Captain Ed recently dissected a poorly considered New York Times' editorial concerning what a tolerable level of aspartame (aka Nutrasweet) consumption might be. We here at Political Calculations(TM) aren't going to enter into the debate over the scientific merits, or the potential lack thereof, in the study driving the New York Times editorial board's hysteria, but we will put together a tool to help you figure out just how much Nutrasweet might be at stake for you!
All you need to do is to enter your personal data in the table below and we'll figure out how many typical cans of diet soda (roughly 225 mg per 12-oz can) you could consume, or how many of those packets of Nutrasweet (assuming 45 mg per packet) you might "safely" go through in the course of a day.
But that's not all! Because we just have this feeling that the daily amount of aspartame (in milligrams) per unit of body weight (in pounds) that defines the "healthy" limit that an individual might consume might be bouncing around quite a bit, we've made this figure one you can enter into the calculations. We've plugged in the new "proposed" healthy limit, but you should know that the current maximum intake recommendation is 50 mg for every 2.2 lbs (or 1 kg) of body weight per day.
Had enough explaining? Here's the tool!
Ain't math fun?!