Aspartame: Sweet, Sweet Poison
By Carlos H. Conde
During the past several weeks, an advertisement has been appearing in the Philippines’s major newspapers that extols aspartame, the artificial sweetener that goes by the brands Equal, Nutrasweet, to name two. The ad, about half a page in size, makes the assertion that aspartame is safe and that the food-and-drug regulatory agencies of the Philippines and of the United States, among other countries, have determined it to be so. The ad does not carry the name of any group or individual, thus it is safe to assume that the aspartame industry is behind it.
I am always convinced that if somebody tries to mislead the public, he would publish advertisements so frequently until the public accepts the ad’s assertion as the truth. This was the strategy that Joseph Goebbels used and perfected in selling Nazism to the German people. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” Goebbels had said. This is the underlying principle of advertising and public relations.
The question is, Why would the makers of aspartame spend millions of pesos to convince the public about the safety of their product? Particularly at a time when the use of the sweetener, so far as I can tell, is exploding in the Philippines, what with Coca-Cola recently launching its Zero brand? Coke Zero, of course, uses aspartame.
I am sure the answer lies in the fact that there’s still much debate about the safety of aspartame.
Try Googling the word “aspartame” and you’ll probably be surprised to learn that, of the first 10 results, at least six are for sites that tackle the dangers of the sweetener. Elsewhere on the Internet, there’s a whole bunch of websites and blogs that tell you that aspartame is never safe (here, here, here, and here). A victim of aspartame even has a documentary about it, which you can view here.
(As an aside, I’ve learned that the Philippines was supposedly the first to try to ban aspartame. Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago even filed a proposed law to outlaw the use of aspartame. Obviously, this proposal failed.)
It would be so easy to dismiss these websites and blogs as the product of conspiracy theorists and idle minds — if not for the fact that there has been credible reportage about the dangers of aspartame. One of them was published by The New York Times in this lengthy February 2006 article, titled “The Lowdown on Sweet.” The article talks about the result of a research that determined that aspartame caused cancer in rats. (View the research’s abstract here.)
And then there are these undisputed facts:
- * Aspartame was first manufactured and patented by G.D. Searle, a so-called “life sciences” company that was later bought by the biotech giant Monsanto
- * In 1977, Donald Rumsfield – yes, this Donald Rumsfield – was hired by Searle to become its CEO. He allegedly vowed to use his clout in Washington to have aspartame approved by federal regulators.
- * In 1981, Ronald Reagan was elected president and picked Rumsfield to be part of his transition team, which selected Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. to be the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
- * Within that same year, Hayes created a “public board of inquiry” to determine the validity of the allegations against aspartame, among them that it caused brain tumor. Three of the six board members voted against aspartame. But Hayes later overturned the board’s recommendation and approved aspartame initially for dry products.
- * Hayes was later accused of impropriety while in office, involving mainly companies that had business with aspartame. After his resignation, Hayes was hired by Burson-Marsteller, the PR firm of Searle and Monsanto, as a scientific consultant.
(For more about how aspartame became legal, check out this timeline, where I took some of the information above.)
The Calorie Control Council, an industry group in the United States, disputes all the allegations against aspartame. In its website, the council declares that aspartame has “great taste without the calories for today’s healthful lifestyles.” It adds that “few compounds have withstood such detailed testing and repeated, close scrutiny, and the process through which aspartame has gone should provide the public with additional confidence of its safety.”
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November 26th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Great article on aspartame, far better and more comprehensive that one could
ever find in the mainstream US Media, which is either afriad to take on this
issue, or has been bribed and cajoled and sweet-talked and lobbied and
influenced not to do so.
I have to quickly respond to the Calorie Control Council’s allegations,
about no scientific or medical expertise among those who testify against
Aspartame’s proven neurodenerative effects. They include:
Internist HJ Roberts, M.D. in Florida
Neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, M.D., in Mississippi
Psychiatrist Ralph Walton, M.D., in Ohio and Pennsylvania
Pediatrician Kenneth Stoller, M.D., in New Mexico
The aspartame molecule is metabolized as methanol, formaldehyde, and a
proven brain tumor causing agent called DIKETOPIPERAZINE, so of course it
will have a harmful medical effect, no matter how many spin doctors, rent-a-
toxicologists (like Coca Cola did very recently in New Zealand, another
nation considering banning Aspartame), or advertisements in Manila papers
the industry and its infernal lobbyist hired-guns take out.
If these names or chemicals are unknown to you, just google them. The two
most important articles are these and
Mr. Conde was right to mention the video; the entire 90 minute video is on
line and free, titled SWEET MISERY. No one was paid to make this film; it
was created by a documentary film maker in Tucson Arizona, Cori Brackett,
after she recovered from advanced multiple sclerosis after just quitting
diet cokes!
Take the time to watch this video, and then take the time to recommend it
your friends and relatives, especially the diabetics, who are the last
people on earth who should be ingesting formaldehyde and methanol, in view
of their damaged pancreas.
The best update of all is to go to the Hawaii Legislature website, check
Bills and Documents, then request the text of Hawaii Senate Concurrent
Resolution 191, 2008, then read it. That is what will be coming next in both
Hawaii and New Mexico starting with the 2009 Legislative Sessions in January
2009.
Let’s hope Obama appoints someone brilliant and a true consumer
protectionist at the FDA, like Dr. Howard Dean, M.D.
MILLIONS OF LIVES IN HUNDREDS OF NATIONS DEPEND ON OBAMA GETTING RID OF ASPARTAME!
Repsectfully,
Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News
Santa Fe, New Mexico
November 26th, 2008 at 6:40 am
SORRY ABOUT THE TYPOS IN THE ABOVE ARTICLE. TOO MANY HOURS AT THE BATTLE TODAY!
December 18th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Guys that study it was obviously “paid for”. It’s nothing but a paid review. They never mentioned what happened to Sprague-Dawley rats that developed malignant tumors due to aspartame.. How short is their memory..(http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2005/8711/abstract.html)
Bob Riley
“i’m on a quest to educate public about cancer and chemotherapy alternatives”
December 28th, 2008 at 4:37 am
Aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed in healthy people (see: http://www.officialscienceaspartame.com/?gclid=CJSYo_bnsZcCFQ8QagodL1nKjw). All the misguided concern about aspartame has been wrongfully created by a combination of errors that started with the original Searle work, were perpetuated by a misguided aspartame internet conspiracy theory, and supported by two badly designed 2006 and 2007 studies. Early FDA evaluators of the original Searle work had tumor concerns, which the internet conspiracy theorists have kept this fable alive for twenty years. But those original results were simply false positives stemming from an error that nobody, even FDA, caught until I reported it this year. The Searle work and everything since (including both highly quoted Soffritti et al (Ramazzini studies) 2006 and 2007 rat studies, and even the internet myaspartameexperiment.com rat experiment used a simple, yet wrong experimental design. They used control rats (fed no aspartame) and treated rats (fed different, graded doses of aspartame to get a dose response). While normally this design is adequate, for this substance this design is improperly balanced and invalid. Even a high school science fair student can recognize this fact once it is explained. Methanol from aspartame degradation is converted to formaldehyde and formic acid. Formaldehyde and formate have long been known to react with and at high doses like those in these experiments deplete a portion of the vitamin folate in exposed rats. That high dose folate degradation would be resolved, if folate were added to diets (daily and microgram sustenance supplements; that is why folate is needed in small doses daily). But, as these experiments have been performed, this degradation of folate only happens in the treated animals, because only they get the aspartame source of the methanol. The consequence is that only the rats receiving the aspartame will show a dose-dependent (high dose, the more the deficiency) increase, not in tumors arising from aspartame, but from folate deficiency induced tumors. Proper design would involve feeding folate supplements to both control and treated animals; it would best have used three groups, control rats, aspartame treated rats, and folate supplemented, aspartame treated rats. This design would not have given rise to tumors, because the rats would not have been depleted of folate. FYI, folate deficiency causes exactly those tumor types reported in the 2006 and 2007 lifetime exposure experiments and literally dozens upon dozens of different cancers. It is also a major factor in breast cancer too.
Second, all the matter above deals with the rat experimental studies, but there is another totally separate issue, human safety. That issue only exists because of the false claims that aspartame causes problems including tumors in humans stemming from the badly done rat work. In a corollary of the second line above, the fact of the matter is that many people in this country are not healthy; they are intrinsically susceptible to this natural cause of tumors that internet conspirators have wrongly attributed to aspartame. Many people, particularly women, are deficient in this vitamin (folate) and some are seriously deficient in it. Folate was added to grain products to quell a serious incidence of birth defects in children of deficient mothers. That worked to a large extent. But the “health weight” trend not to eat sweet rolls, doughnuts and other grain products that have been fortified with folate since 1998 only worsens the underlying problem. Still others have biochemical issues with their folate processing enzymes called polymorphisms that raise the requirement for folate and only raise their susceptibility to folate deficiency. Widespread folate deficiency, not aspartame, is the real problem causing much of the tumors and cancers epidemic in America today. And alcohol abuse by women is a major factor in increased folate deficiency and contributes greatly to the incidence of breast cancer today.
There have recently been calls for a second round of grain product fortification to again overcome these problems. But the only real solution to the many folate deficiency linked tumors is use of folate supplements. Folate is made not by us, but by bacteria in our gut; given even a folate precursor rich diet (“healthy living”), we simply cannot make sufficient folate to prevent the widespread occurrence of disease associated with folate deficiency. Then, many dietary substances including antibiotics, abusive levels of ethanol, and many commonly used pharmaceuticals (antiepileptic and others) adversely affect either folate or the bugs that generate the folate; they only make us more deficient.
(Information detailing the fatal error in all rat aspartame research is new. It was presented in March, 2008 at the national Society of Toxicology meeting in Seattle and in April (2008) at the Agriculture & Food Chemistry section of the national American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans).
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
(FYI, I have absolutely no financial or biasing connection with the aspartame, the soft drink or related industries. However, I am just tired of people who have no understanding of the sciences of pharmacology and toxicology trying to pass judgment by hearsay on something that they know nothing about.)
December 29th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Hi John, that research is just one of other many and it’s nice to have an opinion from someone like you with Ph.D. After going through enough research on my own i convinced myself that aspartame would require more vigorous testing to reconfirm that research, hence i decided to exclude it from my diet. i’d rather go with natural sweetener Stevia. Of course it’s anyone’s personal choice whether to consume it or not just as it goes with smoking cigarettes that actually do cause lung cancer and other complications.