LIGHT URBAN LEGENDS

You're going every day to your office. Greet everyone politely and sit down behind your clean desk, ready to fulfill your daily tasks for the food industry. Suddenly the
phone rings and a worried consumer asks you if aspartame is dangerous. Your face turns red because:
a) You know nothing about aspartame
b) You're supposed to know that
c) You lie and say it's just scare mongering
You try to reassure the caller. Avoiding difficult problems is one of your tasks. Afterwards you take a look on the Internet and the peace is quickly restored. They're all just rumors. Conspiracy fanatics. You even decide to read some of the articles and write a little of your own. So you have something to read aloud or show your colleagues and your boss at the next staff meeting.

Of course Internet hides all possible articles. It's easy to attack someone on premature conclusions. There are people who claim there's a conspiracy behind the assassination on John F. Kennedy. There are probably also individuals who write that Elvis Presley is the true killer of JFK, complete with a matching theory. To use such 'article' to ridicule the complete conspiracy theory on JFK, is what has been tried with aspartame. A smoke curtain to rock the consumer back in its sleep. Aspartame is not a safe ingredient. It even once made a Pentagon list as a potential biochemical weapon. (Committee for the National Institute for the Environment, "Food Additive Regulations: A Chronology," Congressional Research Service, Updated Version, September 13, 1995.) There's enough evidence aspartame causes problems. There are thousands of well documented cases of aspartame poisoning. Just like there's enough evidence tobacco damages your health. That the tobacco industry has tried almost everything to hide that fact, is similar to how aspartame is treated. They don't want to lose billions of course. That's why a lot of effort and money is spent to maintain the illusion aspartame is safe. As long as you manage to create doubt, the people always give the authority the benefit of it. And it's a personal victory for the manufacturers – originally Monsanto - to see the aspartame scandal appear on the popular Urban Legends sites.

According to one of those sites, Urban Legend Zeitgeist, a man of 75 kilos has to drink abnormal amounts of Diet Soda, 375 cans of Diet Coke within a few hours. How do they reach to such conclusion? By simple calculations. One can of Diet Coke contains 200 mg of aspartame of which 1/10 is converted to methanol. And methanol appears in tomato juice, even 5 times more. The always included comparison that methanol also appears in natural foods is being used as an argument that methanol in aspartame cannot cause damage. Fact is that methanol in natural foods contains the protector pectin. Aspartame doesn't have that. The site states that one gram methanol per kilo bodyweight causes poisoning.* That's 75 gram for a 75-kilo man. 75 divided by 20 mg is 375 cans. If it was up to Urban Legend Zeitgeist the Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) can be raised from 40 mg to 133 mg per kilo bodyweight because one study (without mentioning the source) showed no negative signs with test persons - all 75 kilo men - at a consumption of 10,000 mg aspartame. Besides the lucky 75 kilo men, the example of 40 kilo teenagers who are obsessed with their weight and consume large quantities of Diet soda is not often used. The legally established maximum ADI in Europe is 40 mg/ kilo bodyweight and sets for them a maximum of 1600 mg aspartame. In other words, 8 cans or one 2 ½ liter bottle of Diet soda. A child of 20 kilos 4 cans or a 1 ½ liter bottle of Diet soda. That is if they don't consume anything more than the 9000 other products worldwide that contain aspartame. And those are not just Diet products. PepsiMax for example also contains aspartame. According to Nutrasweet the average intake of aspartame consumers lies at 1 – 3 mg/kg. Always mentioned without any examples. Let me give those. That's one can for a 200-kilo heavy man. For a 20-kilo child: one to three sips of Diet Coke. Do you trust a company that screws around with numbers if it's supposed to be about a completely safe product?

Almost all independent research in aspartame shows problems with consumption. Ralph Walton, MD (chairman Center for Behavioral Medicine, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine) analyzed 164 studies in the medical literature that were relevant for the safety of people. 74 of those studies were financed by the aspartame-industry and 90 without.

Of the 90 industry-independent studies, 83 (92%) showed one or more problems with aspartame. Of those 7 remaining studies, the FDA did 6. The fact that there are people working for the FDA before, during and after the approval of aspartame who had interests in the aspartame-industry has already been proven. The FDA is in this case not really independent.

Of the 74 industry-sponsored studies, all 74 (100%) claim no discovery of any problem with aspartame. Compare that with the tobacco-industry whose own research also never showed any problem while independent research did.

Studies in a laboratory are often different than the real world. In a lab it's not for example about Diet Coke that has been transported in hot containers in trains and trucks. Often one doesn't even work with aspartame solutions but dry capsules. Of course delivered by the industry itself. The laboratory version of aspartame is quite different than its products in stores.

Is stupidity damaging for your health? Probably not because I personally know plenty of dumb people who still can manage to walk without a walker. Research by neuropsychologist Paul Spiers showed in 1988 that aspartame caused a decrease of intelligence and damage of the memory. That probably explains why aspartame consumers don't want to think further than the brochures of the aspartame manufacturers.

My previous published article about aspartame (Kleintje Muurkrant, 2001) wasn't picked up by the larger Dutch press. An editor of a large weekly news magazine called me uncritical and partial because apparently I had not used any industry-sources, which is the case with 9 out of 10 articles about aspartame (which I call partial). If you write an article about washing powder, you don't quote from All or Dash when it's about the quality of the product. The magazine also stated that they already had spent enough attention to aspartame in the early 1980s and that there was nothing new to report. Except a whole generation of teenagers who know nothing about it, I added.

For those who distrust the independent research, I recommend an experiment you can do yourself. Just like the 11-year-old Jennifer Cohen from New Jersey did. In January 1997 she bought 24 cans of Diet Coke in a supermarket. She put seven cans in the refrigerator, seven cans in her room (about 20 degrees Celsius) and seven cans in a Boekel incubator setting the temperature at 40 degrees C. She checked the temperatures daily for the next 10 weeks. She took the remaining three cans to Winston Laboratories in Ridgefield, New Jersey. The lab tests revealed that a can of diet soda normally contains 0.06 percent aspartame.

After 10 weeks she took the soda cans out of the refrigerator, out of her room and out of the incubator, and she brought the samples to Winston Laboratory for analysis. Winston Laboratories reported the following results. In the refrigerated sample, 0.058 percent aspartame remained: The missing portion turned into 0.001 percent DKP and 53.5 parts per billion formaldehyde. In the sample from her room, all that was left of the aspartame was 0.051 percent. The missing portion had turned into 0.002 percent DKP and 231 parts per billion formaldehyde. In the incubator sample, there was only 0.026 percent aspartame, but 0.010 percent DKP and 76.2 parts per billion formaldehyde. The higher the storage temperature, the higher the level of DKP in the soda. Room temperature seems to create the highest levels of formaldehyde in soda. (How diet soda turns to poison, EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL; Fall 1997). This experiment even showed that aspartame breaks down into formaldehyde in a cooler environment. DKP is a chemical that can cause cancer.

The European Committee on Food received in 2001 more than 500 pages of research documents from the British Foods Standards Agency. In December 2002 the committee presented their final report; there's nothing wrong with aspartame. Unfortunately there were members in the committee who had ethical and financial ties with the food industry. There's for example the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), an industry group founded in 1978 by Coca-Cola, Heinz Foundation, general Foods, Kraft Foods (of which Philip Morris is the owner) and Proctor & Gamble. Also the manufacturers of aspartame – Monsanto and Ajinomoto have branches in various parts of the world that have separate memberships in the ILSI. Holland Sweetener Company, another company that sells aspartame, is also a member of ILSI. At least half of the Committee members have been involved in ILSI projects and/or participated in ILSI workshops.The committee refused or were negative on most independent studies while no negative word was being said about the industry-sponsored research. Click here for a complete member list of ILSI.

The Committee cites as evidence that aspartame does not cause seizures two aspartame industry-funded human studies (Rowan 1995, Shaywitz 1994). Had they read these studies, the Committee would know that nearly 100% of the subjects in these studies were taking anti-seizure medication while the studies were being conducted. The members in Brussels had probably better things to do than to read and study hundreds of pages of research. Click here for a detailed analysis of the fraud in the industry-sponsored research.

If you would compare the whole situation with a court trial where the judge only listens to one party, nobody would take it seriously. Strangely enough, this is exactly what happens with aspartame. DSM (together with the Japanese firm Tosoh owner of Holland Sweetener Company – the second largest producer in the world of aspartame) reports on its website that 'all scientific research has always led to one and the same conclusion: aspartame consumption is safe'. They don't even try to beat around the bush with it. Further they write: 'On internet and after that in the press however do appear from time to time publications that doubt the safety of aspartame. These publications are not based on scientific research and we can only guess for the reasons why certain individuals put together such negative publications.' This is how easy they 'reason' in stating that all independent research wouldn't be scientific.

I will examine one of such 'unscientific' studies closer. The Norwegian medical students Arnstein Eltervaag and Elisabeth Hetle connected to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway presented in December 2001 their thesis, based on the Sonnewald study of 1995, which showed damage in brain cells of mice by aspartame. The 48-page thesis contains 35 references. Contributors to the study have an impressive career in biochemical studies of neurotoxins. They worked with brain cells from 7 day old mice. Several amounts of aspartame were being administered. After 7 days they were analyzed by 2 different tests: Lactate dehydrogenases (LDH) test, which gives a picture of cell death. And the 3-[4,5- dimethylthiazol-2yl]-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromid (MTT) test, which can be used to analyse mitochondrial activity in living cells.

The results showed damage/cell death from an added quantity of 0.06 mg/ml aspartame each day for 4 days. As a comparison Diet Coke contains 0.24 mg/ml aspartame. MTT- and LDH-tests showed damage to the neurons at an added quantity of 1.5 and 3.00 mg/ml ASM after 22 hours of incubation. The conclusion of the thesis was a warning against the consumption of aspartame, especially in products consumed by children, because NMDA-receptors and the synapses involved also are connected to learning. Click here for more details of the original Sonnewald study.
Published in Neuroreport, 6:318-320

The PR people at DSM may tell me what's so unscientific with this particular research.

* A study done by the university in Barcelona in 1998 (Trocho) even showed that one single dose of 10 mg/kg of aspartame led to an accumulation of formaldehyde in the body (liver, kidneys and brain) and in cell tissue where it damaged DNA.

© 2003 Dennis Rodie

The original Dutch article was published in Kleintje Muurkrant 383, September 26, 2003

For more details about aspartame: see The Sweet Lie