In The Words of Dr. Phil, "What the hell were you thinking?"

In a follow-up to three of my last four posts, I found this information and thought that we should all be aware of it.

Aspartame is back in Diet Pepsi! It’s one of the oddest exclamations to come out of the food and beverage industry in a while. Yes, a little over a year after the soda giant announced that it was reformulating Diet Pepsi to get rid of aspartame, the company is bringing the controversial sweetener back.

In April 2015, PepsiCo Vice President Seth Kaufman said, “Aspartame is the No. 1 reason consumers are dropping diet soda.” At the time, the company maintained that it was bowing to overwhelming customer demand by switching from aspartame to sucralose, known better by the brand name Splenda.

Yet sales of Diet Pepsi continued to nose-dive. So Pepsi has decided to have it both ways, kind of like Coke did back in the 1980s when it infamously tried out New Coke—only to be forced to bring back the original recipe after one of the biggest product flops of all time.

Diet Pepsi, made with sucralose, will continue to be sold in silver cans marked “aspartame-free,” while its aspartame-laced sister soda will come in light-blue cans euphemistically labeled “blend classic sweetener.” That kind of seems like hawking MSG as a “classic” flavor enhancer. Let it be known that sucralose, like all artificial sweeteners DOES NOT break down in the human body like sugars do.

The return of aspartame may make die-hard Diet Pepsi fans who just couldn’t stomach the new taste, happy but it does nothing to ease concerns about the possible health effects of a long-term diet soda habit. As with so many suspect food additives, aspartame has been the focus of a tug-of-war between industry and federal regulators—who say there’s plenty of science to support their assertions that the artificial sweetener is safe—and public health advocates, who maintain that a lot of that science is funded by industry and that independent studies have linked aspartame to certain types of cancer.

Beyond that, there’s the larger question of whether regular consumption of diet soda, no matter what brand, has a counterintuitive effect. That is, does drinking diet soda cause people to gain rather than lose weight? A growing body of scientific evidence has supported the phenomenon, although researchers have generally been at a loss to explain it. While some scientists have argued that consuming zero-calorie beverages has the psychological effect of encouraging people to eat more – for example, “I’m having a diet soda, so I’ll get a larger order of fries”—others have put forward a more physiological explanation. One possibility is that artificial sweeteners may interfere with our brain chemistry to cause us to crave more sugar or that they might alter our gut bacteria to make us more susceptible to glucose intolerance.

All in all, it’s enough to give an ominous ring to aspartame’s much touted return. As far as THIS writer is concerned, there is NO reason to ingest a chemical mix that has no nutritive value, very little in its favor for pros and a whole lot of cons. Try Stevia or honey.