ublic Relations Campaign Deception: Aspartame & Formaldehyde
By Linda on Aug 31, 2010 in Toxins | comments(0)
Full article: http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/
Excerpt:
I have recently been sent some information about aspartame and formaldehyde that looks like it might be part of one last public relations campaign to claim the chemical is ‘safe’. The formaldehyde exposure number cited in the text is off by a factor of over 400,000 and would not be taken seriously by knowledgeable scientists. The scientific literature cited has clearly not been read by the author. However, since a few consumers might inadvertently take the text seriously, I have chosen to point out some of the more obvious problems with the text.> A simple MEDLINE search reveals that the levels of
> formaldehyde they are talking about (30 micrograms after the
> ingestion of 200 mg/kg/day of aspartame for 11 days) are
> well within ‘safe’ levels, even though 200 mg/kg is equal to
> about 60 Diet Cokes per day(!).The truth is that there is no MEDLINE summary showing an exposure to or an accumulation of 30 micrograms (ug) of formaldehyde in humans after ingestion of 200 mg/kg/day of aspartame. This figure appears to be either fabricated or caused by some serious math errors. The actual figure can be calculated quite easily and is approximately 61.3 milligrams (mg) for ingestion of one liter of diet soda.
The actual measured amount of aspartame in one liter of diet soda is approximately 600 mg. [Ref. 1]. If a 60 kg (132 lbs) woman ingested one liter of diet soda, she would be ingesting 10 mg/kg of aspartame:
600 mg aspartame / 60 kg body weight = 10 mg/kg
Aspartame breaks down into 10.9% methanol by weight [Ref. 2]. So that the amount of methanol obtained from 600 mg of aspartame is:
600 mg aspartame * 10.9% = 65.4 mg of methanol
