On the opening day Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan on April 15, the New York Times reported, “Even as a judge was hearing arguments on last-minute issues in a criminal case that centers on salacious allegations and threatens to upend his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest.” Since then, the various news outlets have kept track of Trump’s afternoon naps, even when his attorneys were passing him notes, and, in one report, had to be shaken awake. The behavior is that of the presumptive presidential candidate who refers to his opponent as “Sleepy Joe.”
Mark Caputo, a political reporter, wrote in X (formerly known as Twitter), “Unable to speak when he wants and lacking a steady stream of Diet Coke, his favorite drink that is served to him constantly by staff at Mar-a-Lago, a decaffeinated Trump is now on Sleep Watch by the nation’s media in court.”
As long as six years ago, the New York Times reported, Trump was known to drink 12 cans of Diet Coke a day. The reporters fixated on the fact that Diet Coke contains caffeine, the stimulant in coffee and tea, and without the caffeine Trump would doze off. More significantly though, Diet Coke is sweetened with aspartame [N-(L-α-Aspartyl)-L-phenylalanine, 1-methyl ester]. That’s an artificial sweetener. For the record, President Biden is said to drink Gatorade Orange, the original, with sugar — in fact, two kinds of sugar, sucrose and dextrose.
Sugar is a class of chemical compound with the general formula Cn(H2O)n, where n is usually three or more molecules. This formula reflects the fact that sugars are made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a ratio of one carbon atom to every n water molecules. On the other, aspartame, a commonly used artificial sweetener, has the formula C14H18N2O5. In this formula, N stands for nitrogen, and there’s none in sugar. That makes a difference in the way the body responds to the intake of the nitrogen-bearing compound. Aspartame, sold under the brand names Equal and Nutra Sweet, isn’t fattening as sugar would have been, but regular ingestion of aspartame has hardly kept Trump lean.
In 2017, the journal Stroke published a study, “ Sugar- and Artificially Sweetened Beverages and the Risks of Incident Stroke and Dementia,” which reported that sugar-sweetened beverages were not associated with stroke or dementia, but higher recent and higher cumulative intake of artificially sweetened soft drinks were associated with an increased risk of ischemic stroke, all-cause dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Considering the significance of the conclusions in terms of the American diet, the results, while dramatic, were not conclusive that artificial sweeteners really caused dementia. With a population of about 341 million people, the sample size of 2,888 people represents approximately 0.0008% of the US population, and the number of people who developed dementia, 63 people with Alzheimer’s Dementia, is not large enough to prove anything.
There’s a phrase “Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc,” which translates to “With this, therefore because of this,” or “correlation does not prove causation.” There may be other things that the study missed, and it calls for more study to find out.
A 2023 report from the World Health Organization warned that consuming sugar substitutes for a long period of time correlated with an increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, several cardiovascular diseases—including stroke—and death from any cause. However, the study published in Stroke did mention dementia, with the most common form dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Notably, 70% of dementia cases are of this type. Further, a report in Scientific Reports (August 2023) using rat studies, found that aspartame taken in moderation “for up to 16-weeks at doses equivalent to only 7–15% of the FDA recommended maximum daily intake value (equivalent to 2–4 small, 8 oz diet soda drinks per day) produces significant spatial learning and memory deficits in mice.
Moreover, the cognitive deficits are transmitted to male and female descendants along the paternal lineage, suggesting that aspartame’s adverse cognitive effects are heritable, and that they are more pervasive than current estimates, which consider effects in the directly exposed individuals only.
Consider the quantity of aspartame ingested by Trump, and the symptoms of Alzheimers, which include a gradual decline in memory, thinking, behavior and social skills, which have been noted in Trump. Further, Trump’s father had Alzheimer’s Dementia, which is consistent with the 2023 report. There is strong concern that Trump inherited the condition. It is important to note that this is a strong possibility and should be noted in the campaign literature.
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sam.uretsky@gmail.com
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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