Aspartame is a very common "sugar replacement", found in "diet" soft drinks, lower-sugar yogurts and other things where sweetness is desired but sugar is not -- never mind as a sugar substitute in coffee. These substitutions have been widely promoted for insulin-compromised individuals, particularly those who are overweight or Type II diabetic.
Saccharin was among the first of these, but many people eschewed it after it was linked to the possibility of causing cancer. The science on that is less-than-conclusive, but needless to say it scared a lot of people off. The doses used in those studies were insanely high (and in rats) and in 2000 it was concluded it didn't apply in reasonable and consumable doses in humans. Well, if you believe the studies anyway.
Now we have a study out of Sweden that throws a great deal of shade in aspartame, which is the most-common non-sugar sweetener used in various foods and beverages -- by far.
For the new study, mice were fed food containing 0.15% aspartame every day for 12 weeks — that’s the equivalent of humans drinking about three daily cans of diet soda.
Aspartame-fed mice developed larger and more fatty plaques in their arteries and experienced higher levels of inflammation, a major contributor to heart disease.
The obvious caution is that this was in mice, not humans, but note that this looks a lot like coronary artery disease and it may be related to insulin signaling because the immune signal involved and identified in the study is sensitive to that signal.
The dysregulation of this particular signaling pathway is not well-understood at all -- that is, we know what happens in this regard but not why it happens.
This however begs the question: How is it that this problem in a substance that is this widespread in use, artificially made and when caused by exposure is in a reasonable amount that human would be expected to consume, was not identified before it was approved fifty years ago?
The FDA first approved aspartame as a sweetener in 1974 and scientific evidence has continued to support the agency’s conclusion that aspartame is safe for the general population when made under good manufacturing practices and used under the approved conditions of use. The FDA-established acceptable daily intake (ADI), or the amount of aspartame that is considered safe to consume each day over the course of a person’s lifetime, continues to be protective of public health.
Three sodas a day is certainly within the realm of expected and reasonable amount of use.
So why is this study a new discovery?
You'd think that's not possible, considering that the changes found against controls were quite dramatic, they occurred at very reasonable levels of consumption and took just about three months to show up in the mice -- and not an extended period of time.
But the record says its not only possible, that's what happened.
Which means nobody looked, because if they looked they would have found it.
Why and how did that happen, and what else has been similarly not looked at?