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What’s the Deal With Aspartame?

You may recognize aspartame as an ingredient in your low-calorie sugar packets, sports drinks, sodas, and other beverages. Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners have become popular in diet culture as a substitute for real sugar as a way to reduce caloric intake. Since aspartame is about 200 times sweeter than sugar, it takes a lot less aspartame to reach the same sweetness that sugar has. While this may seem like a great benefit to consuming fewer calories by substituting sugar for this artificial sweetener, studies show that aspartame consumption actually increases the risk of obesity and diabetes. More and more research shows that aspartame poses many more threats than benefits that you should be aware of before choosing that low-cal option. 

Let’s consider what happens on a chemical level when we consume sweets. Our brains LOVE sugar. Every time we give our brain sugar, a surge of dopamine is released to our reward center, giving us that craving for more. This is a natural response that becomes dysregulated when sugar is consumed in high amounts, resulting in addiction. When you make the switch to an artificial sweetener, your brain gets confused and overstimulated with this sugar substitute causing a shift in your chemical balance. 

Studies show that this chemical shift causes metabolism to slow, hunger to rise, and addiction to surge. In essence, the consumption of lower-calorie artificial sweeteners slows down your metabolism, makes you more hungry, and causes you to be addicted to repeating this cycle of eating more and breaking down less. All this to say, artificial sweeteners may be fewer calories per teaspoon compared to sugar, but both animal and human studies show that through this metabolic mechanism, they actually increase weight gain and risk for obesity and diabetes. 

If this isn’t frightening enough, there is also sufficient data that show aspartame increases the risk of cancer. In a rodent study, the incidence of malignant tumors increased significantly with low doses of aspartame administered. If you are genetically at risk for any type of cancer, you should absolutely avoid artificial sweeteners at all costs. 

All in all, it is better to consume real sugar in moderation than to consume artificial sweeteners as a substitute. 

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Stage 3: Nourish & Refresh

At this point, you are feeling better than you ever thought you could as you are feeling energized and thriving. You have learned a lot about your body, you are moving more efficiently, you understand your body’s cues, and you have a good idea of what to do with these cues. This means you get to try new things, achieve new goals, and conquer new challenges!  As you do, we will be here as your resource, as needed, to help you nourish, boost, and refresh your health.

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Stage 2: Activate Healing

Pain is generally the last symptom to show up and the first to go away. This means that by the time you realize there is a problem, there has been a problem for a long time. Especially for chronic or recurring issues, understanding how you got to where you are is so important for getting to where you want to go. In this stage of your journey, you will resolve underlying dysfunction, remove cheats, and retrain habits. As we aid you in activating your body’s natural healing potential, we will help you regain movement, energy, and body function both inside and outside. Throughout this process, you will start to feel greater ease and inspiration as you restore communication and efficiency in your body. Together, we will constantly assess, observe, and reassess your body’s responses to boost your results.

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Stage 1: Discover Root Cause

You are your own person, with your own collection of life events which brought you to where you are today. You deserve to be heard, seen, and treated as the individual you are. Your journey begins with your Discovery Evaluation. This first visit includes your exam which works to uncover the root of your issue(s), new patient diagnostics, and, of course, your first treatment. This is how we will help you begin connecting the dots and feeling better. After your first treatment, we will ask you to observe your body’s responses– good, bad, or indifferent. There is no wrong answer as this is just starting point information and direction for moving forward. In your second visit, we will review this feedback and your diagnostics to further identify potential underlying causes and compensations. We will combine everything we have learned about you, consider your goals, and together create a plan to resolve your concerns from the roots up