Sometimes I worry about my health. Moments of medical self-awareness rarely present themselves to me, but when they do I feel compelled to do something about my overall medical situation.
For the past year or so I have become more and more convinced that I am slowly losing my memory. Before this slow-down in mental recollection, I considered my mind a steel-trap for data, facts, and tidbits of trivia. Lately though, words escape my grasp when I try to use them and dates and obligations lie by my mental wayside, neglected and forgotten. With conditions like Alzheimer’s threatening who knows how many Americans every year, I started to feel like there was an expiration date on my mental processes. What could I do about it though? How could I prevent my brain from “spoiling”, for lack of a better word?
Well one day I thought I found my answer. My father and aunt, who are more friends than siblings, started a crusade in December against aspartame. For those of you who don’t know, aspartame is a chemical that is found in artificial sweeteners like Sweet N’ Low and it also helps diet sodas to still taste sweet even though they have no sugar. Now, neither my aunt, my father nor myself is a professional scientist, but we are armed with a tool that surely must rival a college education, the Internet.
I opened up my browser and began my search, nay my quest, for information. According to a number of web-sites I visited, aspartame can be responsible for a multitude of medical conditions like death, but more important than that, memory loss. Memory loss! The source of my problems had been found. Now you may be asking yourself, how can a can of pop turn someone into an idiot? Well the key element in my “ailment” was quantity. In 2008, I drank pop roughly four times a week. Not just little twelve ounce cans though, I was drinking 44 ounce cups of Diet Pepsi (available for 98 cents at your local Burlington Express). Now four 44 ounce sodas a week, for 52 weeks a year comes out to over 9,000 ounces of soda per year! My soda intake has been consistently similar to that of 2008 for the past three years. That means in the past three years I have consumed almost 27,500 ounces of Diet Pepsi. Too much of a good thing really can be a bad thing.
So the course of action I needed to pursue was obvious to me, I had to quit the stuff. No more aspartame for me. So as my New Year’s resolution, I have forsaken the sweet elixir that brought me up, Diet Pepsi. I have had a few relapses since then, but overall I have held strong. I have not yet noticed any increase in my ability to remember, but I will continue to abstain from soda until enough i achieve the desired results or prove that they cannot be obtained.
Now this is in no way a condemnation of Diet Pepsi as a whole. I would hate to think that I, in any way, forced someone to completely remove Diet Pepsi from his life. However, I do urge you to do like me and to examine the amount of aspartame you ingest, and the possible effects you may be suffering because of it.