by liveandlearn

Created on: August 28, 2008

We all feel ill sometimes don't we? We all feel lots of little things that we don't visit the doctor for because we don't think we should bother them. But what if all these little things we are feeling have just one cause and we are possibly consuming masses of this cause every single day?

Confused? Don't be. Every day, millions of us try to diet. We drink diet drinks or cordial mixed with water (because water is best, right?) instead of full fat fizzy drinks. We eat sugar free and low fat foods because we think they are better for us but by making this assumption we could be damaging our health. If we think something is good for us we don't usually feel the need to check it's ingredients but this must change. There is also clearly not enough readily available information about what our diet products contain.

In many of these so-called healthy foods one of the ingredients is a sweetener called aspartame. In Britain, two of our major supermarkets have banned its use in all of their own brand products. On hearing this information, I decided to find out a little bit about aspartame and was horrified at what I discovered. Here are just a few of the side effects it can cause:

Excessive thirst / hunger
Memory loss
Heart Palpitations
Stomach Cramps
Feeling Unreal
Joint Pains
Nausea / Vomiting
Migraine
Chronic Fatigue
Hair Loss
Irritability
Chronic Cough
and many more.....

Usually when we eat or drink something which is bad for us the side effects would be confined to one area of our body and one of the worst things about aspartame is that it seems to affect our whole body. When we go on a diet to try and lose weight, aspartame is making us hungry and we actually end up putting weight on! 10 days ago I banned aspartame from my house. Before this myself and my partner had been experiencing insatiable hunger which has since disappeared. Generally we both feel healthier although we may be experiencing slight withdrawal symptoms. It was also pretty easy to swap it for something else so we don't miss the products we were using before.

However, I would strongly advise anyone to at least try cutting aspartame from their diet. Our cupboards are not neccessarily full of the stuff but the likelihood is that aspartame is in the things we use the most. We must pay more attention to what we are putting inside our bodies. After all, we don't know what it could be doing to our health.

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