Great news!It's the DOSE that is the problem with things that can kill you, not the substance. (e.g.aspartame poisoning.)So the answer is control the dose of whatever the evil. Just remember small doses eventually accumulate if the body cannot adequately eliminate them. So if you die from lack of oxygen when you are gradual choking over a prolonged period, don't blame the perpetrator who chokes you! Similarly, blame the problems on folate deficiency, not the fact that aspartame influences folate metabolism.
Best solution : Vote with your money. Refuse to eat or buy anything with products in who make the rich richer, and the poor(fools) sicker.If enough people are prepared to face the hassle of this, they will be surprisingly healthier!

Brent Bielema:

You nearly became blind most likely, because you possibly have some problem with folate enzyme metabolism in your eyes (a systemic or localized deficiency or a genetic polymorphism (~15% of the population), which raises your folate requirement). I urge you to visit your physician and explore your own folate status. These issues alone can cause most of the 99+ diseases claimed to be associated with aspartame. As to the folate issues, don't believe what I say--read for yourself. Go to The National Library of Medicine's website for primary scientific literature, PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) and type "folate,eye" without the quotes in the search line. The results will show 347 references today. Or instead type "blindness,folate" again without the quotes and find 41 references today. Folate deficiency linked blindness has been known for a long time. At high (~11 ml) doses of methanol, methanol’s metabolism to formate can make this substance toxic to eyes; that involves formate accumulation and formate-mediated acidification that ultimately leads to blindness. Today treatment is multifactorial and often includes folic or the related folinic acid (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12216995?ordinalpos=9&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum).

As to aspartame's approval issue, get real; it makes little difference how it was approved 30 years ago, because criticism of this process resulted from false positive results (read my comments above). Moreover, aspartame has a twenty year record of safety. No scientific papers remain to question its safety--period. As to the excitotoxin issue, those old arguments were abandoned by scientists years ago; today it is known that each meal contains such excitotoxins in far greater quantities than this sweetener. FYI, here is a one line, short course in toxicology: only the dose determines the poison, not the potency of the toxic substance. Water (drowning) kills more people each year than the trace amounts of cyanide in the plant products you eat daily ever could. The amounts of aspartame are irrelevant as a toxicological issue, of course given use according to the label. As to the Blaylock stuff, you must realize this man is a highly skilled neurosurgeon, but he is not a toxicologist nor even a pharmacologist, and certainly not a scientist. He is stuck in overdrive, because he will not listen to the facts. You read his writing as a book, because his garbage couldn't get published in any reputable journal. Times change, science changes, but take a good look for yourself at the antiaspartame arguments; those critics are still arguing data from twenty to thirty years ago that simply isn't valid today, because they have no arguments left today. The antiaspartame critics are raising this as a legislative issue, solely because they can’t win in the scientific arena. The news is that they will not win anywhere. Just this week they failed again in Hawaii

Lest you misunderstand, I am not necessarily arguing for the use of aspartame here; I really don't care whether you use it or not. And no one has a gun to your head making you use it. Likewise, no one has any justification to remove this product from use by interested parties, especially by legislators whose training we all know involves years and years of scientific training.

John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)

That's funny -- I became nearly blind after consuming aspartame mints (one roll per day) back in the early '90's. I had to undergo laser surgery in both eyes -- now my left eye has a permanently disfigured view, but at least my right eye is better. It's obvious that there was a tremendous amount of double-dealing and influence-peddling to get aspartame approved in the first place, and to say that it can actually prevent cancer is ridiculous! Just read Dr. Russell Blaylock's information -- it's clearly an excitotoxin, and should be removed from the food / drink supply, along with MSG and Splenda. Isn't it amazing that the big drink companies are now going back to sugar AND another natural sweetener, stevia, to "power" their new drinks? Clearly consumers want the natural unprocessed foods -- but unfortunately they're also monkeying with the stevia this time. It's obvious that we can't trust the big food and drink companies -- so choose honest products from small / local businesses, and work to remove the junk from our food. Consumers have the power to do that. Imagine all the lives that will be saved and enhanced by such a powerful move!

I am very sorry to see that you have been taken in by the antiaspartame extremists and their false arguments. These comments about aspartame safety are simply untrue, regardless of how aspartame may or may not have been approved! Aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed in healthy people (see: http://www.officialscienceaspartame.com/?gclid=CJSYo_bnsZcCFQ8QagodL1nKjw). Here are the real facts as science knows them today, as opposed to hearsay from twenty plus years ago.

All the misguided concern about aspartame has been wrongfully created by a combination of purely scientific errors that started with the original Searle work, were perpetuated by a misguided aspartame internet conspiracy theory, and supported by two badly designed 2006 and 2007 and all other European studies. Early FDA evaluators of the original Searle work had tumor concerns, which the internet conspiracy theorists have kept this fable alive for twenty years. But those original results were simply false positives stemming from an error that nobody, even FDA, caught until I reported it this year. The Searle work and everything since (including both highly quoted Soffritti et al (Ramazzini studies) 2006 and 2007 rat studies (suggesting lymphoma and leukemia), and even the internet “myaspartameexperiment.com” rat experiment used a simple, yet wrong experimental design, not to speak of a badly conducted protocol. First I’ll discuss the experimental design error. They used control rats (fed no aspartame) and treated rats (fed different, graded doses of aspartame to get a dose response). While normally this design is adequate, for aspartame this design is improperly balanced and invalid. Even a high school science fair student can recognize this fact once it is explained. Methanol from aspartame degradation is converted to formaldehyde and formic acid. Formaldehyde and formate have long been known to react with and at high doses like those in these experiments deplete a portion of the vitamin folate in exposed rats. That uncontrolled high dose folate degradation would be resolved, if folate were added to diets (daily and microgram sustenance supplements; that is why folate is needed in small doses daily). But, as these experiments have been performed, this degradation of folate only happens in the treated animals, because only they get the aspartame source of the methanol. The consequence is that only the rats receiving the aspartame will show a dose-dependent (high dose, the more the deficiency) increase, not in tumors arising from aspartame, but from folate deficiency induced tumors. Proper design would involve feeding folate supplements to both control and treated animals; it would best have used three groups, control rats, aspartame treated rats, and folate supplemented, aspartame treated rats. This design would not have given rise to tumors, because the rats would not have been depleted of folate. FYI, folate deficiency causes exactly those tumor types reported in the 2006 and 2007 lifetime exposure experiments and literally dozens upon dozens of different cancers. Second, I’ll mention their experimental errors; their use of Sprague-Dawley rats, which are known to become folate deficient as they age, is the most serious in all their two to three year studies. Because of its technical nature I cannot establish to you in this writing that their rats were deficient in folate even before beginning their experiment. However, various factors suggest that this is highly likely. The other European studies are all invalid, but for a different reason. They all failed to consider the serious impact of homocysteine, a substance which increases in the absence of folate. This substance explains all their errant work. (Information detailing the fatal error in all rat aspartame research is new this year. It was presented in March, 2008 at the national Society of Toxicology meeting in Seattle and in April, 2008 at the Agriculture & Food Chemistry section of the national American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans).

Second, all the matter above deals with the rat experimental studies, but there is another totally separate issue, human safety. That issue only exists because of the false claims that aspartame causes problems including tumors in humans stemming from the badly done rat work. In a corollary of the third line above, the fact of the matter is that many people in this country are not healthy; they are intrinsically susceptible to this natural cause of tumors that internet conspirators have wrongly attributed to aspartame. Many people, particularly women, are deficient in this vitamin (folate) and some are seriously deficient in it. Folate was added to grain products to quell a serious incidence of birth defects in children of deficient mothers. That worked to a large extent. But the “health weight” trend not to eat sweet rolls, doughnuts and other grain products that have been fortified with folate since 1998 only worsens the underlying problem. Still others have biochemical issues with their folate processing enzymes (called polymorphisms) that raise the requirement for folate and only raise their susceptibility to folate deficiency. Widespread folate deficiency, not aspartame, is the real problem causing much of the tumors and cancers epidemic in America today. Folate is also a major factor in breast cancer too, see http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/27/3/517. FYI: this paper suggests that folate sufficiency is more important at breast cancer prevention than the genetic risk factor BRCA. And alcohol abuse by women is a major factor in increased folate deficiency and contributes greatly to the incidence of breast cancer today. The concentrations of alcohols (methanol from aspartame or ethanol from low use) are just insufficient to cause any problem in people without other underlying folate issues.

Some might argue, well we should just avoid any risk factor such as aspartame. But they just don’t understand that methanol and its oxidation products formaldehyde and formate are required for the normal production of methyl groups by the folate biochemical system and many other processes. It is this methylation of DNA, as one example, that actually functions to prevent cancer by preventing weak and breakable DNA. So at least for methanol this argument is fallacious. For ethanol, however, it may be a different matter.

There have recently been calls for a second round of grain product fortification to again help to overcome these folate deficiency problems. But the only real solution to the many folate deficiency linked tumors and birth defects, etc. is use of folate supplements. Folate is made not by us, but by bacteria in our gut; given even a folate precursor rich diet (“healthy living”), we simply cannot make sufficient folate to prevent the widespread occurrence of disease associated with folate deficiency. Then, many dietary substances including antibiotics, abusive levels of ethanol, and many commonly used pharmaceuticals (antiepileptic and others) adversely affect either folate or the bugs that generate the folate; they only make us more deficient. This is why continuous consumption of folate supplements is essential.

John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
(FYI, I have absolutely no financial or biasing connection with the aspartame, the soft drink or their related industries. However, I am just tired of the antiaspartame extremists, who have no understanding of the sciences of pharmacology and toxicology, trying to pass judgment and create widely believed but false hearsay on something that they know nothing about.)