Live Blogging From Verbania IT: Aspartame and Bees. Pass the Diet Coke Please.
Today we visited our daughter who is an exchange student in Verbania, Italy, on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore, in the region of Piemonte. Her host father is a bee cultivator and proprietor of a small company that produces honey and wax. He travels up into the Italian Alps every day to tend to their bees.
He told us that the population of bees is declining worldwide due to various factors such as pesticides in the environment. But what is a weird twist is that a substance that is in diet coke, aspartame, may actually help out the bees. Aspartame is added to diet coke as a substitute for sugar. Many Americans drink gallons of this stuff.
Things go better with Coke. That is, if you are a bee. I'm not sure about the rest of us.
A video on YouTube describes how a man feels like aspartame was responsible for the death of his wife, caused by drinking too much diet Coke:
You see the bees have been suffering from a kind of pest that interferes with their life cycle. This has had a negative effect on the production of honey. They found that when they took a bunch of diet coke and put it out in the sun for a few days, the aspartame in the diet coke underwent a chemical reaction. When given to the bees, it killed the pests that afflicted them.
This might be good news for the bees. But for those of us who drink diet coke?
The FDA has set the Acceptable Dietary Intake (ADI) of Aspartame at 50 mg/kg per day. This is equivalent to 21 cans of diet coke per day. Our European friends might think that this is impossible. But have they ever been to Dallas? And seen a super slurpy special first hand?
The effects of aspartame on health continue to be controversial. And this is made worse by allegations of conflicts of interest amongst those experts who have opined on the topic. The continuing purchase of our medical experts does not leave room for confidence amongst consumers about these so called expert opinions. So they have noone to blame but themselves if noone believes them.
Hat tip to brother Steve Bremner for the Aspartame Youtube video link.
