dca

my name is tigger and i am a diet coke addict. i need help! we have no food or drinks in the house right now because someone hasn't made it to the grocery store. while punkin was getting ready for her summer camp, i was literally rearranging the pantry looking for a stray soda of any kind. i really wanted diet coke, but at that point, i would have drank anything fizzy and bad for me. i totally felt like a crack addict digging around in the carpet looking for stray pieces of rock.

i dropped punkin off and immediately went to the convenience store for a fountain diet coke. i saw that they have a new "regular coke" that is sugar free, but after looking at the label, i don't know how it differs from diet coke. it has aspartame in it, which is what i assume gives diet coke its famous aftertaste. i have tried diet coke with splenda and i think its aftertaste is completely nasty. they better not be planning to take away my diet coke!

i am reading more and more about the whole aspartame debate. the pro side says that the research that has been done is inadequate and does not prove that it is carcinogenic. the no side says that it can cause brain tumors, multiple sclerosis-like symptoms and turns into formaldehyde in your body. that leaves me wondering just how much aspartame one has to consume to be affected by these adverse consequences.

i have a friend who is a chemist and she told me once about the whole "aspartame has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats" research. apparently, if you gave a rat the equivalent amount of sugar, it would skip the whole cancer thing and just die. i hate statistics. companies can skew the results in so many ways that i don't know what to believe. i know i should be eating only organic things, but who has the time or the money to be able to do that?

anyway, i guess i am not "anonymous" anymore. but if anyone would like to join the meeting, just come on up to the podium. you know the drill.