My mom was on the team that “invented” aspartame. IE isolated it.
You know “all” it is? The chemical that’s created when one adds milk to bananas. Her team lead was curious about WTF it was sweeter adding milk to bananas, which was a common break time snack at the time, than eating either milk or bananas alone (synergistic 1+1=7)
Know what it DOES?
Yep. It’s zero calories.
It ALSO makes cell membranes less permeable. (Over time. IE Decades, before the effects are felt.) Which not only makes a person hungrier, as cells are crying out for the nutrients they can’t absorb... more than negating the zero calorie effect for most people... but it. Makes. Cell. Membranes. Less. Permeable. Less able to get oxygen & nutients. Less able to send/receive messages to nearby cells to self destruct (we usually have a few hundred cancerous cells in us, at any given time. What makes cancer cancer? That response gets shut off. So the cancerous cell and all nearby cells don’t self destruct in order to protect others, and the cancer spreads). And a hundred other things. Like fat cells releasing fat. And any cell being delivered iron, oxygen, protein, sugar, antibodies, etc.
Milk & Bananas (any time one adds milk to cereal with half a banana they’re cresting the amount of aspartame found in about 50 diet Cokes), and anything containing aspartame, are really things to avoid eating.
Wacky thing to note? INCLUDING every nut “milk” I know of. Aspartame is a side effect of adding certain sugars and proteins together. Bananas and anything “creamy” is -rule of thumb- bad for you. But bananas and sugars? (Bananas and rice, most commonly) make certain nutrients bioavailable that otherwise we’d just piss out. Eating bananas and rice, together? Creates a nutritional smorgasbord of trace minerals and nutrients.
My mom’s team had no idea that bananas+milk would be zero calories. Much less that it would storm the soda / “diet” world. It wasn’t even a passion-project, per se. Just a “Huh. That’s odd. I wonder what is happening chemically to make milk & bananas so sweet?” It took decades before the long term effects were understood.
Conversely? There are certain times when we WANT cell membranes to be less permeable. So there may well come a time when, instead of packets on coffee tables/microdosing our whole bodies with the stuff, aspartame is used as a medicine, targeted macro/megadoses to protect cells at risk of exposure from toxic substance. Like radiation & chemo treatments, or pollutants.
