My younger self was known to consume rather alarming amounts of diet soda. A busy schedule of family and work was easier to manage if my caffeine intake was high. I would drink quite a bit of coffee in the morning, then switch to diet soda later in the day.
A turning point occurred when a colleague from Chemistry advised me that I shouldn’t consume so much aspartame. She had noticed during committee meetings that my eyes looked red and tired (they did) and that I should try backing off the diet soda to fix this problem. Intrigued, I did a bit of digging and found that U.S. researchers proclaimed the safety of aspartame, but researchers elsewhere seemed less certain. Being an empiricist at heart, I decided to do a single case, within-subject ABAB study of my diet soda intake (not the most objective research ever). After several cycles of baseline and soda consumption, I had to agree with my colleague. My eyes did look and feel better without the diet soda. I quit and happily switched to drinking tea instead (Earl Grey, hot).
Apparently, I’m not alone. In response to consumer feedback, a number of brands have produced aspartame-free drinks. Diet Pepsi is offering a version that replaces aspartame with sucralose (Splenda). While generally considered safe (as is aspartame) by regulating bodies, sucralose has been linked to adverse effects on the immune system. Like aspartame, exposure to heat, such as sitting on a loading dock in Houston during the summer, causes sucralose to break down into some nasty stuff.
Although I think I was an anxious child, I don’t feel especially anxious as an adult, with the exception of having a nagging height phobia which I’m told is partially genetic. I didn’t have a reason to consider anxiety levels as part of my little diet soda experiment. But a recent article found that doses of aspartame equivalent to less than 15% below the FDA maximum dose were associated with noted increases in anxiety, at least in mice. Aspartame affected gene expression in the amygdala, so observing effects on anxiety seems logical.
This, to me at least, seems worthy of follow-up. We’re told that younger adults are becoming increasingly anxious. While one could suggest numerous hypotheses to account for this increase (social media, etc.), what if this simple dietary influence was part of that picture? Aspartame is found in many things besides diet soda. The ethics of a double-blind/placebo-controlled study probably preclude this approach, but a well-controlled quasi-experiment might do the trick. In the meantime, I’ll stick to my tea, which in addition to being yummy also provides health benefits.
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