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Read this "New York Times" story for a chilling, NEW scientific study on
this controversial food sweetner. Story just published on Sunday.

Also note the references in the story to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who
was the head of Searle when that company was pushing for the FDA to approve
Aspartame, also known as NutraSweet and Equal.

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12sweet.html?_r1&orefslogin[/url]

Here is a copy of the Times article:

-----

The Lowdown on Sweet?

(picture) Dr. Morando Soffritti, who led tests of aspartame on 1,900
rats, calls it a possible carcinogen.

By MELANIE WARNER
Published: February 12, 2006

WHEN Dr. Morando Soffritti, a cancer researcher in Bologna, Italy, saw
the results of his team's seven-year study on aspartame, he knew he
was about to be injected into a bitter controversy over this
sweetener, one of the most contentiously debated substances ever added
to foods and beverages.

Abstract of the study (nih.gov)
[url]http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2005/8711/abstract.html[/url]

(picture) A study conducted at an Italian cancer research center,
above, has rekindled the debate on aspartame.

Aspartame is sold under the brand names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and is
found in such popular products as Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple
and Sugar Free Kool-Aid.

Hundreds of millions of people consume it worldwide. And Dr.
Soffritti's study concluded that aspartame may cause the dreaded "c"
word: cancer.

The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually
high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that had
been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to
five 20-ounce bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The
study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was
conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and
Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit organization that studies
cancer-causing substances; Dr. Soffritti is its scientific director.

The findings, first released last July, prompted a flurry of criticism
from the Calorie Control Council, a trade group for makers of
artificial sweeteners that has spent the last 25 years trying to quell
fears about aspartame. It said Dr. Soffritti's study flew in the face
of four earlier cancer studies that aspartame's creator, G. D. Searle
& Company, had underwritten and used to persuade the Food and Drug
Administration to approve it for human consumption. "Aspartame has
been safely consumed for more than a quarter of a century and is one
of the most thoroughly studied food additives," read one news release
from the council.

At the same time, Dr. Soffritti's findings have energized a vociferous
group of researchers, health advocates and others who say they are
convinced that aspartame is a toxin associated with a variety of
health troubles, including headaches, dizziness, blindness and
seizures.

DR. SOFFRITTI, who oversees 180 scientists and researchers in 30
countries who collaborate on toxin research, says that since last
July, he has been contacted by some of these critics, including a
member of Parliament in Britain and a number of conspiracy theorists,
some of whom say they have suffered from "aspartame poisoning" and
filled Web pages with cloak-and-dagger speculation about why the
F.D.A. approved aspartame for sale a quarter-century ago.

No regulatory agency has yet acted on Dr. Soffritti's findings,
although Roger Williams, a member of Parliament, called for a ban on
aspartame in Britain last December. Last month, the European Food
Safety Authority, an advisory body for the European Commission, began
to review 900 pages of data from Dr. Soffritti; the goal is to finish
by May. A commission spokesman, Philip Tod, said it was too early to
know what the next steps would be if the scientists reviewing the data
concurred with Dr. Soffritti's findings.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration says it has
also taken note of the study, which is available online
([url]http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2005/8711/abstract.html[/url]) and is
scheduled to be published next month in a medical journal financed by
the National Institutes of Health. F.D.A. officials say that they,
too, intend to conduct a thorough review.

But both the F.D.A. and the European Commission have cautioned that
there is no need for people to avoid aspartame. "We don't see any
concerns at this stage," said George H. Pauli, associate director for
science policy in the F.D.A.'s Office of Food Additive Safety. "We've
gone through a humongous amount of data on aspartame over the years."

Putting restrictions on aspartame would come at a significant cost.
Food companies and consumers around the world bought about $570
million worth of it last year. New regulatory action on aspartame
would also jeopardize the billions of dollars worth of products sold
with it. Already, in the United States, many companies are opting to
use sucralose, or Splenda, in their new low-calorie products, in part
because it is less controversial.

(Page 2 of 4)

Lance Collins, chief executive of Fuze Beverage in Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., said that safety concerns about aspartame were a "major
contributing factor" in his decision to use sucralose in his tea and
juice drinks. Sucralose, however, is made by under a patent by just
one company, Tate & Lyle of London, and is in desperately short
supply.

Dr. Soffritti, who has spent 28 years doing research on potential
carcinogens, said he was trying to steer clear of the growing
political maelstrom. But he added that he was concerned about the
large numbers of people who use aspartame, particularly children and
pregnant women. "If something is a carcinogen in animals," he said,
"then it should not be added to food, especially if there are so many
people that are going to be consuming it."

Lyn Nabors, executive vice president of the Calorie Control Council,
said Dr. Soffritti's study was not valid because the rats used in it
had been allowed to live longer than the two-year standard established
by the United States government's National Toxicology Program. "It's
difficult to determine if the cancers you find are due to something
else," Ms. Nabors said. "Just as in humans, the rat's body slows down
later in life, and the aging process causes all kinds of things."

But John R. Bucher, deputy director of environmental toxicology at the
National Toxicology Program, the government's agency for research on
toxic chemicals, called the design of the Ramazzini study "impressive"
and "thorough," and said that he did not think the fact that rats were
allowed to live until their natural deaths had skewed the results.

Dr. Jose Russo, director of the breast cancer and environmental
research center at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, says
that lifetime studies are "ideal" but that they are not done often,
partly because they are more expensive than limited-time tests. Dr.
Russo, however, criticized the Ramazzini study for not allowing
outside pathologists to analyze all of the tissue samples where
cancerous tumors were found. "People need to see every tumor," he
said.

Dr. Bucher of the National Toxicology Program said pathologists at the
program, with which Ramazzini collaborates, looked at 70 tumor slides.
But with the study producing over 9,000 tumor-containing slides, James
Swenberg, professor of environmental science at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that this falls short of standard
practice.

While Dr. Soffritti's methods have drawn some criticism, the Ramazzini
cancer lab, which is financed by private bank foundations, governments
and 17,000 individual members, has earned considerable credibility
since it was founded in 1971 for its pioneering research on chemicals.
It was the first research body to do studies showing that vinyl
chloride and the gasoline additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or
M.T.B.E., are carcinogenic, research that eventually encouraged the
United States to strictly regulate vinyl chloride and that led 21
states to ban M.T.B.E.

Dr. Soffritti said he was inspired to look at aspartame because of
what he calls "inadequacies" in the cancer studies done by Searle in
the 1970's. He said that those studies did not involve large-enough
numbers of rats and did not allow them to live long enough to develop
cancer.

The Ramazzini study was conducted with 1,900 rats, as opposed to the
280 to 688 rodents used in Searle's studies, and the rats lived for up
to three years instead of being sacrificed after two, which is the
human equivalent of age 53. "Cancer is a disease of the third part of
life," Dr. Soffritti said. "You have 75 percent of cancer diagnoses
for people who are 55 years old or older. So if you truncate the
experiments at 110 weeks and the rats are supposed to survive until
150 to 160 weeks, it means you avoid the development of cancer at the
time when cancer would be starting to arise."

Others have also challenged Searle's studies. Documents from the
F.D.A. and records from the Federal Register indicate that, in the
years before the F.D.A. approved aspartame, the agency had serious
concerns about the accuracy and credibility of Searle's aspartame
studies. From 1977 to 1985 ? during much of the approval process ?
Searle was headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now the secretary of
defense; Searle was acquired by Monsanto in 1985. Monsanto later spun
Searle's assets out into two companies: Merisant, which owns the
brands Equal and Canderel, and NutraSweet, which is owned by J. W.
Childs Equity Partners, an investment firm in Boston.

(Page 3 of 4)

A 1976 report from an F.D.A. task force, for example, found that
Searle's studies on aspartame and several of the company's
pharmaceutical drugs were "poorly conceived, carelessly executed, or
inaccurately analyzed or reported." It cited what it called a lack of
training by the scientists analyzing tissue samples, a "substantial"
loss of information because of tissue decomposition and inadequate
monitoring of feeding doses.

In response to the report, the F.D.A. asked the Justice Department to
open a grand jury investigation into whether two of Searle's aspartame
studies had been falsified or were incomplete. In a 33-page letter in
1977, Richard A. Merrill, the F.D.A.'s chief counsel at the time,
recommended to Samuel K. Skinner, then the United States attorney for
the Northern District of Illinois, that a grand jury investigate the
company, which was based in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, for
"concealing material facts and making false statements in reports of
animal studies conducted to establish the safety of the drug Aldactone
and the food additive aspartame."

A grand jury was never convened, however. Shortly after the letter was
sent, Mr. Skinner left the Justice Department to join Sidley & Austin,
a law firm that represented Searle. After 12 years at that firm, now
Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood, Mr. Skinner was appointed to be
President George H. W. Bush's transportation secretary; later he
became his chief of staff. In 1978, a year and half after Mr. Skinner
left the United States attorney's office in Chicago, his deputy,
William F. Conlon, also left to work at Sidley & Austin.

Mr. Skinner, now a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig LLP, said that as soon
as he began looking for a new job and interviewing with Sidley &
Austin, he recused himself from the Searle investigation. Mr. Conlon,
who is still at Sidley & Austin, did not return phone calls.

Over the next few years, Searle's petition for aspartame approval led
to much disagreement within the F.D.A. The commissioner at the time,
Alexander M. Schmidt, convened a three-member public board of inquiry,
which concluded that one of Searle's studies on rats showed an
increase in brain tumors from aspartame. The board members ? all of
them scientists at universities ? voted to withhold approval of
aspartame until more studies were done.

But yet another F.D.A. review, this one of Searle's tumor tissue
slides ? paid for by Searle and conducted by an academic group that is
now defunct ? concluded that Searle's studies had demonstrated that
aspartame was safe. In 1981, a new F.D.A. commissioner, Arthur Hull
Hayes, concurred with this assessment and granted approval to
aspartame shortly after President Ronald Reagan appointed him to run
the agency.

And in a move that fueled the conspiracy theories, Mr. Hayes left the
F.D.A. a little more than a year after approving aspartame and took a
job as a consultant to Burson-Marsteller, which at the time was
Searle's public relations agency. Mr. Hayes did not return calls
seeking comment.

Ms. Nabors of the Calorie Control Council said that suggestions or
innuendoes that Searle was trying to influence government officials
with lucrative job offers were baseless. Artificial sweeteners are
unfairly targeted for suspicion, she said, citing the government's
decision to ban the sweetener cyclamate in 1969 after studies showed
that it caused cancer in animals. "Cyclamate was banned, saccharin was
required to have a warning label for a while, and there's all these
conspiracy theories on aspartame," she said.

She added that there were more than 100 published scientific studies
showing no adverse effects from aspartame, and said that in 2002, the
European Commission reviewed many of these studies and reaffirmed the
sweetener's safety. The bulk of the studies investigated neurological
effects; none were animal cancer studies, which are lengthy and
expensive.

In any case, critics say that most of these studies were financed
either directly or indirectly by manufacturers of aspartame, and that
the results of aspartame studies tend to depend on who paid for them.
In an analysis of 166 articles published in medical journals from 1980
to 1985, Dr. Ralph G. Walton, a professor of psychiatry at
Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine found that all 74
studies that were financed by the industry attested to sweetener's
safety.

Of the 92 independently funded articles, 84 identified adverse health
effects. "Whenever you have studies that were not funded by the
industry, some sort of problem is identified," said Dr. Walton, adding
that he has not looked at studies performed since 1985. "It's far too
much for it to be a coincidence."

Dr. Walton, who, like some other psychiatrists, has studied aspartame
from a neurological perspective, said he had also seen problems from
the sweetener firsthand. At Safe Harbor Behavioral Health, a mental
health facility in Erie, Pa., where he is clinical director, Dr.
Walton said he had observed that for many people with mood disorders,
such as depression or bipolar disorder, aspartame exacerbates the
condition. "For people with panic disorders, for instance, we've seen
that when we eliminate aspartame, it's much easier to control their
illness," he said. "The number of panic attacks goes down."

(Page 4 of 4)

Dr. Walton and others say that this is probably attributable to
aspartame's phenyalanine component. (Aspartame is made up of two amino
acids, phenyalanine and aspartic acid.) He said that an excess of
phenyalanine could upset the body's balance of neurotransmitters,
causing a range of neurological symptoms.

Defenders of aspartame often point out that phenyalanine is naturally
present in many protein-intensive foods. But Dr. William M. Pardridge,
a professor of endocrinology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at
the University of California, Los Angeles, says that when it comes
from food, phenyalanine is absorbed into the brain more slowly.

"If your blood phenyalanine level was increased five times, in my view
there would be a safety concern," Dr. Pardridge said. "The question is
whether aspartame use could ever increase levels that much, and the
answer is yes. We've known that for 20 years."

Dr. Soffritti said he had not studied the effects of phenyalanine. He
theorized that the tumors in his study were related to the methanol,
or wood alcohol, that is produced as the body metabolizes aspartame.
When the body breaks down methanol, the result is formaldehyde, a
known carcinogen. "I know that when I treat animals with methanol, you
end up with lymphomas and leukemias," he said.

BUT Dr. Kenneth E. McMartin, a methanol expert and professor of
pharmacology, toxicology and neuroscience at the Louisiana State
University Medical Center, said he believed that it was unlikely that
someone could consume enough aspartame to let harmful levels of
formaldehyde build up in the body.

Dr. Soffritti said he thought that more research and open debate were
needed on whether aspartame was a carcinogen. "It is very important to
have scientists who are independent and not funded by industry looking
at this," he said.

Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in
the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group, said he did not think
that Dr. Soffritti's study could be considered definitive, but that it
should prompt an "urgent re-examination."

"For a chemical that is used by hundreds of millions of people around
the world, it should be absolutely safe," Mr. Jacobson said. "There
shouldn't be a cloud of doubt."

----

A Note from a Poster in the Sci.Med newsgroup:

The article stated:
"Aspartame is sold under the brand names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and is
found in such popular products as Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple
and Sugar Free Kool-Aid. "

Poster's comment :
The above statement is misleading. Aspartame is added to thousands of
food products. I also thought for a while that it was found only in
diet drinks and that one was safe from it simply by not drinking diet
drinks. I was misled and misinformed by such statements as the one
above.
If you want to warn people as to where aspartame is found, you dont
just list a few diet soda brands. You say that it can be found in any
type of industrially processed foods and that it is actualy found in
thousands of them. Now if you want to keep people uninformed, you do
just what the author of the article did. You just mention a few soda
brands and leave the rest unmentionned, leaving the reader assuming
that it is a fair overview of where it can be found. Therefore even
people who dont want aspartame will consume it, assuming that it is
only or mostly found in diet sodas. I did that, and kept doing it even
though I had been into natural nutrition for years. I have had to
actualy read anti-aspartame articles on the internet in order to smell
the coffee and finally realize that I wasn't safe from aspartame by
just not drinking diet drinks.

[url]www.dorway.com[/url] claims the right figure is of over 6000 food products
containing aspartame but as I have found no list or even confirmation
on the web I'll only claim it is "thousands".

Thinking about it, it's weird that no list is easily found. Wouldn't
you want to know if your usual processed foods contain aspartame or
generally other hazardous sweeteners and chemicals? Wouldnt it be
suitable for an additive such as aspartame about which there are
suspicions of toxicity?

But it's the usual story.
1/ it's unsafe
2/ it's authorized, branded as being safe, and spread all over the
market.
3/ You're not told that it is unsafe and so largely spread and
therefore you consume it unknowingly, even if you suspect it is
unsafe.
Conclusion, it is both unsafe and in effect mandatory. Typical. And
you're enslaved through misinformation and lacking of taking care of
your rights, as usual. The message is "we're in charge, we're taking
care of you, we're the ones who decide what you eat, what medical
treatments you get, everything. You're not entitled to decide or even
to be informed."