Madam, - The feature "Diet industry banks on failure" in The Irish Times on 28 July 2003 contained a number of serious allegations about aspartame which may have caused unnecessary concern to your readers.
Aspartame is a safe food ingredient. It is made from two amino acids, phenylalanine and aspartic acid. These amino acids (parts of protein) occur in many foods which we eat as part of our normal diet, such as meat, dairy products or eggs. For example, in a 330ml glass of milk, there is 11 times more aspartic acid and five times more phenylalanine than in a can of soft drink sweetened entirely with aspartame.
When we consume foods or drinks sweetened with aspartame, the sweetener is digested to its component parts, which are treated by the body in exactly the same way as if they had come from meat, milk or vegetables. Aspartame brings nothing new to the diet.
In a recent review, the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Food (SCF) confirmed the safety of aspartame. This review of all of the recent scientific papers concluded that aspartame is safe, and that health myths circulating on the Internet are without foundation. The SCF also made the following conclusion:
"Aspartame is unique among the intense sweeteners in that the intake of its component parts can be compared with intakes of the same substances from natural foods." - Yours, etc.,
ANN JONES, Aspartame Information, Bressenden Place, London SW1.