Chugging a Diet Coke or two every day could cause you to have a heart attack, stroke, or other major heart event, suggests new research recently presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles. A team from the University of Miami (UM) Miller School of Medicine found that people who regularly drink diet sodas are 61 percent more likely than others to have a major heart event.

Hannah Gardener, an epidemiologist from UM and lead author of the study, and her colleagues, surveyed more than 2,500 Manhattan residents on their eating and lifestyle habits. They also evaluated participants’ health, including their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and made comparisons. After taking into account all relevant factors, the team found that diet sodas in particular are linked to heart illness.

Drinkers of regular soda, on the other hand, did not demonstrate an increased risk of heart events in the study, illustrating that something specifically unique to diet sodas was the culprit. And a simple, common sense analysis indicates that the only major difference between diet soda and regular soda is the use of artificial sweetener additives like aspartame.

But researchers went out of their way to say they were unsure which ingredient(s) might be the culprit. Besides suggesting that perhaps other outside factors are involved, which is a typical cop-out conclusion made in many studies, not one suggestion was made to even hint that aspartame just might be the cause of increased heart events.

Humorously, when addressing the possible causative factors in diet soda, the researchers actually suggested that caramel color, another popular ingredient added to sodas to give them a brown color, might be the cause. Such a statement is surprising coming from allegedly educated scientists, though, because caramel color is also added to regular sodas. And if regular sodas did not demonstrate the same increased risks, then caramel color is not the additive in question in this case.

No matter how much the establishment tries to dance around the issue, aspartame, as well as sucralose, saccharin, neotame, and the other artificial additives used in foods, are harmful to health. Aspartame in particular, which is made using a genetically-modified (GM) enzyme, is linked to premature birth, kidney disease, organ lesions, nerve damage, cancer, and premature death (http://www.naturalnews.com/027491_a…).

Sources for this story include:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4147986…