I’ll bet you’d never have guessed my next post would be about artificial sweeteners.

Not long ago, my Mom and I attended a nutrition class at our church. The instructor loaned Mom a video entitled Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World. Mom was so impressed with the movie that she had me watch it.

As it turned out, is was a documentary on the harmful effects of aspartame, commonly markeded at Nutrasweet. I took the information to heart and have since been telling people, offhand, that aspartame is dangerous. I didn’t really questioned the documentary until last night, when Liam raised some objections to the chemistry behind Sweet Misery.

So, I leapt this morning into Wikipedia, and found their article about aspartame, which, incidentally, confirms the content of Sweet Misery.

I encourage you all to at least take a brief look at the findings before having another diet soda. A quick summary: when digested, aspartame breaks down into methanol, aspartic acid, and phenylalanine. All of these substances are potentially harmful to the human body, though to what degree remains controversial. That said, please note the heading “Recently published research” near the bottom of the article.

Heh. Also note that from here on out, you will be seeing a lot of Wikipedia citations in my posts. It’s an amazing site, and I encourage you all to visit it frequently. Poke around, and see what you can find.