Another former NutraSweet consumer, Shannon Roth, a mother of two who works as a goldsmith in Ocala, Florida, organized Aspartame Victims and Their Friends, Inc. after suffering blindness in one eye. She said the group now has about 700 members.
“I got up in the morning and had two packs (of Equal, the NutraSweet tabletop version) in each cup of coffee…three or four cups of coffee before noon. Then I’d switch to the iced tea with it,” Roth said.
In the summer of 1984, Roth said, she began to experience headaches, sleep and memory loss, and irritability.
After getting out of bed one morning, she discovered she couldn’t see when she closed her right eye, Roth said. “I could see like through a black veil. It was like a centralized, almond-shaped black spot,” she said.
Doctors’ laboratory tests failed to trace the cause of her partial blindness, she said, and one doctor told her not to expect vision to return to her eye.
Roth said she suspected NutraSweet as the cause after learning of a similar case that was allegedly linked to the sweetener, and after about four weeks without NutraSweet, her headaches and other problems ceased. Her sight began to return a few weeks later, she said. Shannon Roth