Aspartame and "diet sodas" -how do they work?

Like a trojan horse, apparently
here's how

Methyl Alcohol — The Root of the Problem with Aspartame

Aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. The phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group, which provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol. This is in sharp contrast to naturally-occurring methanol found in certain fruits and vegetables, where it is firmly bonded to pectin, allowing the methanol to be safely passed through your digestive tract.

If the methyl alcohol is broken off from the phenylalanine, as easily happens when drinks sweetened with it are exposed to higher temperatures, it no longer tastes sweet. This is precisely what happened to most of the diet soda sent to the Middle East for US troops. They received non-sweet sodas that were loaded with dangerous levels of methanol, which can be toxic when it's in this already broken down state.

Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it's carried into susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone marrow, where the ADH enzyme converts it into formaldehyde, which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA. All other animals, on the other hand, have a protective mechanism that allows methanol to be broken down into harmless formic acid...

According to Aspartame expert Dr. Woodrow Monte, there's a major biochemical problem with methanol in humans, because of the difference in how it's metabolized, compared to all other animals. This is why toxicology testing on animals is a flawed model. It doesn't fully apply to humans.

Both animals and humans have small structures called peroxisomes in each cell. There are a couple of hundred in every cell of your body, which are designed to detoxify a variety of chemicals. Peroxisome contains catalase, which help detoxify methanol. Other chemicals in the peroxisome convert the formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last step occurs only in animals.

When methanol enters the peroxisome of every animal except humans, it gets into that mechanism. Humans do have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as animals, but human peroxisomes cannot convert the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid.

So again, to recap: In humans, the methyl alcohol travels through your blood vessels into sensitive areas, such as your brain, that are loaded with alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which converts methanol to formaldehyde, and since there's no catalase present, the formaldehyde is free to cause enormous damage in your tissues.

excerpted from Dr. Mercola's newsletter, just read, today.

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