Not sure everyone elses take but I have been ingesting artificial sweetners since 1974---god love Fresca and Tab Cola - my first 2 carbonated drinks...and i got to 'fit in' with all the other kids in the 70's. All of my life i have been told that these sweetners will cause cancer...do you guys worry about this? My children are not diabetic but I almost always by diet soda/pop/cokes for them and dont think twice about it. I always figured that these research studies would feed the rats their body weight in sacchrin and poof they would get cancer.
my mum showed me an article that said that aspartame and isomalt do not cause cancer per se but may have side effects on a very small population. i’ll leave you a link if i can retrieve it
This is relatively old news but a reason, I think, to not give kids diet soda. Of course, I can easily say this now that my kid isn’t even old enough to beg for soda - ask me again in a few years! :o)
(That said, we don’t drink any soda in my house - I don’t like it - so maybe (i hope!) it won’t be an issue…)
You and I were diagnosed in the same year!
Yes, indeed, I remember Tab and Fresca - they were both advertised as having “one crazy calorie”.
I went through a period, maybe about 15 years ago, where I drank almost 4-5 cans of diet soda a day, every day.
There are dozens of websites that describe aspartame as being a “neurotoxin” but who knows.
I guess moderation is the key. (I now drink one 12 oz bottle of diet pepsi per day, but also have other a/s’d items like yogurt.)
The diet soda’s in the early 70’s were horrible (Tab was probably the least bad IMO), but I drank them nonetheless. Today’s soda’s with aspartame are great.
I’m not a heavy soda drinker, but when I do want one (e.g. diet code with pizza, or an occasional AW diet root bear float) I don’t worry about any cancer risks. Aspartame has been one of the most tested food ingredients in the world and unless someone thinks there’s a huge conspiracy, for the vast majority of the population it isn’t a health hazard (used in moderation, of course).
Hey, Mol. Do you remember sitting around my mom’s dining room table writing letters to senators and reps begging them not to pull saccharin off the market?! I don’t know why that memory sticks in my brain. It will likely be the story I retell 3 million times when I am in my 90s. At any rate, I go thru phases with diet soda and Equal…I don’t have it all and then it seems like I am addicted…I look at the articles about links to cancer and in the end I have to admit that I think that anymore, life causes cancer. Kathy mentioned moderation and I suppose that’s the key. Sophie, my daughter, wants soda if everyone else has it…wants green tea if everyone else has it…wants milk if everyone else has it…so maybe she’ll be a good influence on me as I try to drink what she should be drinking as an older toddler. Final thought, Mollie and my brother were diagnosed 5 years before I was…I also distinctly remember taking a drink of their diet Dr. Pepper and thinking that I would NEVER drink that! Things changed as it took a while for diet Coke, etc. to show up. Have a great weekend everyone.
