Aspartame

Aspartame is a synthetic chemical sweetener created by Monsanto. It is not a food-derived compound in any functionally meaningful sense. It tastes sweet but operates as a poison in biological systems. Aajonus noted that it was pushed through the FDA despite extensive evidence of harm, and he named Dick Cheney as the political figure responsible for forcing its approval. He stated plainly that all of Monsanto's own examination of the compound proved it was harmful, and the FDA approved it regardless.

The compound is found in diet sodas, in processed foods of nearly every category, and in products marketed as health-supporting or weight-reducing. Aajonus treated its ubiquity as a deliberate result of regulatory capture rather than any oversight. He described the FDA's approval of aspartame as emblematic of the agency's structural corruption: the last eleven or twelve individuals who headed the FDA each moved directly into CEO or executive positions at pharmaceutical companies or chemical corporations, creating an institutional incentive to approve harmful compounds.

Aspartame circulates in commercial food products under at least eleven and in some sources thirteen different names. Aajonus emphasized this as an intentional strategy to prevent consumers from identifying the substance on ingredient labels. He described these alternative names as "friendly names," noting they often invoke natural-sounding language such as "sugar supplement" or "maple syrup supplement" rather than any chemical designation. Because of this labeling practice, a person trying to avoid aspartame by reading ingredient lists may encounter it repeatedly without recognizing what they are consuming.

Sweet and Low was named by Aajonus as one of the commercial presentations of aspartame. He treated the full range of artificial sweeteners as sharing the same basic character: inorganic chemicals, debris compounds that create toxins and damage health, with no biological value.

Aajonus cited specific figures from animal testing on aspartame. In approximately 32 percent of animals tested, aspartame created kidney cancer or bladder cancer. In approximately 33 percent of animals, it produced bladder cancer and brain tumors. He described this as documented in the scientific and industry literature and accessible to anyone willing to research it. He framed this data as having been known before approval and suppressed rather than acted upon.

In human populations, Aajonus described aspartame as causing a wide range of conditions including diabetes, seizures, multiple sclerosis-like neurological symptoms, fatigue, drying of nerves, loss of neurological function, and cell mutation. He specifically noted that a large number of women, which he estimated at hundreds of thousands, were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and treated with pharmaceutical and chemical medical protocols when what they actually had was an allergic or toxic reaction to aspartame. He referenced a documentary called "Sweet Remedy" made by a woman who was herself one of these cases. She suffered for approximately six or seven years with symptoms attributed to MS before identifying aspartame as the cause. When she stopped consuming it, her symptoms disappeared. Aajonus cited interviews in the documentary with doctors who treated these women, as well as with former FDA employees who attempted to block aspartame's approval from inside the agency.

He used this case pattern to make a broader point: a single chemical compound in the body can produce complete systemic havoc, and with aspartame this is not an isolated phenomenon but a pattern occurring across too many people to dismiss.

Aajonus traced the approval of aspartame through a specific political and financial history. He identified Dick Cheney as the person who pushed it through the FDA, describing the compound as "Dick Cheney's little chemical" in multiple seminar contexts. The approval occurred despite internal FDA resistance: Aajonus noted that people working within the FDA at the time of the approval were actively fighting to prevent it.

He described the FDA's institutional structure as fundamentally incompatible with public health protection. The revolving door between FDA leadership and chemical or pharmaceutical corporations meant that approval decisions served corporate profitability rather than safety. Aajonus stated that Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola both knew aspartame was harmful and knew what the test results showed before they incorporated it into their products. He treated the soft drink industry's later removal of aspartame from some products as an admission of guilt without accountability: "Why did you have it in the first place when you knew it was bad?"

He also noted that the FDA's priorities were visibly inverted: the agency spent significant resources fighting raw milk and eliminating raw juices from health food stores, requiring pasteurization, while simultaneously approving aspartame and related chemical sweeteners for mass food distribution.

Aajonus described a personal episode involving aspartame that he recounted across multiple seminars. In approximately 1993, he was hired to act in a commercial for a product he called NutraSleep (a sugar substitute in the NutraSure product line), at which point he was 47 years old but reportedly appeared to be in his early 30s. The commercial's concept involved a couple celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary by having a second wedding ceremony. He was cast because of his younger appearance.

Knowing what aspartame was, Aajonus deliberately created conditions that caused the commercial to be prohibitively expensive to run, through actions he took on set that forced repeated expensive shooting scenarios. As a result, the commercial ran for only six weeks before the cost of continuing became untenable. He stated that he was paid well for the work but that the expense he created for the production company was intentional and that he had no regrets, describing aspartame as "a poison, a dangerous poison."

Aajonus described aspartame as effectively the dominant commercial sweetener in all processed food. He stated it is "in everything" and called it "the main sweetener on every food on this planet that's processed." Diet sodas were a primary vehicle, and he noted that virtually all sodas contained it, with some brands later advertising its removal as a virtue while having poisoned consumers with it for years.

He also described the broader category of processed food as a delivery system for multiple chemical harms simultaneously. He noted that a cereal made with GMO ingredients and containing aspartame along with approximately sixty other chemical varieties would produce severe toxicity requiring substantially more raw nutrients to counteract than, for instance, a small portion of cooked rice eaten alongside a largely raw diet. This framing placed aspartame within a larger argument about the cumulative chemical burden in packaged and manufactured food.

Aajonus treated aspartame as the primary example of the artificial sweetener category but extended his condemnation to the full class. He stated that there are "other sweeteners which are just as bad," referring to compounds like Sucralose, and described them collectively as poisonous. His categorization in "We Want to Live" placed all sugar substitutes under a single designation: inorganic chemicals, debris that creates toxins and damages health. He was explicit that unheated honey and raw fruits are the only sweeteners that promote better health and drew a hard line between those and everything in the processed or synthetic sweetener category.

He also addressed maple syrup and date sugar as heated sweeteners that, while not in the same category as aspartame, are nonetheless processed at high temperatures. Maple syrup is heated to approximately 270 to 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Date sugar involves steaming dates to crystalize them. These compounds interfere with digestion and glandular and nerve health, though Aajonus did not describe them as acutely toxic in the same way he described aspartame. Table sugars and refined sucrose, processed from sugar cane or sugar beets at temperatures around 320 degrees Fahrenheit, were described as damaging to digestion and glandular and nerve function without the specific disease profiles he attributed to aspartame.

When asked directly about stevia as a sweetener in an early training session, Aajonus responded simply "No," indicating he had no knowledge of it at that time or no position on it. He did not develop a detailed position on stevia in the available source passages. The questioner described it as an herb sweeter than sugar that does not affect blood sugar, which was offered as something a diabetic could use. Aajonus did not affirm or expand on this.

Aajonus described aspartame not only as toxic but as addictive, using the phrase "addictive poison that mutates cells, damages genes, causes all kinds of problems" when describing its function in diet sodas. He contextualized this within the corporate strategy of soft drink manufacturers who, in his account, deliberately engineer chemical dependency through the compounds in their products. The goal as he described it is to maximize consumption through addiction rather than to nourish or satisfy the consumer's actual physiological needs. He described attendance at a corporate meeting through a friend fluent in eight Asian languages, at which a Coca-Cola marketing executive threw a bottle of vegetable juice against a wall because it was brought into the building, declaring that only Coca-Cola was consumed there. He used this anecdote to characterize how these corporations think about their products and their consumers.