The “Break it Down” Blog

Grant Gochnauer, more or less the obsessive pinnacle of health, sent over a link to a site that represents Victoria Inness-Brown personal experiment with 108 rats over a 2 year and 8 month period, studying the effects of aspartame in them.

The photo above was one of the rats in the study that had a common side effect of ingesting the aspartame, and that was huge tumors/cancerous growths. The consistency with which aspartame, in the test animals, produced cancerous growths should be disturbing enough to get it pulled from the market… but thank God for capitalism, we likely aren’t going to see aspartame going anywhere soon.

The reason I bring up Grant in all of this is because he is healthy… almost to a fault:

The guy knows shit like… eating a grapefruit and 1oz of protein will surge your metabolism for 1hr, and then a shot of caffeine will get you ready for a good workaround…

Anyway we had a conversation about aspartame a while ago and Grant was readily informed about the dangers of diet soda and the seemingly obvious evidence linking aspartame to cancer and other issues, but ones that our medical community seems to either not care about or just completely avoid looking into.

One part of that conversation (with a group of friends) was how we all compared notes and noticed that when we had a diet soda, it was noticeably easier to consume more food… almost 50% sometimes, than if we were just drinking water. A common comment was having pizza with water compared to eating pizza with a diet soda, the difference in slices consumed was almost double.

I have independently tested this myself over the last year, eating the same meal on different days over and over and over again, with Diet Pepsi one day and water the next. Regardless of the setting (home cooked or eaten out) I can eat almost twice as much when drinking a diet soda with the meal than if I were just drinking water.

The connections of aspartame and cancer are scary and the circumstantial evidence seems to be all over the place (e.g. Aspartame Victims Support Group) but I think there is a very valid link to diet soda and obesity in this country as well. Combining an appetite enhancer with the American mindset of “I can have it all!” and you have a recipe for disaster.