Chris Hardie's Weblog

I've had a bad case of unusually persistent headaches lately, and when I experience health problems I usually try to identify simple potential causes and solutions before I go get all up inside the conventional healthcare system. Some call this holistic health, I just call it common sense and listening to the marvelous self-diagnosing machine that is the human body. Am I particularly stressed out or upset about something? Have I been getting enough exercise? Is my cuisine all screwed up? And so on. I was talking to someone today who practices craniosacral therapy and she did a good job of reminding me how many ridiculously toxic, but FDA approved, headache-causing substances there are out there in the food we buy.

I caught her mention of aspartame as a common one and started doing a little research. While I tend to avoid looking up medical information on the Internet after previously embarrassing experiences doing so, I found lots of connections mentioned between headaches and aspartame. Who would have thought that ingesting formaldehyde would have negative health effects? Huh! Thanks, Monsanto! I took a brief skim of my pantry and found three products at the front of the shelf with aspartame and related substances like sucralose / Splenda, listed as an ingredient, both of which I've consumed lately - they're now in the trash. Yeah, I know - we can't just start throwing away everything that's bad for us to any degree. But I figure that if a given edible substance has to have dueling propaganda websites and panels of experts to talk about whether or not it REALLY causes brain tumors, I can probably live without it to be on the safe side.

Perhaps I can ONLY live without it.