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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.
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oh…I know lots of aspartame horror stories! it’s really nasty stuff…
doug! I was wondering if you were alive!! glad to see you here!
one day you say you’re in Italy a couple of days later there is a major earthquake and then silence for a week!!
glad you’re all safe.
yeah well the ‘live blogging’ is a little delayed as there is not such a great internet access, especially in Sicily, so stay tuned for the ‘delayed posts’
I remember those ‘Coke adds Life” ads…….and “It’s the real thing”.
With Gianna. I was worried about you too.
I would have been worried if I’d have known you were in Italy during the quake. Ten years ago I spent about 6 weeks in a wonderful town not too far south of the earthquake epicenter, called Sulmona and I have been concerned about the people there. It’s wonderful medieval walled city with lots of historic architecture. Great restaurants and terrific cheeses and sausage for sale at the weekly market in the town square.
Drinking a coke a day will increase your weight by five pounds a year, which adds up over time. I used to do that and when I quit (that and quitting Mickie D’s) I lost 30 pounds. Of course industry’s answer to that is to come up with a Diet product. Which is, of course, probably toxic in other ways.
Diet drinks kill more than bees. I’ve been campaigning against it since our daughter died from leukemia, but with little success. In frustration I wrote this poem.
AS PAR TAME IS TO BLAME
I know an old lady
Couldn’t find a fly
Nor bee nor other insectii
Couldn’t find a spider
To jiggle inside her
In this fair city
It seems a pity
Couldn’t find a bird
What’s more absurd
It’s herbicide she’s expected to swallow
Monoculture, land left in fallow
Government themes to endorse
-so she’s thinking — maybe the horse
g. bell
I knew regular coke will full of sugar, so opted for the diet coke. I will never touch the stuff again. Aspartame seems great for bees, but not so great for us. I will follow up on this article and decide if I’ll stop using it in my coffee – oh when will it ever end – just about everhthing I like seems to have an adverse response (assumably) on my body.