Hi Jaqui,
my story is try much akin to Helens re: diet etcetera. There was a sugar shortage back in the late seventies and many people switched to sweeteners which caused a massive demand and supply from companies. Many of them were terrible, with very bitter aftertastes but one or two, Canderel I recall as being amongst the best, produced both tablet and sugar-like jars of granules, which proved very popular and very sugar-like… all in all a very good substitute if still a good way off the real thing.
We used the Canderel products for a year or so but eased of graduakk==lly because it was a very expensive product. By the time sugar was back full time we had reached the stage where we didn't use anything in our hot drinks and sparingly on foods. We have stayed that way eer since. Janet uses sugar in her baking and cooking but neither of us use sugar in drinks or on cereal ecetera. I had one spoon of sugar in a milky coffee a couple of weeks back and it tasted awful to my pallet … a lesson learned there.
IMHO I doubt that aspartame is responsible for MM… or any other individual food or drink product for that. I have been anaemic since birth which has included hospital stays during my childhood and many consults in my adulthood, culminating in the discovery of a rogue gene handed down from my mother's Romany relations who moved to the UK in 1900. My Grandmother died shortly after my Mother's birth due to blood loss and a low immune system that did not help her picking up pneumonia… who knows, she might have developed MM… but my consultant has told me quite categorically that my anaemia and my MM are two disparate and separate diseases and my MM is just the bad luck of the draw. She says that almost all MMers are the same, just the bad luck of the draw with no rhyme and no reason… just a gene that is in most of us that has, for whatever reason, been irritated into life… and once alive there is no going back.:-(
This is my conclusion also. But there can be a long, long time, improving rapidly where MM is changing its status from terminal to chronic… with a ten year expectancy for most new MMers… coming soon, to a place near you.8-)
Dai.
