Aspartame patent reveals E. coli feces used The European patent for aspartame is now available online, and it confirms the artificial sweetener is made from the waste products of genetically modified E. coli bacteria. … They are modified to produce an especially large peptide used to create aspartame.

The Annals of Oncology in 2004 noted that more than 50 studies had been published looking at saccharin in rats. Twenty of these were “one generation” studies, meaning that they did not look at the rats’ offspring. In only one of those studies did huge amounts of saccharin produce cancer, and it was in a type of rat that is frequently infected with a bladder parasite that would leave it susceptible to saccharin-induced bladder cancer.

But “two-generation studies,” in which rats were fed lots of saccharin and their offspring were, too, found that bladder cancer was significantly more common in second-generation rats. That prompted many countries to act.

Instead, they noted that the paper stated that (1) brain cancer had become more common from 1975 to 1992 and (2) that more people had started consuming aspartame recently.

A study following people for an average of more than 14 years published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine found that those in the highest quintile of added sugar consumption had more than twice the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those in the lowest quintile, even after controlling for many other factors.

The accompanying editorial noted that the increased risk of death began once a person consumed the equivalent of one 20-ounce Mountain Dew in a 2,000-calorie diet, and reached more than a fourfold increase if people consumed more than one-third of their diet in added sugars.

Escherichia coli (/ˌɛʃəˈrɪkiə ˈkoʊlaɪ/),^[1][2] also known as E. coli (/ˌiː ˈkoʊlaɪ/),^[3] is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus Escherichia that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms (endotherms).^[4][5] Most E. coli strains are harmless, but some serotypes can cause serious food poisoning in their hosts, and are occasionally responsible for product recalls due to food contamination.^[6][7] The harmless strains are part of the normal microbiota of the gut, and can benefit their hosts by producing vitamin K₂,^[8] and preventing colonization of the intestine with pathogenic bacteria, having a symbiotic relationship.^[9][10] E. coli is expelled into the environment within fecal matter. The bacterium grows massively in fresh fecal matter under aerobic conditions for 3 days, but its numbers decline slowly afterwards.^[11]

E. coli and other facultative anaerobes constitute about 0.1% of gut microbiota,^[12] and fecal–oral transmission is the major route through which pathogenic strains of the bacterium cause disease. Cells are able to survive outside the body for a limited amount of time, which makes them potential indicator organisms to test environmental samples for fecal contamination.^[13][14] A growing body of research, though, has examined environmentally persistent E. coli which can survive for extended periods outside a host.^[15]

The bacterium can be grown and cultured easily and inexpensively in a laboratory setting, and has been intensively investigated for over 60 years. E. coli is a chemoheterotroph whose chemically defined medium must include a source of carbon and energy.^[16] E. coli is the most widely studied prokaryotic model organism, and an important species in the fields of biotechnology and microbiology, where it has served as the host organism for the majority of work with recombinant DNA. Under favorable conditions, it takes up to 20 minutes to reproduce.^[17]