I am writing to thank you for your crusade against NutraSweet. I am a type 1 diabetic for 25 years now. I received my first article from you by accident, as I was a member of another email users list when your article accidently got posted to all of us last year. I wish I could say I followed your advice at the time, but I chose instead to believe the “other side”, and thought you were simply a reactionary (very sorry). I did lay off NutraSweet for about a week just for laughs at the time because I was starting an exercise program, and wanted to rid my body of all artificial stuff. However, when my blood sugars improved, I attributed it to the exercise. Eventually, I added the NutraSweet back into my diet, nothing too much, just a diet Snapple here and there – maybe 3 a week. And my blood sugars were no longer quite as good, and I began having what I refer to as “knock-down, drag-out hypoglycemic reactions. I just thought I needed to do more exercise! Last December, I was told by a dietician that NutraSweet was perfectly safe, and I just went wild eating it in everything and upping my Snapple intake to two or more a day. Who knew? Well, my blood sugars went from difficult to horrible. My appetite was running rampant; I was waking up with 500 blood sugars and going to be with lows of 35-40. I was depressed and angry all the time. No one could figure out what was wrong with me. I didn’t want to have sex with my husband and I even began having hot flashes (I’m 36). Some minor tingling, which I have always passed off as “just one of those diabetic things”, which never was more than just a minor sensation, was getting worse. I was gaining weight, feeling uncoordinated and spacey, like I always had a hangover, and felt like death.
One day, I was looking up menopause in my medical advisor, and happened by the section on multiple sclerosis. I read the symptoms and it sounded just like me, with all the tingling and stuff. I panicked, then I remembered your email from a year and a half ago that talked about NutraSweet possibly causing MS-like symptoms, and decided to give up NutraSweet to see if it would help. The next day, my blood sugars were perfect, and I re-read the article and saw that NutraSweet has been implicated in swinging sugars!!
My blood sugars have been perfect for almost two weeks now. It is uncanny. I am so beside myself with glee I can hardly stand it. I have energy, my vision is better, my constipation is gone, I can think far more clearly, my stamina has improved, and I want to live life again. My blood sugar meter average has dropped from 200 to 165 in the time span of 10 days, and still falling. It is once again easy to correct low blood sugars, and they are very minor occurrences now. My insulin dosage has gone from 30 to 17 total units per day. I have, simply put, been reborn.
A chemistry teacher in my diabetes support group says it is true that Aspartame converts to formaldehyde and methanol in the body. A much respected neurologist where I work (I work at a research institute within a medical center) said that she had a patient who was having seizures and eating lots of NutraSweet. As you can guess, the seizures stopped when NutraSweet was eliminated from his diet.
I am telling everyone about this. I have forwarded the info to my diabetes educator at a University. She theorizes that if the NutraSweet was the culprit, it may have caused a mimicking of gastroparesis (delayed emptying of ingested foods), which in turn caused my swinging sugars. A research tech also told me she systematically eliminated foods from her diet to find out what was causing her constipation and severe abdominal pains. Her search was over when she tested the NutraSweet.
I am going to fill out one of the action report forms. Is there any other way I can help in this effort? I don’t even know if you respond to emails, but I just wanted to add my testimony to the growing list of NutraSweet recoveries.
Deep thanks and God bless you.