Aspartame in Sipahh Milk Flavoring Straws? Believe It!

Here comes another product in the market fraudulently claiming to be healthy and good for kids. The advertisements shown around Metro Manila pictures a caucasian kid sipping milk with Sipahh, a milk flavoring straw that comes in four flavors, chocolate, strawberry, banana, and cookies and cream.

Sipahh is supposed to encourage and promote drinking milk in kids but a closer look at its ingredients would show that it is not for kids because aside from a host of chemical-sounding components, it has the very controversial aspartame, the sweetener sold under the brand names of Equal and Nutra-Sweet, and usually found in diet sodas.

The safety of aspartame has been questioned for years but it was only recently that those doubts were confirmed by a study conducted by Dr. Morando Soffrite, a cancer researcher in Bologna, Italy. After a 7-year study on aspartame, his team found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias, and other cancers in rats that have been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to five 20-ounce bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit organization that studies cancer-causing substances; Dr. Soffritti is its scientific director.(Warner, Melanie. Feb. 12, 2006. The Lowdown on Sweet. The New York Times.Retrieved June 3, 2009 from NYTimes.com)

The study, obviously, is being strongly opposed by the producers of aspartame which if confirmed by the US Food and Drugs Authority would mean a loss of earnings of around US$570 million annually.

Last year, i admit guilt in buying a pack for my kids. It was a good thing when i got home, i checked the ingredients and i saw the word "aspartame" jumping right at me. That really irked me as it again showed the deceit employed by manufacturing companies. How can a product intended for kids contain aspartame? If we allow our kids to use Sipahh, it is as if we allow our children to drink diet sodas. The website of Sipahh claims it is healthy and has no preservatives. What do they think of aspartame? The fraud and deceit the manufacturer of Sipahh employs at the expense of our children is something i can no longer fathom. This company has traded their values for a worthless piece of straw that does nothing than make milk taste like medicine.