involved with excitatory (stimulating) responses, while its counterpart is the GABAergic system, involved with inhibitory responses.

This is a strange, strange world we live in; we drink poison every day, and try to counteract it with another poison. Hmm.

It's funny; I wrote in a personal journal once that my one of my biggest problems in life is that I feel as if the volume knob has been turned up to 11 on every possible stimulus. I think I've always been like this, from birth; as an infant, if anyone sneezed or made any sort of loud noise, I'd scream continuously. I've also mentioned having asthma as a child. Both the excess stimulation and the asthma can be linked directly back to an excess of glutamatergic responses, most likely made far worse by aspartame.

The site I mentioned above proposes an experiment: avoid all aspartame-containing products for 60 days straight, and compare your mental state at the end of the experiment to how things were at the beginning. If you notice a significant improvement, aspartame is the culprit.

I'm going to try this, starting tomorrow (today, really). If my anxiety attacks and heart issues have lessened by the end of 60 days, I'll have my answer.