What's in your diet soda: the health risks of aspartame

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

What’s in your diet soda: the health risks of aspartame

In 1965, a chemist at G.D. Searle & Co discovered aspartame. By 1981, aspartame was approved by the FDA and for sale under Searle’s trademarked brand name, NutraSweet. On aspartame’s shoulders, an entirely new arm of the food and drink industry was born: the calorie-free-sweetener ‘diet’ market.

In 1980 - a year before the FDA approved NutraSweet, and its active ingredient, aspartame - an internal Board of Inquiry composed of three independent scientists confirmed that aspartame “might induce brain tumors.” In fact, as far back as 1971, Neuroscientist Dr. John Olney found that one of the key ingredients of aspartame caused holes in the brains of infant mice. A Seale researcher confirmed Dr. Olney’s foundings in a follow-up study. In 1977, the FDA formally undertook a criminal investigation of Searle with the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate if Searle had knowingly misrepresented findings and “conceal[ed] material facts and ma[de] false statements” in aspartame safety tests. It was the first criminal investigation the FDA had ever filed, but it went nowhere.

Finally, in 1981, Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld brashly stated that he would use his vast political influence - not science - to get aspartame FDA approval.

A few years later, the General Accounting Office issued a report (pdf) about the FDA’s approval of aspartame. The report showed that many of the scientists polled about aspartame’s safety disagreed with the FDA on issues of aspartame’s safety and felt that it needed further research, specifically in

[the areas of] neurological function, brain tumors, seizures, headaches, and adverse effects on children and pregnant women.

The result was that research continued in all areas - except for brain tumors.

Then, in 1996, 84 of 92 independently-backed peer-review studies of aspartame found bad health effects resulting from aspartame.

Finally, in 2006, the Italian Ramazzini Institute published a study that showed aspartame might be a possible carcinogen: they tested aspartame on 1,900 rats for the full (roughly 3 year) course of the rats’ lifetimes. Previous studies had only been conducted on much, much tinier rat pools and only for 1-2 years. The rats tested in the shorter studies didn’t show an increased susceptibility to cancer while taking aspartame. This is significant because cancer, generally and largely, manifests itself later in life: after the age of 55. 2-year-old rats are roughly 53 in human years, so the Searle-funded studies were essentially ending the experiments before potential cancers could be observed in the rats. In 2010, Ramazzini repeated their aspartame tests on mice (pdf) and found that aspartame, even in small doses over the course of the mouse lifecycle

induce[d] cancer of the liver and lungs.

So, just to recap:

Searle’s aspartame, now a vital part of a billion-dollar industry, has been linked to increased incidents of liver and lung cancer in lab animals, including in animals that took aspartame prenatally;

Research on aspartame’s relationship to brain tumors has been cut short, despite the cautioning of many scientists;

Research funded by Searle consistently and regularly found aspartame to be a safe additive, while independently-funded research regularly found otherwise;

Oh, and:

Arthur Hull Hayes, director of the FDA when Donald Rumsfeld was Searle’s CEO and aspartame was approved, later left the FDA days after it was reported he had accepted bribes, gifts, and other illegal ‘perks’ from industry leaders such as Hershey Foods Inc. and General Foods Corp.

Just for fun:

Shortly after aspartame’s approval by the FDA, Rumsfeld sold Searle to Monsanto. (And, before that, he won major industry awards for increasing Searle’s bottom-line by laying off 60% of the company’s employees.)

Aspartame is bad. It may increase your risk of many cancers. There’s evidence that it heightens the risk of strokes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes. And we don’t know if it causes brain tumors or not because research in that area was halted decades ago.

Who’s thirsty now?

h/t Tom Philpott, Just how bad is aspartame? Grist, 2/14/2011