Regarding a variety of memes a couple decades ago that went on and on about the “dangers” of aspartame; now they’re being replaced by memes on the danger of cyanocobalamine (a stable form of vitamin B12).
These memes are dishonest and aim to con average readers by depending on the readers general (and understandable) level of ignorance about the chemistry and biology of nutrition.
Before I finished my PhD in the field of molecular neurobiology, I had completed the coursework for a doctorate in Human Nutrition/Nutritional Biology. Quackery in medicine in general and nutrition in particular (and the methods used to push it) was among my favorite topics of study.
Like political and religious propagandists, the practitioners of nutrition quackery rely on misdirection, misinterpretation, and the deliberate manipulation of ignorance, fear, and desperation to create and then cultivate a target population.
As a means to this end, they aim to foster in that population an us-versus-them mentality and a sense of pride or superiority over possessing special insider knowledge. The first is used to cut them out of the general population and the second, to keep them isolated from it.
And since what the practitioners of quackery use to accomplish the first is seen by the victims to be so mind-boggling stupid once they realize what’s actually going on, if those running the scam can’t rely on their victims’ unwillingness to lose their unwarranted feeling of superiority over being among the cognoscenti to keep them in the group, then they know they still have a pretty good shot of using their victims’ shame over having been conned and their fear of looking stupid to keep their mouths shut.
A link below to McGill University will show the reader how nutrition quacks now use the same tactics I describe to scare people about vitamin B12. It’s short and sweet and hits the essential features of the fraud with respect to vitamin B12.
I will use aspartame as an example. It’s more involved because I talk about the essential features of propaganda, a subset of which is nutrition quackery.
Here are a few of the principal ways nutrition quacks and other propagandists work.
1. They use words with bad connotations.
Aspartame is a chemical...
“Oh, my God! Not...a...CHEMICAL!”
Yes, sadly, aspartame is a methylated ester of aspartic acid joined to phenylalanine by a peptide bond. It is a chemical made from two other chemicals and joined together with a chemical bond through chemical processes in a chemical plant.
“Oh, the evil chemical industry that creates evil chemicals to adulterate food and slip them into the human body like assassins!”
Well, not really.
Aspartame is a chemical, but then so is every other food.
“Food” is just a verbal smiley face label we stick on assemblages of chemicals, many of which the chemical engine (which is your body) requires to, well, to do anything at all and without which it would rapidly break down and fall apart. Many other chemicals in food are not needed for anything and the body generally ignores them. But every single chemical in food that the body requires to stay healthy, in the wrong quantities, is capable of sickening or killing you.
For instance, vitamin A is essential for eyesight and the gut immune system. But eat a big chunk of polar bear liver and the high levels of vitamin A in it will kill you.
Eat too much vitamin C and you may find yourself making an unexpected special delivery.
2. They use unfamiliar scientific words to generate fear.
“phenylalanine” and “aspartic” and “ACID”!
We’ve all heard of the London acid attacks and the Phantom of the Opera, scarred by acid, and how some murderers have used acid to get rid of their victims.
“And people expect us to put ACID into our bodies?”
Uh, yeah, sure.
Vitamin C, without which you would develop scurvy and fall apart into a bleeding, toothless mess, is an acid (ascorbic acid, from anti-scorbutic acid, meaning “anti-scurvy).
Anything you eat that tastes sour is full of acid.
Your balsamic vinegar is full of acid (acetic acid).
Your tangy yogurt is full of acid (lactic acid).
Your naturally-cured salami is full of acid (lactic acid).
Your Sour Patch candies, lemons, limes, and other citrus fruits are full of acid (citric acid).
Aspartic acid and phenylalanine, the main ingredients of aspartame are two of the 20 amino acids your body uses to create proteins from instructions supplied by two other acids: Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).
Deprive yourself of these amino acids and you will soon die. You cannot live without them. The ones referred to as essential amino acids must come from the diet because they can’t be made in house. The rest, including aspartic acid, one half of the aspartame moiety, are synthesized in that chemical factory known as your body.
Amino acids are all weak acids, unlike the strong acids, such as sulfuric acid that burned the face of the Phantom of the Opera, or hydrochloric acid that—oh, wait a second!
Your stomach’s full of hydrochloric acid! It’s produced by your chemical factory body to start chemically breaking down the secondary and tertiary structures of dietary proteins composed of those chemicals called amino acids in preparation for the next step in the breakdown of foods into their basic chemical components.
This strong acid can severely burn unprotected flesh, such as your esophagus, as seen in gastric reflux disease. But why doesn’t it burn the hell out of your duodenum? That’s because your body knows how to handle that strong acid by neutralizing it with appropriate amounts of a base, another chemical produced by your chemical factory body.
The aspartic acid-phenylalanine moiety leaves the stomach with the other denatured proteins. In the small intestine the primary structure of the peptide chains is worked on by digestive enzymes, peptidases that are chemicals produced by the pancreas.
The different peptidases chemically cleave the peptide bonds of the string of amino acids in a preferential manner until small peptides are left, then transporters in the brush border membrane of the small intestine finish the job by bringing them over in ones and twos for transport to the liver and elsewhere.
In the case of the aspartame dipeptide, the result is two common amino acids—the first, aspartic acid, is acquired through the diet and is synthesized by the human body. The second, phenylalanine, an essential amino acid, is identical to any other phenylalanine in the diet and is used in exactly the same way.
Earlier, in the highly acidic environment of the stomach, the esterified methyl group attached to aspartic acid is cleaved by acid hydrolysis to form a molecule of methanol. This is one of the two chemicals that we are warned about hysterically in the memes referred to above.
But once again the dishonesty is plainly seen if we get honest answers to these questions:
Question 1: How much methanol is produced per 1 liter of Diet Coke?
Question 2: How does this quantity compare with other so-called “natural” beverages?
Answers:
One liter of aspartame-sweetened soda will yield about 55 mg of methanol.
One liter of fruit juice contains up to 680 mg of methanol.
So if the danger of aspartame lies principally in the production of methanol, then ounce for ounce “natural” fruit juices are up to more than 12 times worse.
So one supposed danger pitched by anti-aspartame quacks is disposed of.
What’s left?
Oh, yeah, that would be the dread formaldehyde, conjuring images and the stink of dissecting pickled worms, frogs, and fetal pigs in high school or college biology class and a deliberately-cultivated revulsion to the idea of drinking beverages sweetened with aspartame by associating them with formaldehyde.
3. They use misdirection to deflect attention from what’s actually going on or they set things up so people will make incorrect inferences that will facilitate the goals of the quacksters.
Here’s how they do that on the subject of formaldehyde:
At no point in the digestion of aspartame into the single amino acids of aspartic acid and phenylalanine is there any formation of formaldehyde.
One meme I saw talked about the formation of formaldehyde and then methanol.
But since the formation of methanol (referred to by the quacksters as “wood alcohol” to heighten the reader’s fears) actually precedes the cleavage of the peptide bond, digestion, it becomes clear that not only has the guy making the meme failed to get the order of chemical operations right but he has no clue at all (or he’s just being deceptive) about the relationship of formaldehyde production to the digestion of aspartame into its constituent amino acids: there IS none.
To reiterate:
First, the demethylation of aspartame by acid hydrolysis of an ester bond produces minute amounts of methanol that are insignificant compared to the methanol found in fruit juice and practically nothing compared to an identical quantity of a fermented beverage.
Second, the cleaving of the peptide bond of a perfectly ordinary dipeptide consisting of two completely ordinary amino acids results in two free amino acids that are chemically indistinguishable from any others of the same kinds in the human body.
Third, at no point in the chemical digestion of aspartame is formaldehyde EVER produced.
Once the peptide bond has been cleaved between aspartic acid and phenylalanine, aspartame as aspartame is gone and has no more effect on the human body than the aspartic acid and phenylalanine in beans or meat.
So where does the scaremongering about formaldehyde come from?
It comes from two things:
A. They ignore the actual sources of formaldehyde in the human body (exogenous and endogenous).
The human body, as part of the one carbon pathway, naturally produces formaldehyde that is then metabolized into less toxic compounds.
Dietary methanol is converted in the liver by alcohol dehydrogenase into formaldehyde that is then metabolized into less toxic compounds.
We have already seen that the amount of methanol produced per liter of aspartame sweetened soda (55mg) is trivial compared to that found per liter in fruit juices (average 140mg, range 12-680mg). It’s minuscule compared to fermented drinks (>1500mg per liter).
Consequently, the amount of formaldehyde from an aspartame-sweetened source of methanol is very small, amounting to between 0.3-0.4% of daily human oral exposure.*
In other words, just as the amount of methanol that could come through the cleaving of the methyl group from aspartame is vanishingly small compared to the total amount of exogenous methanol, so the amount of formaldehyde is even smaller than the total daily amount of exogenous and endogenously-produced formaldehyde.
B. They deliberate misrepresent the effects of that extremely small portion of total formaldehyde that is later produced from the very small amount of methanol arising from the acid hydrolysis of the ester bond of the methyl group on the aspartic acid molecule in aspartame.
As I said earlier, food is composed entirely of chemicals, any one of which in sufficient quantity, either too much or too little, could sicken or kill you. And the metabolic processes of the human body produce chemicals that, in sufficient quantity, could sicken or kill you. But it all depends on the quantity. As Paracelsus said, “The poison is in the dose.”
The deceit of this meme and other such memes is that they ignore this critical piece of information.
The author of the meme points out what very large, very toxic doses of methanol or formaldehyde can do to one’s physical health and then makes the completely unwarranted assertion that, because methanol is generated in from the cleavage of the methyl group of aspartame and later formaldehyde from the methanol, aspartame is a deadly poison.
This is not true for the simple reason that much, much larger amounts of methanol are consumed without harm in fruits and fruit juices than one could ever obtain from aspartame and hundreds of times more formaldehyde is ingested in the diet or produced through metabolic processes than could ever be produced from methanol derived from aspartame.
To get as much methanol from 1 liter of Diet Coke (55mg) as one gets from 1 liter of a fermented beverage (>1,500mg), one would have to drink (1,500/55) over 27 liters of Diet Coke per day. So whatever harm arises from drinking that much Diet Coke, it’s not coming from the methanol.
The authors of anti-aspartame memes are either incredibly ignorant not to be aware of these very basic facts or are incredibly devious for failing to mention them. Of course, if they did, it would completely undercut their position and deprive them of the pride and (imagined) superiority of their crankdom.
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** Based on the analysis of the EFSA Scientific Panel on Food Additives and Nutrient Sources added to Food using actual usage data, methanol from aspartame was estimated to contribute to 0.5-9.7 % of the total daily exposure to endogenous and exogenous methanol. For formaldehyde, and assuming exposure to aspartame at the current Acceptable Daily Intake of 40 mg/kg bw per day together with a 10 % conversion to methanol with further conversion to formaldehyde, a daily exposure of 4 mg/kg bw per day is estimated. This exposure would only contribute to approximately 0.3-0.4 % of human oral exposure from background levels in food products and endogenous turnover.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.2903/j.efsa.2014.3550/asset/efs23550.pdf?v=1&t=jdxsc4zc&s=36c925c7c02e516e3eece50153e9fcf51f33c625
Love your explanations.