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.”