Silverwing was referring to this news story.

Chris -  I'm not sure if they tested that, but my thought would be probably not because they're turning the sperm from something that’s inactive to something that’s active.  But it’s a good thought!

We posed this to Karen Kidd from the University of New Brunswick:

Mercury has been very well studied and we know a lot about its effects on human health.  There’s some great advice available on the web in terms of the types of fish that are safer to eat.  For example, we know that fresh tuna has a lot more mercury in it than canned tuna, swordfish is another one that’s high in mercury.  We know that bigger, older fish are higher in mercury, so what I would recommend that everyone do, is take a look at that advice on the web and choose fish that we know are lower in mercury.

The Food Standards Agency have some advice online here.

We put this question to Professor Karen Kidd:

There’s a lot of concern about oestrogens in the environment and what they're doing to our health, but in this case, we’ve looked for estrogens in fish muscle and have found no evidence that they concentrate in the muscle or any parts of the fish that we eat.  So, in this case, it’s not a risk to human health.

This was answered by Yor_on on our forum...

"If you walk into an orchard, pick an apple from a tree, rub that apple on your shirt, you’d notice that it shines, and that’s because you've just polished off the natural waxes and also yeasts that the apple produces in order to protect its high water content.  And without that wax, fruits and vegetables would end up going all dry and nasty.

After they've been harvested, apples get washed and brushed to remove leaves and field dirt, and then they get packed in cartons for shopping to your market.  This process removes some of the fruits original wax coating that actually protects the fruit.

So the apple packers re-apply a commercial grade wax, and one pound of that wax can cover as many as 160,000 pieces of fruit.  So in other words, two drops of it on each apple.  The waxes have been used on fruits since the 1920s.  they're all made from natural ingredients certified by the US Food and Drug Administration as safe to eat and they come from natural sources such Carnauba that wax, the leaves of the Brazilian palm, Candelia wax, which is derived from a reed-like dessert plant of the genus euphorbia and also food grade shellac."

Well aspartame, the sweetener, works because it’s about 200 times sweeter as a molecule than sugar is.  But because it contains virtually no calories compared with a large number of calories from sugar, you can use it to replace the sweetening things in food that would normally be sugar, and therefore, cut the number of calories in food.  So that’s how it can be used to help people lose weight. 

The worry is, whether or not it gets metabolised or broken down in the body into something toxic.  So if you look at the molecular structure of aspartame, it consists of two amino acids.  One of which is called phenylalanine – perfectly healthy there, no problem with that.  Another one called aspartic acid – again, very common, no problem there.  The two are linked together though with a bridge molecule which is a methyl group, a carbon atom attached to a couple of hydrogens.  But when this molecule goes into your digestive tract, the acid and other chemicals in that environment actually break apart the two amino acids, the phenylalanine and the aspartate, and they get absorbed and used in the body in the same way any other amino acid would.  But the methyl group actually gets turned into a methanol, and the other name for methanol is wood alcohol. 

We know that methanol can be harmful to health when it goes into your body – although in itself, methanol is not harmful, it goes to the liver. There, enzymes break down alcohol, ethanol, ultimately into ethanoic acid, vinegar, and it’s just excreted.  These enzymes also turn methanol initially into formalin, which is formaldehyde - a fixative - the same stuff you use to embalm bodies.  Ultimately, the formalin gets oxidized to make formate or formic acid.  This is the same stuff that ants squirt out their back end, which makes you sting.  That’s not good because it’s very toxic to mitochondria, the powerhouses in our cells.  Mitochondria supply energy to cells and if nerve cells don't have enough energy, they can die.

So if you have an intense ingestion of methanol, then the methanol can turn into formalin and fix your body internally, and also into formic acid which will deactivate your mitochondria, and that means nerve cells can die because they don't have enough energy.

The amount of methanol you get from aspartame is very, very low - a daily intake of probably less than a few milligrams or possibly 10 milligrams of methanol.  So probably trivial, probably not going to harm you, but the jury is out.  We just don't know, is really the answer.