My insomnia and the search for a graduate thesis topic have brought me to your e-mail address. For what it’s worth, here is my stream of consciousness story. I’m a 25-year old pharmaceutical chemist named Kathryn. I’ve always been fairly healthy except for an inherited case of primary dysmenorrhea, and an occasional bout with hay fever.
When Aspartame first replaced saccharin as the artificial sweetener of choice, I was an oblivious junior highschooler who drank about two glasses of diet soda a day. Two to three weeks after the switch, my mother (who also drank diet soda daily) and I started getting bad headaches, usually accompanied by nausea. We were quickly able to isolate NutraSweet as the culprit. After giving up diet soda cold turkey the headaches went away. During my college years I was always able to tell if I had eaten something containing Aspartame by the tell-tale headache that would result. For years now I’ve been warning friends and family that I don’t trust NutraSweet – but I’ve never had the time to do any research on the subject until now. What I’m reading scares me. I hope this can be of help to you. I realize it’s not much.