Sweet Poison: How the World's Most Popular Artificial Sweetener Is Killing Us -- My Story

I changed over to diet Coke and diet Dr. Pepper about a year ago to try and loose weight. At first I continued to loose weight and all was well... But then my weight loss stopped, and I started having a hard time concentrating. I thought I was just getting older when I started having trouble seeing at night. Then I noticed I started dropping things and bumping into walls etc. And I started having headaches. I didn't think it could have anything to do with the aspartame in the soft drinks I was consuming even though I was up to about two liters of soda a day. Then I talked with our Pastors wife who had almost died from aspartame poisioning and she said you need to stop right away. I felt really bad the first two days of not drinking or consuming any aspartame products. Plus I wasn't consuming any cafeeine either. I was going to bed and sleeping for 16 hours. But in the next three days I started feeling clearer headed and just better all around. My night vision is coming back every day and I no longer drop things.

Everyone should read this book and understand the dangers of aspertame. It is far worse than people realize. I have stopped using any foods or drinks with it in, and I know I feel better, and have less headaches. A book for everyone!

I was having thryoid problems after my second daughter was born. I was drinking Diet Dr. Pepper for an energy boost every day. This book caught my attention because of the author's thryoid disfunction. I read the book and stopped using aspartame. My hair is no longer falling out, and my engergy and thryoid levels are back to normal. My 3 year old daughter is epileptic, and several months before reading this book her seizures took a sudden turn for the worst. She started having 15-30 seizures a day, and even had 2 grand mal seizures. I was terrified by the increase in seizure activity and wondered what had caused the change. Reading about how aspartame can cause seizures/grand mal seizures, I checked the vitamins I was giving my daughter. Because it was fall, and I wanted her to be healthy during cold and flu season,I had started giving her several fruit flavored vitamin c chewables and 1 chewable multi vitamin. Checking the labels I discovered they all had aspartame as an ingredient. It was hardly coincidence when I realized the increase in seizures was around the same time I started these vitamins. I threw out both bottles. It has been 6 months and my daughter has not had another grand mal seizure, and her seizures dropped from 15-30 a day down to 0-3 on a typical day. I was also able to drop 2 of her 3 seizure medications. Aspartame is very dangerous, I had no idea.

What is important about Janet's book is not whether or not she is a great writer (as a very long life of obsessive reading, I can tell you, there are very few) or whether she made mistakes about the minutea of science. What is important, is that she is right. I know. I've been there. About four years ago, my mother told me that she saw a segment on the news about the adverse effects of aspartame (weight gain, headaches, hair loss, etc.) and told me because she knew that I drank diet drinks. At that point, I was drinking one can of Diet Coke, Monday through Friday, in the afternoon at work because that was what was available. At home, I was drinking Diet Rite which uses Splenda. I was not using any other diet products and still don't. So, I thought it was no big deal to just drink the regular Coke with sugar for a week to see if I noticed any difference. At that point, my feet were in such increasing pain from "arthritis," I felt I was fast on my way to using a wheelchair. The condition had gotten increasing worse for more than ten years. I came home one Friday night and was not even sure I could walk the few feet to the bathroom. I had spent a fortune on extremely expensive doctors, shoes, inserts, etc. Within four days of not drinking aspartame, I was able to walk up and down stairs for the first time in many years. About 90 percent of the pain was gone. The balance of the pain went away over a period of months, and today (even though I am four years older), I am in no pain at all, and take a great deal of delight in buying really cheap shoes. My brother-in-law gets migranes from aspartame (obviously, he is not genetically-related to me). My mother has had two cans of diet drinks in her life; the first sent her to bed with a severe headache, and the second one made her feel like she was high on drugs. None of the three of us ever talked about it until after my dramatic experience. That's not coincidence. Mind you I was drinking five cans a week. People that are drinking a lot more and not making the connection (as I didn't) are being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, lupus, etc. This is not a small cost to what we laughingly call our "health care system." We are all paying big time for this in cold hard cash not to mention the loss of productive workers. Aspartame is a neuro-toxin. In retrospect, it makes absolute sense that I had such pain in my feet because there are so many nerve endings in the feet. It was developed by G. D. Searle in Skokie, Illinois (which was bought out by Monsanto). The CEO of G.D. Searle who pushed aspartame through the FDA was Donald Rumsfeld after Reagan became President. He was adamant about getting this approved despite the fact that the animal studies that Searle did killed some of the monkeys. This is a fact, not as one reviewer stated, in the same category as belief in UFO's. Given the recent revelelations about the FDA, can anyone seriously think that they are protecting us? They

Janet Starr Hall's doctors expected her to die, but she defied them and lived to tell her story in Sweet Poison: How the World's Most Popular Artificial Sweetener is Killing Us--My Story. Rather than suffering from Graves' Disease, a deadly thyroid disease, Hull had been poisoned by the food and soft drinks she had consumed. A working mother with little time, Hull relied on prepared foods. She counted on diet drinks to help control her weight. She didn't realize how much aspartame (Nutrasweet) she was consuming, and she didn't know until almost too late that it was toxic to her system. After her recovery, she devoted her spare time to researching the history of aspartame in food products. Her book is the result of those years of research. She "uncovered hundreds of documents contradicting the NutraSweet Company's claim of product safety." She quotes statistics from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) indicating that "aspartame accounts for over 85% of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA." Those reactions include headaches, depression, dizziness, seizures, and weight gain. Several deaths have been reported. There is also evidence that aspartame contributes to birth defects. Her book details how the FDA first determined that aspartame was unsafe for humans, then later reversed itself. She obtained documents revealing the chemicals that constitute aspartame and how those chemicals behave in the human body. Sweet Poison is a must-read for anyone consuming food or drinks containing aspartame. At the least, it will open your eyes to what you're putting in your body. It might even save your life.