Every few
years, a new cycle of the aspartame scare makes it rounds on (social) media
fuelled by clickbait conspiracy theories, incoherent pseudoscientific rants,
and dubious personal anecdotes. In 2019, for instance, the nonsense suggestion
that aspartame could lead to MS and that MS could be cured by dropping
aspartame (hint: idiotic bullshit), promulgated by spam articles and
fake news sites, received – not for the first time – plenty of shares and much engagement. Now,
since it is usually difficult to identify the authors of such stories (or the
editors of the sites to which they are posted), we’ll have to go with the name
of the person featured in one of these spam anecdotes: Rhonda Gessner, whose
sister ostensibly had MS but who, after cutting aspartame on Gessner’s
suggestion, could soon rise from her wheelchair and drop all medication.
Now, one
would do well to assign a non-negligible credence to the hypothesis that
Gessner is a fictional character altogether, but there is in fact a
Rhonda Gessner listed with a self-published book How to Cure Asthma Without
Drugs on Amazon, and her name appears in connection with marketing efforts
on behalf of the idiotic product Kangen water as well.
Diagnosis: Doesn’t mean she isn’t fake, of course (hence the question mark), but if you ever encounter the name, you can at least rest assured that any claims associated with her is lunatic bullshit spam.
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