Artificial sweetener aspartame linked to anxiety

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Aspartame is used as an ingredient in over 5,000 diet foods and beverages. Now, new research from Florida State University reports the artificial sweetener may be linked to a greater anxiety risk, an animal study concludes.

Mice exposed to aspartame exhibited anxious behavior. Notably, the anxious effects of aspartame on tested rodents extended up to two generations from the original males exposed to the sweetener.

“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, but what happened two generations ago and maybe even longer,” says study co-author Pradeep Bhide, the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair of Developmental Neuroscience in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, in a university release.

This work was conducted, in part, thanks to previous research at the Bhide Lab focusing on the transgenerational effects of nicotine on mice. Those earlier projects indicated temporary, or epigenetic, changes in mice sperm cells. In contrast to genetic changes (mutations), epigenetic changes are reversible and don’t change the DNA sequence. Still, they can change how a body reads DNA sequences.