Wrapper

"Built_Well" <bw@bbbb.com> wrote in message
news:CfKdnbTf4qw9xW7enZ2dnUVZ_vudnZ2d@sysmatrix.net...[color=blue]
> 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.
>[/color]

AH, yes, the NYT, the mouth organ of the DEMONrat party.

[color=blue]
> [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."[/color]