Source: elpais.com via Amy on Pinterest

So why are the very organizations that are here to serve the dairy business petitioning the FDA to help ‘poison’ milk?

Let me explain. Recently, the IDFA and NMPF have petitioned the FDA to allow Aspartame along with other non-nutritive chemical sweeteners in children’s milk supply.

Easily enough, as much as these organizations can advertise to you—for really no other reason other than the belief system that milk and dairy are healthy for you–they’re taking it upon themselves to say adding these chemical sweeteners will help children consume more milk. This is based on the belief that children are more apt to drink a milk that’s sweeter than normal milk. And more milk consumed, coupled with lower caloric milk (due to the replacement of high calorie sugar with chemical, no calorie, sweeteners) means healthier children, so they say.

On the surface all seems logical enough. More milk consumed, along with lower calories equals healthier, less obese children. However, when you look a little deeper into this proposition, you may realize this thought process is not only wrong, it’s borderline criminal.

A bit of history on Aspartame.

This chemical was originally discovered by accident in the mid 60s by the Searle Company while testing an anti-ulcer drug (which by the way is now owned by Monsanto, please don’t get me started on Monsanto, and if you’ve been under a rock, please type Monsanto into Google and enjoy this amazing company’s practices and ethics. I’m kidding of course).

In the mid 80s aspartame was passed by the FDA to be used in dry goods/foods and beverages. Many know this chemical by its trade name, Equal or Nutrasweet that come in those pretty blue and pink packets. I could go on for hundreds of pages of the dangers of this seemingly and stupidly-legal to use as a sweetener ingredient, but I’ll give you a quick cheat guide to some of the best of the over 90 wonderful reactions/side effects of this ‘food:’

• >> Seizures and death (my personal favorites)
  >> Holes in your brain (I’m not kidding)
  >> Breathing problems
  >> Tachycardia
  >> Headaches/Migraines
  >> Depression
  >> Fatigue
  >> Joint pain
  >> Anxiety attacks
  >> Vertigo
  >> Memory loss (not a doctor, but I’d think from holes in your brain?)

It has also shown to trigger and/or worsen:

• >> Brain Tumors
  >> Epilepsy
  >> CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)
  >> Multiple Sclerosis
  >> Parkinson’s Disease
  >> Birth Defects
  >> Diabetes
  >> Lymphoma
  >> Fibromyalgia

Yikes, we might be better off getting the kids on a smoking habit to blunt their appetite—think of the health benefits from the lack of calories.

I’m obviously very opinionated and greatly disagree with even the idea to petition this, but here’s another hard fact, with none of my opinion attached.

The FDA has many adverse reactions to foods and drugs reported to them daily, guess which chemical/food is associated with over 75 percent of these reports?

Aspartame.

Here’s a noble idea, I think it’s time for this government agency, the FDA, to start working for us the tax payers and not for the pharmaceutical/Food Conglomerate lobbyists. Call me insane, but for them to ‘push’ any logical human to consume this stuff—let alone allow our children to be exposed to this chemical—they should be jailed.

Okay, well maybe the dairy organizations shouldn’t use such a harsh chemical sweetener. What about stevia, xylitol or rebaduside A? They’re all natural and non-chemically derived, wouldn’t that help? Not really. The theory of removing sugars to eliminate unhealthy calories and replacing them with a non-caloric/non-nutritive sweetener has merit, however this theory has holes. It’s the same reason why we read time and time again that diet soda still leads to obesity. The reality is, these non-nutritive sweeteners can still mimic an insulin spiking response from your pancreas tricking your body into thinking it just ingested a large amount of sugar. Although there’s an absence of calories, the harmful effects of spiked and yo-yo’d insulin within the body really does the most harm and can still lead to the plumping of fat cells.

It seems we are trying to Band-aid a problem that needs to be resolved from the core foundation of the real issue.

The reality is kids can be taught and trained what’s right to eat from early on. If you feed them trash and chemicals, they’ll learn this as their diet. If you expose them to real foods, their diet will follow suit for the rest of their lives.

The idea that kids will drink more milk because it’s sweeter is a really backwards way of thinking. Kids who are raised with proper nutritional guidelines and intelligent/smart knowledge of food choices don’t care for sweetened milk—with chemicals or added sugar, for that matter. We need to stop altering our foods and see them for what they are. Milk is milk, why change it? Nature made it that way, and I tend to believe that nature knows way more about proper food design than any food scientist will any day.

Click here to tell the FDA: We don’t want aspartame in our milk.

Doug Smith is an adventurer/traveler who perpetually lives outside of his comfort zone. He thrives on knowledge, especially when it comes to health. After watching many people around him, including himself, suffer from the negative effects of poor nutrition, he took it into his own hands to learn every thing there is to know about proper nutrition and health. Doug acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in Kinesiology (with an emphasis in physiology, biology and sports nutrition) and subsequently co-founded True Nutrition, a dietary supplement and nutrition company, over 10 years ago. Through his ongoing quest for knowledge and heightened consciousness of the effects of his own nutritional path, he continues to pursue a mission to educate people on the largely untapped and immense potential of proper nutrition. For more on Doug, visit www.truenutrition.com

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Ed: Lynn Hasselberger