Two Sides to Every Can: Diet Soda and The Brain

Two Sides to Every Can: Diet Soda and the Brain

A brief fact-check of the details of common Diet-Soda horror stories and their impact on the brain.

Recently, there have been a string of health websites creating the short popular list versions of diet-soda dangers that are filled with quite compelling and staggering points that when taken at face value could make a person wonder how any of the people who ingest these items on a daily basis live at all after the somatic onslaught of poisons. Under harsher scrutiny, however, an equally small and slanted list in the opposition brings these points to a more muted and hopefully truer middle ground of reason and scientific understanding.

Fact Check #1: Most Diet Sodas Contain the Poison Cocktail Aspartame

While it may be true that many diet beverages on the market do contain Aspartame, the dangers of this substance have been both understated and overstated. One of the harshest of these overstatements leads to a false understanding that when consumed, aspartame immediately breaks down in to several poisons that begin to wreak havoc on the body and poison the consumer. This hypothesis grossly deprecates the process the human body uses to “break down” substances we eat every day, from digestion, and metabolization, to absorption and excretion. By overlooking (or not mentioning) all of this, it can be easy to see how frightening the prospects of some of the large named substrates of aspartame can be. Let us take a closer look at some of the biochemical and pharmacological details of the three largest and most talked about constituents: aspartic acid, methanol, and phenylalanine.

Aspartic Acid: This is an amino acid that in some on-line articles have been linked to an “excitation” fear that it overstimulates the neurons in your brain until they reach death. Many of these claims come from the linking of aspsartic acid, to glutamic acid (glutamate) which in excess around neurons can in fact bring them to over-activate and go through a process called apoptosis wherein the neuron destroys itself. This is where the term “excitotoxic” comes from and has become a buzz word. However, we must also understand that there are two prevailing natural defenses against this. One, is the Blood Brain Barrier which regulates levels of these substances from entering the brain from the blood (where aspartic acid would come from after ingestion), and neurotransmitter catabolism (exctracellular neurotransmitter breakdown) which entails the breaking down of any group of neurotransmitters in the synapse over a period of time. In laymans terms, there’s a guard at the gate, and even if you get past that and stay too long, you still are torn apart. Both of these substances, in balanced amounts, are absolutely necessary to life. Brain functioning would be nearly impossible without them. Dangers of these substances in high levels, however, can be harmful to those in which these mechanisms are impaired, be it through genetic conditions or even fetal exposure. It is still important to mention that the level needed to reach these points of risks are well above even the most dedicated diet soda drinker, and have been evaluated by the FDA.