Uncontrollable hypertension, urgent hypertension, hypertensive emergencies and consumption of cheese. It is my intent to make this a short version and make a long version available. I searched for hypertension & cheese for years now and found nothing. So, with that in mind, I will combine hyper tension, high blood pressure, cheese, Aspartame and NutraSweet quite a few times in hopes search engines will pick up on this and associate the terms for future searchers. I have had HBP since around 2004, it was controllable with medications (from 165/85 to 120’s/70’s). Then, about three years later things changed dramatically when my levels would shoot up in the 180’s/90’s +. It didn’t take long to determine these hypertensive emergencies followed the consumption of either color of cheese, yellow or white. It would be the next day that hypertension would set in and only a nitrate would bring it down to within reason (150’s/90’s) and that would last a few days, then drop back off. No doctor had an explanation for this other than the obvious, “don’t eat cheese”. One finally mentioned serotonin, which did turn out to be relevant. Then in the fall of ’09 my levels shot up as if I had ingested a lot of cheese and would not respond to the medications I was taking. I had been drinking diet soda since NutraSweet became available in it during the mid 80’s, first in root beer. To be fair, I had been smoking for much longer. (For more the more detailed version of this rant email tgasatr) I explained this to 3 or 4 doctors and all had no explanation or pill that was of any use so I eliminated Aspartame and smoking from my bad habit activities. After about 3 months my hypertension subsided and was controllable with normal high blood pressure medications again, with my “normal” complications. Doctors were and are dumfounded by my “normal” complications regarding medications. (gmail is my provider) Perhaps someone out there will request the full version of this and will have the answer to medications “flipping” on me. I blame Aspartame for the BP spike because it absolutely did cause me to have ‘Habba Syndrome’ since the early 90’s which, in my opinion, is a symptom in itself. Dr. Habba didn’t go farther with his observations. So now, after 1 ½ years of no NutraSweet, cheese no longer effects my BP. It has also been the same duration of not smoking but I blame aspartame because of much researching the stuff and the fact that I use nicotine replacements. I hope this won’t be too, long to upload to most forums. Some sites filter out email addresses, for those wondering why the cryptic tgasatr@gmail.com email address. Here ends the short version, I hope this helps someone who finds this, I can’t be the only one experiencing who has had this reaction.