In his first 100 days the President of the United States has made so many bizarre comments that the news media are running stories on it, mental health professionals have broken the Goldwater Rule to offer their opinions and ordinary people are left scratching our heads.
Donald Trump is the 13th President in my lifetime and I have never seen anything like this. (Granted, I don’t remember anything about Truman and very little about Eisenhower.)
Three Warning Signs
Recently we learned three things that appear to be disconnected but maybe have more bearing on this issue—and with one another—than we realize.
- President Donald Trump thinks that President Andrew Jackson was “really angry” about the Civil War even though the seventh president died 16 years before the conflict began. This follows on statements that implied he thought Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895) was alive today and he didn’t realize President Lincoln was a Republican..
Pundits, critics and comedians have attributed his ignorance of history to, well, ignorance of history. But wait, there’s more. - Just a few days ago we heard that our current POTUS uses the steward button on his desk to get regular deliveries of Diet Coke in the Oval Office.
- Last week the Framingham Heart Study linked aspartame with dementia and stroke.
Aspartame Intake
I have not been able to find out how many Diet Cokes a day the president drinks but each one contains 180 mg of aspartame.
Say he has one an hour for eight hours—a reasonable intake for a busy man who talks to many people during the day. That equates to 1,440 mgs of aspartame a day. If he drinks more than eight Diet Cokes a day, his aspartame consumption would, of course, go up.
And he didn’t start this habit when he entered the White House. His aides say Pres. Trump drank a lot of Diet Coke when on the campaign trail.
What’s a Safe Quantity?
In several previous posts I have discussed the fact that aspartame has multiple adverse impacts on the human body. So how much aspartame is safe to drink?
As Lynn Stratton describes in her well-documented article, “The Spin on Aspartame,” (Healthy Holistic Living), you have to follow the money. These “experts” are usually funded by the same industries on which they are supposed to be reporting objectively. Their organizations have titles that make them sound independent but the money behind them comes from sources tainted by direct financial interests.
After having read about aspartame’s impact on the human metabolism, however, I think that no amount of this artificial sweetener is safe to drink. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bubkes.
Diet Soda Makes You Fat
And here’s another thing. We’ve all seen the photos of Donald Trump playing golf and powering his drive with a really big butt. Aspartame—with its consumer names of NutraSweet and Equal—is supposed to help you lose weight.
It doesn’t work that way, however: aspartame actually makes you fatter. Dr. Mercola details exactly how in his article, “This is How Aspartame Causes Obsesity.” In brief, aspartame blocks alkaline phosphatase (IAP), a gut enzyme that can prevent obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
Ironically, Donald Trump himself noted this in a famous 2012 tweet that said, “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.”
Reinforcing the Risk from Diet Coke
So we have a 70-year-old man, who is under-exercised, overweight and getting visibly more so. Every day he drinks a toxic substance that is linked to dementia and strokes.
There has been wide speculation in a variety of places about Mr. Trump’s possible dementia. At least one person has attributed it to “early onset “Alzheimer’s Disease.” I’m not sure that 70 can be considered “early onset,” though as Alzheimer’s typically affects people 65 and older..Keep in mind that Mr. Trump’s father, Fred Trump, also had Alzheimer’s. That increases the risk for POTUS.
Physical and Psychological Effects
Physically, aspartame changes the ratio of amino acids in the blood, blocking or lowering the levels of serotonin, tyrosine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and adrenaline.
Dementia and stroke are just two of the 92 effects that have been attributed to aspartame. Other psychological/psychiatric effects include:
- Severe depression
- Irritability – Mr. Trump has demonstrated this on numerous occasions, most recently with a reporter in the Oval Office.
- Aggression – He has already bombed Syria and threatened to start a war with North Korea.
- Anxiety – Mr. Trump is famously anxious about the validity of his election.
- Personality changes
- Insomnia — Trump reportedly sleeps only a few hours each night (as his early morning Tweets attest)
- Phobias – “I’m something of a germophobe.”
More Bizarre Comments
Mr. Trump’s Diet Coke habit may explain some of the more bizarre comments he has made lately. As I write this, he has Tweeted that he thinks the country needs “a good shutdown” to fix the fact that he can’t get a health care bill through Congress. As if there were no greater impact to shutting down the government than teaching Congress a lesson.
I expect to hear more of them.
Do you think POTUS’s Diet Coke habit is good or bad? That probably depends i part on whether you support him or resist him. Does his consumption of aspartame in Diet Coke have any impact on the President’s fact-free, unsubstantiated and sometimes reckless or irrational comments? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV.
But I think it’s worth consideration.