My husband was only in his mid-thirties when he started suffering from debilitating joint pain – primarily in his knees and ankles. He would wake up in the morning almost unable to walk. He started taking aspirin, but soon that wasn’t enough.
I had read a little about the dangers of aspartame (NutraSweet) and asked him to try giving up his beloved diet cokes for a couple of days. He said that he probably couldn’t live without them, but he would try. After only a couple of days without the diet cokes he was pain free. But he thought that meant he could start drinking diet cokes again. It only took one diet coke before he was in agony again.
It turns out that it wasn’t easy to give up the diet cokes. It also is almost impossible to avoid aspartame. The other night he ordered a margarita and there must have been aspartame in the margarita mix because he could hardly walk the next day.
On days that he can avoid aspartame though, he is pain free. I’m so glad that we made this discovery before starting down a long path of pain killers and arthritis medication!
The binder below contains some of the resources that I found on aspartame, though I’m sure there are more. This digital binder has some interesting links with scientific data, write-ups from doctors, personal stories, and even one horrifying ‘home experiment’ with aspartame.