Fuckin hell. Just watched that documentary Sweet Misery about Aspartame, the artificial sweetner. Not possessing a comical wacky edge or fancy production like Supersize Me and the recent glut of sexy documentaries, it focuses on low key interviews with nuerologists , brain nerds and of course victims of this crazy chemical and really is interesting.
Aspartame is the artificial sweetner branded as Canderel and found in thousands of products.
Even before seeing it, It annoyed the shit out of me how Diet Coke is seen as a healthy alternative to the real deal. Like idiots who smoke Silk Cut or my current pet hate, Fairtrade coffee (I know it’s not a health thing but it kills me, pack of saps thinking they’re Bob Geldof because they buy this coffee while wearing clothes made by Malaysian orphans and generally just being right on wankers).
The long term effects of modern vices always interests me. Mobile phones are a good one, the whole planet uses them but we have no idea what the lifetime cumulative effects of sticking a microwave transponder to our thin skulls is. Guaranteed to be not good. The victims in Sweet Misery share the common trait of suffering terrible side effects but as soon as they cut out the Nutra Sweet their symptoms dramatically dipped or just disappeared. My degree in nuerospunkology hasn’t come through yet but even a U2 fan can make the connection. Shit, there’s this poor woman in the film who got sentenced to 50 years for poisoning her husband with metahanol, the very chemical that Aspartame produces but your body can’t metabolise, he was strung out on soft drinks and was using that creotin stuff for body building. The whole Aspartame thing was never brought up in her trial. 50 years. Four walls till doomsday.
The wholesale cover up and selective research by the manufacturers is terrible but not really surprising. They gave 7 monkeys Aspartame in milk (which slows absorption) and 1 died while 5 had seizures but this didn’t strike them as something which should be submitted. The human trials by an outside investigator are worse. The story then takes a political angle with serious wrangling to get the drug approved and silence the critics and the cunt himself, Donald Rumsfeld , played a massive part in this.
While I’m at it let me digress and pour scorn and derision with laser precision on that recent fatal chemical trials in the UK. Why were people outraged and how the fuck is it a news worthy story that willing volunteers of a drug trial lucked out? Is it remarkable that experimental drugs have dangerous unkown side effects?
The whole thing has all the element s of a Dead Kennedys song. The thought blocking sugar that kills people and gets covered up and approved by crooked politicians. People are buying more and more pharamcueticals to keep a handle on the side effects of other drugs. I know, I know, there are a hundred other issues worth talking about but this one gets me. So ease off the Diet Coke. Stick to Aldi beer, cheap processed meat and John Player Blue like this walking health farm. Interestingly though, snopes files these all claims under false.
You’re not going to find this film anywhere other than an illegal download so go steal it. Also got a long winded one about ITN falsifying/cleverly editing footage from Bosnia in order to wangle support for UN intervention. So there.
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Air fresheners and this new one 3volution (separate rant for that) can’t be good for a house with small kids/babies, just because it smells nice, anything aerosol has to be bad. Besides the many chemicals used to create the scent, surely the propellant is lethal. But getting back to them as a concept, having a device plugged into your wall constantly sending out a fake smell is just wrong. It’s intrusive, weird and phoney. Back in my day all houses smelled like mashed potato except The Finegans house which smelt of wee wee. 
