Aspartame experiment on rats

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The chemical ("sugar substitute") aspartame was approved for human consumption by the US Food and Drug Administration in the early 1980s. The Ronald Reagan Administration was instrumental in this. I'm as much a conservative right-winger as you're going to get, and Reagan likes to portray himself in these terms, but the more I look at his record the more I see he's actually a dreaded neo-con.

When he came to power in 1981 the first thing he did was suspend the authority of the then chief of FDA, Jere E. Goyan, who was apparently applying a far too sensible rationale to aspartame approval. Reagan himself then, if I'm not mistaken, directly appointed the shady Arthur Hull-Hayes character as Commissoner.

Beyond general loosening up of safety requirements for drug approval, it seems Hayes' main purpose in the FDA was to get aspartame into the food supply. Indeed, when he departed after his short stint in 1983, he took up a high-paid contract at G.D. Searle's PR agency (Searle was the maker of aspartame). He approved aspartame for dried foods in 1981 and for beverages (which accounts for 80% of aspartame consumption) in 1983.

Aspartame products are easily identified (and avoided) as "sugar free", "diet", "light" specifically on soft drinks and yogurts. People are familiar with these marketing buzzwords but they don't know the chemical it actually refers to. Its E number which appears on ingredient lists is E921.

The story of aspartame is an interesting one and involves infamous figures such as Monsanto and Donald Rumsfeld. Anyway that is the background, which I've tried to lay out fairly simply and dispassionately. I've seen the Irish Times mock the aspartame story which is irresponsible really and bad journalism when the facts are so readily available. Then again, one should not expect worthwhile journalism from the mainstream media, that goes without saying. Further background on the story can be found here: [1] [2] [3]

What I'd like you to take a look at here, having understood the background, is an experiment conducted by Vanessa Inness-Brown called My Aspartame Experiment, which fed the chemical to a population of rats and observed the results. The results were pretty horrific and definitive: tumors, eye ailments and motor difficulties that were not seen at anywhere near the same level in the control group.

You will read that aspartame is composed of phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol (wood alcohol). As isolates, these are all biologically dangerous chemicals (for example, wood alcohol burns the retina). As aspartame is broken down into these components in the body, the symptoms seem to match up with the effect of these chemicals.

She could have provided a more extensive table of results but nonetheless I don't doubt her findings very much as almost every independent (non-industry-funded) study has reached the same conclusion.

Also it might be worthwhile to note that while the the West has followed suit with the US and approved this chemical, it is banned as a food additive in Japan.

humanji

To save people time on looking for links, here's an old thread from here about this:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055350795&highlight=Aspartame

with various for and against points, if anyone wants more reading on it.