Aspertame Rebuttal: Guest Post

My post on October 10, Aspartame Causing My Wrist Pain?, is purely an anecdotal one. I was musing about the appearance of my pain, use of aspartame, and then the easing of the pain when I stopped using the aspartame. I am not yet an aspartame believer, but John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition), has written a great response to my concerns about aspartame.

I was concerned that his comments wouldn’t be seen by many people because it is in the comment section of the aspartame post, so I asked his permission to publish it as a guest post. He kindly agreed so I am offering you his take on aspartame.

Thank you Dr. Garst for both taking the time to write your thoughts, as well as provide links, and for allowing me to post his as a guest post post.

And here it is:

Hi Marijke,

Sorry about your wrist pain, but it likely has little direct connection with aspartame. First, aspartame is perfectly safe; it is perhaps the most studied substance in history. There is, however, an internet conspiracy theory attributing 90+ problems to aspartame. But, perhaps with the exception of headaches in susceptible people, this remains a conspiracy theory without real scientific merit.

Aspartame is approved for use as a sweetener by all the world’s relevant regulatory authorities. For more see Snopes comments, or read about new discoveries about aspartame safety in my comments here.

Second, all of the above now said, the reality is that people (1) deficient in the vitamin folic acid (folate), (2) who have unusual folate enzymes called polymorphisms (see , or (3) that have high blood homocysteine (frequently reduced by added folate) may show issues that seem associated with aspartame even to the point of dissipating after aspartame withdrawal, but that are really connected by the above or similar (vitamin) problems. Folate deficiency and high homocysteine are directly linked to rheumatoid arthritis and other immune disorders, see this pubmed link and this one.

Migraine headaches are another problem found in people with the methylenetetra-hydrofolate polymorphisms, even without aspartame exposure, but added folate can overcome this problem. Methanol from aspartame is metabolized by folate and presence of these three (or related) issues could be exacerbated by the methanol in aspartame. But you must know that no food or drug can be responsible for problems that derive from a preexisting personal problem.

While I have no idea whether these types of personal issues may explain your wrist pain, wrist pain can be a symptom of rheumatoid arthritis. And, as noted in the links in the above paragraph, that wrist pain could be suggestive of underlying personal issues as described there.

I personally suspect that aspartame sensitivity may have promise as a test for these and other related vitamin issues. But you should know that the underlying issues have known risks of their own; deficiency of the vitamin folic acid is known to be a substantial factor in many neural tube birth defects, likely plays a major role in fetal alcohol syndrome, and is a factor in many cancers, including breast cancer, see this abstract.

I just can’t understand why physicians fail to see the connections between these issues and patients sensitive to aspartame. This folate deficiency-methanol metabolism and toxicity issue has been well known for more than forty years.

Lastly, further evidence that your pain is really not from aspartame, but some underlying personal issue comes from the finding that aspartame itself has benefit against inflammation, for example, see this link. This action may be associated with other evidence suggesting long term exposure to methanol can foster folate synthesis; such biological feedback would certainly make sense and it could explain the aspartame data too.

You can read more about the discovered positive effects of aspartame against inflammation here. Note, however, that this post was written to a website that supports this internet conspiracy.

John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)

(FYI, the author has absolutely no financial or biasing connection with the aspartame, the soft drink or their related industries. The author has a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry (Pharmacy) from the University of Iowa, postdoctoral experience at Yale University (Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry) and at Vanderbilt University and taught nutritional toxicology at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) besides having conducted federally funded research at Vanderbilt, UIUC, and at several other universities before recently entering into retirement.)

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