Asymmetrical Information

This sounds really trite, but could it be hormonal? If I get a PMS like bout, eggs taste awful to me. The rest of the time I like them just fine. My mother had the same reaction during pregnancy. I have discovered that metalic aftertastes are more prevalent at those times too, though not to the extent you are experiencing.

My taste weirdnesses vary wildly as opposed to a steady monthly occurrence. Coincidentally they also occur those few times I get really emotional. I expect stress gives me an extra hormone jolt that triggers both.

Hmmm. Well, if I had to guess, I'd guess pregnancy ;)

Debbie--I suppose it could be; us gals are just chock full of hormones, aren't we?

So if that's it, how long does it usually last? I had to buy new toothpaste this morning, and I miss my lemony fresh breath . . .

I'm the same way you are, so not a good person to find a harmless explanation. I think I've experienced this too, but never consistently. Some days I just notice the aftertaste is particularly bad and longer lasting. I've always chalked it up to just getting sick of diet soda. Is it all diet sodas? I've generally found diet root beers to have less aftertaste than most other diets. Also, sucralose based diet drinks don't have quite the nasty aftertaste of aspartame beverages.

Classic first symptom of a goiter. Ok, I'm kidding. Cameron said I needed to work on being funny with patients.

Could it be the new toothpaste? Does the new toothpaste reflect a new committment to good dental hygiene? Are you brushing more often? Many things taste horrible after brushing -- especially diet sodas -- yuck, just talking about it . . ick.

If you are brushing more often, you may just be experiencing this for the first time, depending on your drinking habits.

Do you know how many chemicals are in diet soda? Plus, the soda companies distill the water and remove most of the minerals which a body needs. Switch to a baking soda for brushing, rinse well, drink plenty of water, and . . . sorry this really just doesn't interest me. I'll send Foreman and Chase to inspect your apartment, leave the key under the mat, and Cameron will call you with the results.

Taking any new medications? Exposed to lots of smoke? Catch a cold? All are common culprits for this kind of thing.

If change in taste sensation is a sign of problems the change would probably be much more pervasive rather than just toothpaste & diet soda. But from a distance it's easy to say don't worry about it.

BTW, fasciculations may sound awful but aren't. They are spontaneous (and painless) muscle twitches. The catch is that, in the right setting, fasciculations are a sign of ALS which is absolutely awful.

I too was thinking the change in toothpaste may be to blame, even though you like the toothpaste itself.

I also thougth of pregnancy, but you would probably know if that were a possibility. I like to use a fair amount of black pepper on my food. When I was pregnant, I didn't have any food aversions like some women do, but black pepper tasted about 10 times as strong as normal.

Trust your body... ditch the aspartame. Ever notice how people only seem to be addicted to Diet (not reg.) soda?...it's not the caffeine, either. The stuff gives me an almost instant headache. A friend of mine just quit the stuff and said she had a few days of very real withdrawals.

Google aspartame... there is evidence of MS-like and other neurological symptoms, including depression. There was also this article in the NY Times 02/12/06: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12sweet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Maybe try flavored seltzer for a few weeks and see what happens...? Wishing you good health!

Actually, I had no idea that pregnancy caused taste changes . . . truly, we learn something new every day.

And, sliding quickly around the topic of Jane's sex life (this is a family blog), no, it's not the new toothpaste--I've had it for months. ("New" is a relative term in Jane world.) I just woke up a couple of days ago and discovered I can't stand the taste of artificial sweetener.

Hmm . . . I sometimes get spontaneous muscle twitches in my face and left hand, but I've had those for years, which sounds un-ALS-like. Or so I devoutly hope.

Regarding when my taste changes stop during the month:
It is usually about the middle of my period. Definitely gone by the time it stops altogether, but the difference is usually noticable a week before it starts.

I don't know how much help I'll be since I hate artificial sweetener tastes and always have. But I have noticed that sometimes if I notice something, I notice it again more and more strongly. So maybe it's more psychological? Since you're thinking about it more often, it seems like it's tasting stronger? Probably not, but it's all I'm coming up with.

Oh, and pregnancy does some really weird stuff to your tastebuds. I've never been the least bit picky, but early in my pregnancy I was getting sick to my stomach when Italian restaurants would garnish with parsley -- even if I just smelled it. I had to pick off all of the little chopped parsley bits to be able to eat it.

"Pregnancy" and "hormones" are more or less the same answer, except that the first is a specific reason for changes in the second. Based on what I read during my pregnancies, most of the problems women have in the first trimester of pregnancy are due to the changing hormones, which play havoc on theirs tastes and digestion until they've adjusted. The second trimester is much easier, because the body has adjusted to the new hormones. Then the third trimester gets hard because of the sheer physical size of the growing baby.

Hormonal changes during a normal cycle aren't as extreme but could still cause changing tastes and digestion.

As someone else mentioned, a cold could also do it. Or, if you've been having sinus problems for a while and they finally cleared up, that will change things also.

Speaking as someone who's been addicted to diet soda for at least 20 years, my guess is that your noticing new tastes is just a result of the change in the sort of soda you drink. Diet Coke used to be my favorite until about ten years ago, at which point - for reasons I do not recall - I began drinking Diet Pepsi more frequently. Now when I drink Diet Coke I notice a distinct "oily" taste/consistency that I never noticed when it was my drink of choice.

1) Don't believe the aspartame hype.

2) Could it be that you're just burned out on the flavor and now it's gross? Happens all the time, eat something too much for too long and you get sick of it, starts tasting bad.

Well, of course, it wasn't the toothpaste. That was, after all, my first guess, and my first guess is almost always wrong. Come on people!

This may be more interesting than I originally thought. Nah, probably not, but it's either this or regular clinic duty.

Following up on a couple other posters, have you resumed taking any medications recently for springtime allergies? I've definitely noticed a change in sensitivity to the taste of diet drinks when taking Claritin and Claritin D.

I don't really have much confidence in this diagnosis either -- it is afterall my second guess, which is ALWAYS wrong, and I was half asleep while typing it, but this is how I'm written and I have to go through the motions.

Seriously, though, that much diet ginger ale isn't healthy. You may have an addiction problem. (Or I may be projecting.)

It's a symptom of libertarianism. You are detecting the foul taste of government distortion in the diet ginger ale market ;)

Your body is telling to to EAT MORE SUGAR!
Not that corn syrup crap either, real frickin' cane sugar.

http://popsoda.com

I recommend Red Rock Premium Cola and Whooppee Boardwalk Cola. Coke fans will likely prefer the former while Pepsi fans the latter. Alas, real Coke and Pepsi imported from Mexico is hard to come by nowadays as those companies have inexplicably threatened to sue PopSoda.

It's probably nothing, unless it's a tumor.

(Kidding! We kid the hypochondriacs!)

I suspect the onset of normalcy. Aspartame (and all other artificial sweeteners) really DO taste bad.

Megan -- Doesn't it make you feel a little bit weak in the knees to have Dr. Gregory House commenting on your blog? He is the sexiest blue-eyed d***head in tv history.

At this point I think the most likely answers are: temporary hormonal changes or some sinus problem, also probably temporary. Let us know if it's improved in a couple days.

And then try to find some other excuse to invite Dr. House back. (Yes, I know he's a fictional character and that Hugh Laurie isn't posting here, but a girl can pretend, can't she?)

Chase --
But, House, now that she's convulsing, couldn't it be Astracher's Syndrome -- having sex with a new partner or new person's semen in the mouth, significant taste sensitivity alteration, eventually spiraling into meditemporal lobe collapse? Often fits with metalic aftertastes, too.

House --
Of course! Now it all fits and is scandalous to boot! Cameron, go tell the husband she's been cheating and get him tested for STD's. Foreman, start the treatment!

Sounds like early symptoms of heavy metal poisoning, probably introduced during sex that you must have had but not told us about because everyone lies.

I love you guys. Especially Doctor House. I watch you every Tuesday. (Weeellll . . . sometimes I tivo. But that's not really like cheating.)

But I suspect that if you find my husband, he'll probably be more surprised to learn that we're married than that he has an STD . . .

And Alkali, that's just cruel.

Megan

I just want you know that if it is fatal, I'll be there for you. We can move to Massachusetts, get married, buy and decorate a house, and have hot lesbian sex until you expire.

(Gregory, if you reading this instead of doing clinic duty, this doesn't change a thing between us.)

Trust your body... ditch the aspartame.

To me, the best advice so far

I used to drink large quantities of Fresca without a problem. Now, I get a similar aftertaste problem after 8-12 oz.
I've switched to Diet Dr Pepper which only irritates me after a few cans...
My toothpaste is minty, and I'm pretty sure there are no sweeteners in it (real or otherwise).
Were you ill recently? Didn't you mention some taste reaction with certain foods after an illness... ahh. Garcia effect?

Having been a diet coke addict who didn't like the aspartame (when I went on especially bad binges, I got a bit of nervous twitching in my eye), I switched to Pepsi One, which is sweetened with sucralose and acesulfame potassium. I find it doesn't have the negative tastes in aspartame-sweetened beverages (the combination of two artificial sweeteners, one sour the other bitter, IIRC, allows both to be used in lower dosages for the same sweetness but downsides which fall below perceptibility). It's not too far in taste from diet coke, either, at least in my (somewhat desperate) opinion.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

While I now agree with everyone that aspartame is foul, I'm a little more curious as to why I suddenly find it foul, since I've been happily consuming really astonishing volumes of diet soda (like 6-12 cans a day), for (yikes!) almost 20 years. It's not because I'm suddenly consuming more of it, since if anything, I'm cutting back these days.

Now I am starting to worry about ALS--thanks Alkali :-).

the topic of Jane's sex life

It's gotta be more interesting than Winterspeak's post on libertarian paternalism...

Must be job stress.

Leah . . . you may well have hit on part of the answer. I can't stop thinking about the goddamn taste, which is undoubtedly making it feel much stronger than it is. It's actually not that bad--as long as I don't consume anything with artificial sweetener--but it's maddening because I don't know what's causing it.

It's not likely to be a genetic disorder, as those don't usually manifest suddenly at age, umm, "late twenties". Let's also say pregnancy and new drugs affecting hormonal balances are eliminated. I think we should investigate infectious diseases with neurological effects. Differential diagnoses include rabies, tertiary syphilis, variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, any number of cyst-forming parasites. Any of these a possibility?

I'm 33 and proud, Dr Chase -- just lazy.

You can eliminate rabies and tertiary syphillis. On the other hand, I am fond of my beef . . . especially (mmm) uncooked . . .

It is most likely that your body has developed a distaste (Mmmm, that's awful bad punning JimBob) for aspartme, but there is a way to know for sure. The process, kinda extreme but VERY good for the body is called resetting your basal metabolism. Basically, eat nothing but raw foods and drink water for two weeks.

I used to have to eat potato chips daily and SOMETHING with chocolate after every meal. Did the process and can take or leave either the chocolate or chips. You'd be shocked how much better you will feel after the process. It'll get rid of the stress tremors in your face and hands as well.

Plus, and these are the real long term benefitial practices for me, do Yoga and meditate.

Read Fischer Black's classic 1986 essay "Noise," reprinted in his book *Business Cycles and Equilibrium*, and you will feel better.

SCENE: HOUSE’S OFFICE. HOUSE STANDS IN FRONT OF THE WHITE BOARD. FOREMAN, CHASE AND CAMERON STAND AROUND WHITE BOARD. CAMERON’S ARMS ARE CROSSED. FOREMAN STANDS APART FROM THE OTHER TWO.

FADE IN:

HOUSE

People, you’ve not been very helpful so far. Let’s re-cap. We’ve got a female libertarian blogger and journalist for a U.K.-based “newspaper” (USES AIR QUOTES) with a bad taste in her mouth after consuming diet ginger ale. She’s 33 years old, 6’2” with elf-like features, approximately 150 pounds. Healthy. Former smoker. She’s single, lives with her dog and likes to cook. What else do we know? Any other symptoms?

CHASE

Well, she has a propensity for using the English spelling of some words.

HOUSE

(SHAKING HEAD) You know this from talking to her?

CHASE

No. I read her blog.

HOUSE

Ok, well she writes for a British periodical, so she’s probably trained herself not to use American spellings. Cuts down on re-writes. I don’t see this as evidence of any neurological disorder. Is there anything that would cause a bad taste in her mouth?

CAMERON

Her position on abortion leaves a bad taste in my mouth . . . I read her blog, too.

HOUSE

Fine. Thank you. Not only was that unhelpful, it was entirely irrelevant. Foreman, anything in her apartment?

FOREMAN

No mice, no cockroaches, no evidence of pesticides for removal of mice or cockroaches. Clean kitchen. Some fresh herbs and spices, nothing you couldn’t buy at Zabars. The dog appeared healthy; no fleas, friendly.

HOUSE

What else?

FOREMAN

Well, there were an unusual number of science fiction novels.

HOUSE

So she’s an active reader with propensity for the fantastical.

CAMERON

That might explain her support for some of Bush’s policies.

HOUSE

Again, irrelevant.

CAMERON

Is it? Maybe there is something neurological.

HOUSE

Being a libertarian with a conservative fiscal philosophy isn’t evidence of mental illness, let alone a neurological condition . . . unless there has been a recent, marked change in her beliefs. Is there any evidence of a recent change?

CAMERON

No.

HOUSE

All right, then. Foreman, was there anything AT ALL surprising in the apartment?

FOREMAN

There was a poster of Ralph Nader on one wall. But when I looked closer it had many holes in it, as if it had been used as a dart board.

HOUSE

Ok, differential diagnosis. Go.

CHASE

Lyme disease?

HOUSE

(SHAKING HEAD) WHY?

CHASE

No reason, but I’d be happy to check for bullseye-like rashes.

(CAMERON ROLLS HER EYES)

HOUSE

You’re as bad as some of her male posters. Ok, yes, I read her blog, too.

FOREMAN

She’s obviously imagining it. She said herself that she’s somewhat of a hypochondriac. So her body is rejecting aspartame. Big deal. So what if she’s been drinking it for years. Unless she has a funny taste when she’s not drinking diet ginger ale, I don’t think there’s a problem. Let her go 24 hours without diet ginger ale and get back to us.

HOUSE

Hmm. I agree with Foreman. Start her on regular New York tap water. Brita filtered if she insists. No seltzer. No mineral water. No red wine. 24 hours.

Note to Jane Galt: Dr. House, Dr. Foreman, Dr. Cameron, and Dr. Chase will no longer be posting on your blog, as I've warned all of them that the Administration of this hospital does not take kindly to their use of hospital time and resources diagnosing persons who are not patients, and thus not paying the hospital.

"Could it be that you're just burned out on the flavor and now it's gross? Happens all the time, eat something too much for too long and you get sick of it, starts tasting bad."

That's been my experience, too. Especially with the few artificial flavors that I could ever tolerate in the first place.

Example: Tang. For you kids, this was a NASA-developed powder that mixed with water to make ersatz orange juice. (With all the known nutrients of the real thing, including real sugar.) Every other artificial orange flavor I've ever tried was most foul, but I liked Tang. It was a cheap source of vitamin C, so for a couple of years breakfast always included a glass of the stuff. And then suddenly one morning - YUCCHHH!

Maybe it's just my body's way of telling me that I've had quite enough of that particular chemical.

I'm afraid I can't help much with a replacement low-calorie beverage. I get very good water out of my well, but northern Michigan would be a very long way for Megan to come for a drink of water...

I agree with Bob's Your Uncle about factors that can cause taste alterations.

I also have personal experience that makes me agree Dr. Gregory House's first post about toothpaste affecting taste. (He went wacky on his second post.) I started using a peroxide and baking soda toothpaste. Within two weeks everything started tasting salty, even my own saliva. I discontinued the peroxide and baking soda toothpaste and my taste buds slowly went back to normal. (It took almost a month.)

Julie is spouting nonsense. You cannot become addicted to aspartame, and it does not cause illnesses. Aspartame is a simple tripeptide (3 amino acids) that can occur naturally while digesting proteins.

Noah Yetter presumably is kidding. Sugar cravings don't make diet soda taste bitter.

JS is nutty. All "purge the body" proponents are full of crap! We don't accumulate toxins that go away by eating roots, drinking gallons of water, and getting coffee enemas.

"I am fond of my beef ... especially (mmmm) uncooked"

It's a good thing you drink diet soda, as otherwise your tape worm might be consuming too many calories and getting fat.

In case Cuddy is still out there, there is not Greg House.

Dr. T -- My second guess are often my wackiest, though in my defense, I believe that some allergy and cold medicine can cause dry mouth. Dry mouth definitely affect how diet sodas taste. I'm willing to experiment on myself and report back, but right now I'm with my hooker.

You probably forgot to pour the Jim Beam in the soda.

"JS is nutty. All "purge the body" proponents are full of crap! We don't accumulate toxins that go away by eating roots, drinking gallons of water, and getting coffee enemas."

Dr. T, I may be nutty but I wasn't implying that her body was full of toxins. It's her taste buds that are funny not her health. I found the method a good way to reset what I craved. Nothing else.

Eating a bit of raw greens before every meal also helps.

Aspartame just tastes gross. I was okay with Splenda (sucralose) for a few weeks, then I got tired of its aftertaste too.

And pregnancy makes your taste buds insane. I imagine monthly hormone problems could do the same thing. I've never noticed it, but hey, I never looked for it either. :D When I was pregnant with my son, suddenly I decided chicken was the most horrible thing ever (have you ever noticed how BITTER chicken is??) and started eating beef again. With this pregnancy, suddenly beef isn't so great and chicken is some sort of wonder food.

Hormones are weird.

Just out of curiousity--have you parents noticed that what you crave/dislike during pregnancy conforms to what the resulting children like?

When I was in high-school I had a six-pack a day diet Pepsi habit (there are worse habits one can have in High School than a Diet Pepsi habit...like sex or drugs or smoking...oh, wait, smoking...nevermind) and I carried it through to college, but right around my senior year I found that I couldn't stand the taste of any diet soda. It was suddenly all awful. I don't even like the taste of that Splenda (tm) stuff.

I found that having a pitcher of caffene free unsweatedn iced tea (which I make myself) was both more economical and tastier than the Diet Pespi and I haven't had a can since. You're growing up, that's all.

One possibility is sinus infection. I have had them at times when both taste and smell is badly affected - making things taste like metal, etc. And it is the time of year for colds and allergies that can balloon into sinus problems.

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One possibility is sinus infection.

This may sound gross, but has there been any change in the color of your mucus? Mucus is supposed to be clear. A change to greenish-yellowish can be evidence of a bacterial infection. (a viral infection or allergies shouldn't change the color.)

This is a bit of a longshot, but as was mentioned earlier on your own blog (IIRC) poisonings which your body associates with certain foods can make those foods unpalatable. So lets say a bottle of your ginger ale was microwaved or left out in the sun for a while. Somthing happened that allowed the aspartame to break down, as it does with heat, into methanol.

Methanol breaks down in your body to formaldehyde.
Maybe your body made an association between the formaldehyde in your body and the taste of aspartame.

As was mentioned previously, ditch the Aspartame. It's not good for you.

(Science tidbit, ethanol is the antidote for acute methanol poisoning. If you just drank a cup of methanol by accident, drink some alcohol (ethanol) and your body will work on the ethanol and not convert the methanol into formaldehyde as it would normally do. This won't work for you, if your body has already made the association between formaldehyde poisoning and aspartame's taste.)

Have you done a control experiment i.e. tried drinking non-diet sodas?

Caffine drastically affects your taste buds. When you purged the caffine your taste buds started working properly again and all those things taste really bad.

Interesting, but unlikely, as I gave up caffeine more than a year ago.

Hypothyroidism is a more likely possibility; it's my working thesis at this point. But thank y'all for playing! ;-)

Dr T: Aspartame is not a tripeptide, it is a methyl ester of a dipeptide. It would never occur from metabolizing a protein.

When aspartame is metabolized it does yield methanol. Some studies have linked it to as brain tumors, brain lesions, and lymphoma (see wikipedia entry for aspartame).

Dont even get me going on sucralose - a chlorinated disaccharide? I am hard pressed to find a low molecular-weight chlorocarbon that does not ultimately turn out to be toxic in some way.

I vote for the unsweetend iced tea, and unsweetened toothpaste.

Have you considered seltzer water? It's got great carbonation, and the lime/lemon flavored ones are nifty too. No calories or chemicals to worry about.

While I have to admit that I would rather pursue the pregnancy or std route as a bridge to discussing JG's sex life (family blog be damned!), I think the difference is two-fold: the reduction in diet soda and the switch to ginger ale. If you ingest an item regularly for a long period of time, it takes your system and taste buds a time to recover to original strength. If JG has been IV'ing diet coke for twelve years (assume start at 20 through current), then it would likely take a year or so for her taste buds to show what she was missing. Separately, JG has transition to a more acidic drink, which, assuming she drinks from an alumnimum can, will more likely carry the metal residue, especially if the can producer did a bad job on the organic seal designed to stop metal erosion. A switch to bottled ginger ale will probably help. So would making peace and resuming the past jittery habit, which would re-suppress the taste buds. Now, let's chat about that yellow-toothpaste fresh breath....

Jane

Seriously, I think whatever you have is totally benign -- most likely a developed distaste for aspartame. As you've only mentioned the one real symptom (or complaint), I think hypothyroidism is a stretch. For your own peace of mind, however, I'm guessing you're going to get it checked out. Fortunately, it's easily treatable and would not complicate one's life.

Ok, back to making light of the whole thing: If it is hypothyroidism, my original instinct about a goiter (also a thyroid disease) wasn't far off, and given a good-script writer I could explain better how your diagnosis still allows me to keep my record is in tact.

Be well.

BTW, if you do someday get non-hodgkins lymphoma, you should know it is more or less curable nowadays. The drug is a radiolabled monoclinal antibody called BEXXAR. Two doses cost about $28,000 and usually you're cured afterward.

It's been about 18 months since I switched to (bottled) ginger ale.

The reason I think it's hypothyroidism is that I have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, and have been waiting for a while for my thyroid to cop out. And low thyroid can apparently produce something called "Burning mouth syndrome". So off to the doctor to get my TSH checked out!

I'm thinking more along the line that since you reduced the amount ginger ale that you've been drinking, the flavors of the drink including the bad tasting aspartame seem stronger in contrast to before.

I'd guess that both diet Pepsi and diet gingerale are carefully formulated to hide the bad taste of aspertame as far as that's possible-- but for you the 'aspertame cloaking' only worked for the cola drink, not the gingerale. Once you were sensitized, the jig was up for aspertame. The good news is that you shouldn't have been drinking that much of it anyhow.

When my grandfather was in his mid-50s, his sense of taste and smell suddenly went haywire. Sometimes foods he loved would taste awful, sometimes he couldn't taste at all. They put him through every medical test known to man (at the time), and came up with nuttin'. The best they could do was postulate that he'd contracted some strange tropical disease on Okinawa, twenty-five years before. (Have you been on Okinawa, Jane?)

He died, poor fellow...er, thirty years later, in his mid-eighties. Which was actually very young for his family. I know he was able to taste things in recent years, but I don't think his tastebuds ever returned to normal.

Never liked diet soda and suspect I never will.

Aspartame tastes bad.

Next question?

Supposedly your sense of smell is at it's highest point during your 30's, and as we all know, smell is related to taste. So, perhaps your sense of smell has just gotten stronger this past year and you are now getting a more potent taste of the asperatame.

I also remember hearing when I was a child that your taste buds change every so often, but I can find nothing online to back that up.

Jane, I cut out diet soda cold turkey on December 26. I've replaced that habbit with iced coffee and iced tea. I'd strongly recommend the Mr. Coffee Iced Tea maker, BTW. Anyway, the immediate benefit of putting an end to soda consumption is that my stomach feels better. I get normal heartburn now after a spicey meal rather than walking around with a cramped up icky feeling 24/7 that made it impossible to sleep flat. Soda rots your stomach. Be courageous and just stop.

Sounds like you need our latest reassuring, paranoia-debunking ACSH report, Megan, called _Sugar Substitutes and Your Health_:

http://www.acsh.org/news/newsID.1317/news_detail.asp

Give people enough social confirmation of the fear that pretty much _anything_ is correlated with their daily aches and pains, and soon enough you'll see calls for banning aspartame, radio waves, black cats, voodoo, etc.

Change to one of those hippy dippy "Tom's Of Maine" toothpastes. I remember hearing radio commercials for the stuff and "Tom" bragged about not using chemical sweeteners that were 200 times sweeter than sugar or something like that.

Quit drinking aspertame. Try Splenda. No bitter after taste.

Meanwhile, get one of your British collagues to supply you with Elderflower syrup, for diluting with sparkling water: a drink fit for grown-ups.

I'm sorry to hear that you're having thyroid problems, Jane. On your TSH levels, be sure to get a copy of the lab report with your actual level, and keep in mind that TSH distributions are heavily skewed. A doctor once insisted to me that they were normally distributed - the standard, bell-shaped curve - and hence that the 'average' TSH must be in the middle of the range used by the labs.

This makes a good joke for me to tell people that know even a little about probability distributions - "there's this variable with a mean of 1.5 and a standard deviation of 2; it can easily hit 10 or 20 but can't possibly go negative, and my doctor told me that it's normally distributed!" OK, maybe it's not much of a joke, but it was an extremely silly thing for him to tell me. TSH levels may be log-normal, but they're clearly not normal.

My point - the mean, median and mode TSH levels are between 1.2 and 1.5, according to a study I saw from Australia. Anything over, say, 2.5 or 3 may be fairly high - not in the top 2.5% of the distribution (which is probably the range that the lab reports) but perhaps still in the upper 15% or 20%, i.e. getting into that long upper tail. If you're taking thyroid supplements (I don't know if you've gotten to that yet) and don't feel well with a TSH of, say, 4 or 5, then insist on aiming for a level closer to the mean or median.

Lab Rat:

How much methanol is produced, assuming the complete hydrolysis of the methyl ester? How much is oxidized to formaldehyde? (Might I add, I am not a enzymatic type.)

I would posit that the amount is miniscule, considering that aspartame is used in milligram quantities.

Klug:

A can of soda contains ~180mg (http://www.nutrasweet.com/articles/article.asp?Id=47), so that's over a gram in a 6-pack. I have read that it is almost completely hydrolyzed in the small intestine, yielding ~10% by weight in methanol, which is readily absorbed and oxidzed to formaldehyde.

Granted, these are small quantities if consumed in moderation, but I would rather avoid it altogether myself. The ethyl ester must have some problem, or I am sure they would have used that instead.

Wow this is some fascinating stuff. How about addressing the performance of the president you backed so strongly and the war you wanted so badly?

I believe rabies makes the senses extremely...sensitive.

Invest in bottled water.

It's refreshing, cool, and will clean your system.

Did you see this...
U.S. Won't Be Able to Slow Pandemic Flu Much if it Hits, Computer Model Shows

qdqw: I tend to tire of these scare tactics. Swine flu, ebola, Warburg virus, SARS, avian flu... yawn. Granted, the chance of an pandemic getting out of hand are greater in these days of massive global travel than, say 1918, but I sense a lot of researchers are just fanning the flames of panic to get increased funding. Yes, there is always the threat of a pandemic, but there are good people working on this and there is no reason for the average Joe/Jane to get in a tizzy. I assume your freezer is full of Tamiflu; I am wondering if I wasted my money. You have a generator you bought for Y2K you want to sell cheap?

Richard Kimble: Have you tried a Brita filter? I love mine, it takes the awful tap water in the places I have lived and turns it into reasonably pure, good tasting water for a lot less cost and heavy lifting than bottled water.

tim maguire: I actually thought of that, and possibly actute nickel toxicity, in contemplating our hostess's question.

Jane Galt: Don't worry about it. People's tastes change throughout their lives. I do suggest, though, that you stay away from artificial sweeteners. Develop a taste for, as others have suggested, flavored seltzer or unsweetened iced tea. I am curious about your thyroid condition, though. My mom (almost as tall as you) had to have her thyroid removed. I (much taller than you) have had erratic results from thyroid tests. I wonder if some of the increase in average height, and peak height of people these days may be linked to some genetic or environmental effect on people's thyroids.

You may or may not be a hypochondriac--are you sure you're not a first-year med student...?

"There's someone in my head, but it's not me."

It's obviously early menopause.

(j/k)

Wow this is some fascinating stuff. How about addressing the performance of the president you backed so strongly and the war you wanted so badly?

My, my, my. This is either a mediocre attempt at a Grenade, or a really lousy attempt at a Red Herring. Logical reasoning dictates that either way, you should be branded with a scarlet "T", and then shuffled off into the virtual kill-file.

Alternately, this: Kindly cough up something related to food and/or hypochondria, or better still, obtain it in a sanitary manner. Then, and only then, may you proceed to share.

Drink water.

Aspartame problem solved.

Yep

I once knew someone whose multiple sclerosis started a bit like this - heightened sensation of unpleasant taste, nothing else.

MS is a hypochondriac's wet dream - you may want to revel in its list of symptoms

http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/mssymptomsdtl.html

So, get your brain scanned.

Dr T: Aspartame is not a tripeptide, it is a methyl ester of a dipeptide. It would never occur from metabolizing a protein.

When aspartame is metabolized it does yield methanol. Some studies have linked it to as brain tumors, brain lesions, and lymphoma (see wikipedia entry for aspartame).

Dont even get me going on sucralose - a chlorinated disaccharide? I am hard pressed to find a low molecular-weight chlorocarbon that does not ultimately turn out to be toxic in some way.

I vote for the unsweetend iced tea, and unsweetened toothpaste.

I wonder where the posters that are pro-Artificial Sweetners work...

LR good post, Gracias!~

I don't have a diagnosis, but I don't know about the (female) hormone answer, either, though I know that pregnancy can change taste.

My husband, (6-foot, broad-shouldered etc.) always drank diet, even as a kid, and then all of a sudden, last fall, just before he turned 41, developed an aversion to the taste in just the same way you described. He started complaining about a couple of other things, in the way you do, as well. Not only that, but he could suddenly drink "regular"pop, which he'd always hated.

I though it was odd. He thought it was odd. But otherwise he seems the same as always. And he's definitely not pregnant (lol).

He will drink the seltzer waters; that compromise seems to work.

If it turns out to be some sort of weird thing (which I suspect and hope it isn't), we'd sure like to know, too!

Obviously fibromyalgia syndrome. Why? because every odd symptom I've ever had - fingernails that curl under at edges (beaking), sleep disturbances, sensory overload, short term memory problems (what?) etc etc ad nauseum are included in the list that Devin Starlanyl MD lists as symptoms in her Fibromyalgia & Chronic Myofascial Pain Survival Manual.

You can check the online list if you're not too terrified to find even more of your symptoms included. I dare ya - http://www.sover.net/~devstar/phsympt.htm

They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.

King Henry IV, part 1, (III, 2)

You know, I just remembered that an aunt nearly managed to destroy the enamel on her teeth with a hardcore Pepsi habit. Sodas and most other soft drinks tend to have citric acid or phosphoric acid added for tartness; but besides that, anything carbonated inherently has carbonic acid (at least until the fizz fully dissipates). If you could find yourself an iced chai habit, or SOMEthing with less acid, you'll have less to worry about in the long-term dental hygiene department.

But, if your ginger ale habit happens to be Vernors, I can't really blame you for wanting to keep it!

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