by Chris Wheeler (Healthy Options Magazine -
www.healthyoptions.co.nz)
A report of the BBC News (14 July '05) focused attention back to the questionable safety of the world's most popular diet sweetener, aspartame, consumed by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and found in over 6000 products including soft drinks, chewing gum, sweets, yoghurt and pharmaceutical products.
Close to home, aspartame has become New Zealand's top-selling diet sweetener at the same time that a consensus is developing among independent researchers worldwide that this officially regulated and permitted toxin is probably the hidden factor in a huge range of neurological and toxin-induced medical problems ranging from the increased rates of depression, seizures, vision problems, suicides and erratic behaviour in teenagers, to a range of cancers, including a steady increase in the rate of brain tumours which uncannily parallels the rising curve of aspartame use since 1981.
Morando Soffritti and colleagues of Italy's European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, Bologna, drew attention to the results of a very detailed study (1) employing 1800 rats who were fed aspartame over the course of their lifetime (a rat can live up to three years). At death, each rat was thoroughly examined and the researchers noted a significant increase in cancers - specifically lymphomas and leukaemias - in rats fed dose ranges of aspartame at concentrations comparable to those consumed by humans.
Although the researchers were cautious in declaring the results of their study, the also pointed to evidence in their rat study of an increase in malignant brain tumours in rate fed aspartame. This particular result highlights the significance of Professor JW Olney's 1996 report pointing to an increase in brain tumours in humans paralleling the increase in consumption of aspartame in 1982 (2).
The significance of the Soffritti study is that it was carried out in Italy, a country relatively independent of the powerful international corporates controlling the aspartame market, and a country where research is still pursued according to traditional academic standards, relatively free from commercial bias.
The Ramazzini Foundation, in particular, has specialised in extremely careful rat studies using a particular breed of rat (Sprague-Dawley), which the Foundation have reared and studied for decades. Hence the researchers had access to decades of data on the natural incidence of cancer for the specific type of rat in their aspartame study as well as having a parallel control group on an aspartame-free diet as part of their study.
This care over the purity of the data and the research group’s close adherence to the standards of pure scientific research mean their study findings will be doubly hard to demolish by the international food and beverage corporates for whom aspartame represents a multi-billion dollar market. The study also poses a challenge to New Zealand’s food regulators, the NZ Food Safety Authority (NZFSA), who have been defending the safety of aspartame using data from the aspartame industry itself, backed by a recent supportive report from a science committee of the European Union which was stacked with industry ‘scientists’.
Any review of aspartame data demonstrates a huge rift between the data supporting safety presented by aspartame industry scientists and the data presented by independent researchers, which invariably demonstrates a problem with the product. Professor Ralph Walton of Northeastern Ohio University’s College of Medicine pointed out on the popular US TV programme “60 Minutes” (29 Dec 1996) that he had done poor reviewed research showing that, of 90 INDEPENDENT studies on aspartame, 83 out of 90 of 92 per cent identified a problem. Of the seven non-industry studies attesting to aspartame’s safety, six were studies from the FDA and one was from a literature review almost exclusively dealing with industry-sponsored research. Dr Walton noted at the time that, “As the role of the FDA in the question of aspartame safety has been controversial and allegations were made of a conflict of interest on the part of the FDA Commissioner at the time of aspartame’s approval, one could argue that the FDA studies should not be considered truly ‘independent’. If these studies are excluded, along with the literature review focusing only on NutraSweet ™ (Aspartame) industry-funded research then 100 per cent of the truly independent-funded research demonstrated some type of adverse reaction to NutraSweet ™ (3).
During a recent year spend in Wellington assisting Alison White of the Safe Food Campaign on food additive issues, I attended all the Food Safety Authority’s Consumer Forum meetings where we brought up this same issue of being industry-bias in aspartame safety reports without any response from the NZFSA other than that they were completely satisfied with the quality of research coming out of the industry. What became clearer to me at this point was something I’d discovered a decade before while dealing with government departments (whose function is primarily to serve the public) – they were long ago approached by the chemical/pharmaceutical and food industries whose controlling international corporates can afford to keep expensive lawyers and lobbyists in full-time employment ensuring that whoever is in power, Labour or National, is kept safely in the pro-industry camp.
It will be interesting to see how the NZFSA copes with the Italian researchers’ final comment in their report on aspartame’s potential hazard: “Since the results of carcinogenicity bioassays in rodents, mainly rats and mice, have been shown to be a consistent predictor of human cancer risk, the first results of our study call for urgent re-examination of permissible exposure levels of APM (aspartame) in both food and beverages, especially to protect children.”
Diet beverages containing aspartame are top-selling items in New Zealand supermarkets, and as aspartame-containing logo diet drink can be seen swinging at the fingers of every second Kiwi teenager on the street …
(1). Morando Soffritti, Fiorella Belpoggi, Davide Delgi Esposti, Luca Labertini; Aspartame induces lymphomas and leukaemias in rats.
Eur.J.Oncol, 10:2, 2005. In Press.
(2). John W Onley, et al.; Increasing Brain Tumour Rates: Is There a Link to Aspartame?
Journal of Neuropathology And Experimental Neurology, 55:11, 1115-1123, November 1996.
(3) Walton, RG; Survey of Aspartame Studies: Correlation of Outcome and Funding Source, outlined on
60 Minutes (29 Dec 1996), provided to Ed Metcalfe for the purposes of his story “Sweet Talking”, published in The Ecologist, 30:4, June 2000.