Aspartamania.

• Author: Garza, Mariel
• Position: Aspartame hoax in the Internet

A spartame - the artificial sweetener used in products such as NutraSweet and Equal - is wreaking havoc on the health of America. If you didn't realize it, don't feel too bad. I didn't either, until some concerned friends and relatives forwarded me a pseudo-scientific, faintly official-sounding e-mail message warning that the stuff is causing health problems ranging from dizziness to death.

Among other maladies, the widely posted missive blames the sweetener for killing diabetics in droves and causing epidemics of multiple sclerosis and lupus. The message also implicates the sweetener in Gulf War Syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, vertigo, depression, memory loss, and tinnitus. But what really makes readers pay attention is a far more terrifying claim: Aspartame makes people fat by causing an insatiable craving for carbohydrates.

Before you toss that case of Diet Coke, though, there's one more thing you should know: The aspartame letter is a cybermyth, the electronic age's answer to an urban legend. As with the Internet-spread tales of rogue doctors gutting business travelers for their organs and the "official" memo implicating the U.S. military in a 1996 TWA airplane crash, its claims have been thoroughly debunked. And yet, the message was so widely read and its claims so potentially scandalous that NutraSweet's manufacturer, Monsanto, and various health groups responded both in cyberspace and on paper. The American Diabetes Association issued a statement that the sweetener...