Reacción a "Aspartame sweetener affects cardiovascular health of animals"

I have several concerns about this study. The authors claim that the consumption of Aspartame by adults and children "often exceeds those levels recommended by the FDA". This is extremely unlikely in my view. The FDA-acceptable daily intake of Aspartame is 50 mg per kg of body weight per day. I weigh 80 kg, so this means this means the FDA-based safe dose for me is 4000 mg (or 4 grams) of Aspartame per day, every day, for life. Given a diet drink contains about 200 mg of Aspartame, I would have to drink the equivalent of 20 cans of diet soda a day to get this dose. A child of 40 kg would have to drink 10 cans a day, every day. Even then, the 50 mg/kg dose has a safety factor of 100 built-in. 

The study design also has some issues. The main one is that the authors used a particular type of lab mouse called an ApoE mouse, which is bred to be prone to heart disease. They also fed it a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet, which itself increases the risk of heart disease. They also don’t seem to have measured how much of the Aspartame water the mice drank, or the Aspartame level in the blood, so it is unknown what the mice actually received. 

To my mind, the author's admission that feeding mice that are already genetically susceptible to heart disease with a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet that is known to cause heart disease "diminishes clinical relevance" is somewhat of an understatement. We certainly can’t extrapolate these results to humans.

Contrary to the paper's claims, it is quite well-established that Aspartame doesn't stimulate glucose or insulin levels in humans.

Aspartame is, essentially, just two common amino acids (aspartic acid and phenylalanine) joined together. In the gut, it is broken down to aspartic acid and phenylalanine. There is no reason to think amino acids from Aspartame would be worse than those from any other source. 

The authors would appear to think little work has been done on safety testing in Aspartame; this is just not true. All food ingredients are rigorously tested and safety assessed before they are approved for use. Aspartame is one of the most researched ingredients in the world. It is just that a lot of the data is in safety assessments for regulatory approval, not the academic literature. 

Finally, even if Aspartame did cause some increase in cardiovascular risk (which this study does not prove), then that risk would likely be very small compared to things like high fat/high sugar diets and lack of exercise, etc.

In short, I don’t think you have to give up your diet Coke just yet.