New research from Florida State University has shown that aspartame may induce anxiety based on evidence in mice.
Aspartame
This artificial sweetener is a popular one. You can find it in thousands of foods and drinks being sold to humans around the world.
Aspartame was found to not only produce anxiety-like behavior in mice. Its effects were also observed to cut across generations.
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“What this study is showing is we need to look back at the environmental factors because what we see today is not only what’s happening today,” explained Pradeep Bhide, study co-author and the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in FSU’s Department of Biomedical Sciences, “but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer.”
The results of the study were reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Consumption of aspartame
Aspartame, which has been described as a fortuitous invention, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a food additive in 1981.
Some people consider it a healthier substitute for table sugar in that it is a lot sweeter. This means less of it is used to achieve a level of sweetness, thereby reducing calorie intake.
The authors of this new study estimate that up to 5,000 metric tons of aspartame are produced globally every year. The sweetener is sold under diverse brand names, including NutraSweet and Equal, in America.
Aspartame is a part of a wide variety of food products, including diet foods and sodas. It becomes aspartic acid, methanol, and phenylalanine when ingested – all these substances strongly affect the central nervous system.
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The anxiety-like behavior that was observed in this study resulted from consuming only about 15 percent of the maximum daily human intake recommended by the FDA.
The team carried out this research partly because of previous work at Bhide’s lab on nicotine’s transgenerational effects in mice. Epigenetic or temporary changes in sperm cells had been observed.
Epigenetic changes do not alter DNA sequence and can be reversed, unlike genetic changes. They are capable of affecting DNA sequence reading by the body, however.
Link to anxiety
Mice were given drinking water that contained an amount of aspartame that is about the same as six to eight cans of diet soda (eight ounces each) daily for humans. The animals got this for 12 weeks in research extending across four years.
With a range of maze tests, the researchers observed evident anxiety-like behavior across generations of mice that descended from males that were given the sweetener.
“It was such a robust anxiety-like trait that I don’t think any of us were anticipating we would see,” said Sara Jones, a doctoral candidate who led the study. “It was completely unexpected. Usually, you see subtle changes.”
The research team also found that diazepam effectively improved anxiety symptoms. And like the behavior, this drug used for anxiety disorder in humans proved helpful across generations.
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Researchers will be looking to uncover the molecular mechanisms that enabled the extension of the sweetener’s effect across multiple generations.
The biomedical scientists in this research are also planning to publish another paper from this study on the effect of aspartame on memory.
