Tell Me About The Aspartame, Mommy!

Ever have one of those days when you just want to settle in with your vegetable sandwich, snuggle up to your Mom, and rap about aspartame?

No? I haven’t, either.

But that didn’t stop the Coca-Cola Company from launching a mysterious one-page newspaper ad providing information about the safety of the fake sweetener last week. Everything about it is awkward, starting with the photo of a mother and daughter gathering together in the classic “tell me about female freshness” formation. (What’s up with that photoshop job on the Diet Coke-imbibing mother’s chest?)

Then there’s the non-headline headline, distinguished for its advanced levels of blandness: "Quality Products You Can Always Feel Good About." Perhaps it’s a sophisticated attempt to make the ad seem as artificial as the subject matter it defends.

The copy reads: "Time and again, these low- and no-calorie sweeteners have shown to be safe, high-quality alternatives to sugar. It adds, "In fact, the safety of aspartame is supported by more than 200 studies over the last 40 years.”

Okay, am I missing something, or has anyone been questioning the safety of aspartame lately??  The last time I remember a controversy was in the late 1990s (1996, actually) with the “60 Minutes” story that suggested that ingestion of the aspartame could result in brain lesions. But that was almost 20 years ago. Why would the Atlanta-based soft drink company float this little trial balloon now?

The ad itself ran in USA Today in Atlanta and the Atlanta Journal Constitution last week and will run in the Chicago Tribune this week. Though only two cities were targeted. it’s safe to say the tiny media outlay was dwarfed by the millions of dollars in free media that the ad received. Was that part of the plan?

Is the company policing itself proactively, releasing an ad that perhaps turns legal cartwheels (but doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense otherwise) because something is about to break about aspartame?

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