Following a 2006/2007 attempt in New Mexico, a bill to ban aspartame is being proposed in Hawaii.
Regular readers of this blog know that while aspartame sweetener itself does not contain any GM material, it is made with the assistance of genetically modified microorganisms and the expired patent was formally owned by Monsanto.
Aspartame is metabolized by the body into products known to be carcinogenic and neurotoxins; it has no discernable health benefits, and is known to make you crave carbohydrates possibly leading to weight gain; it is known to destabilize diabetes and other medical conditions.
Aspartame is very important economically because it is sold at the same or higher price than sugar, but manufacturing and distribution costs are a tiny fraction compared to sugar. Advertising campaigns are amazingly similar to tobacco, with names like zero, diet, light and sugar-free, often displaying athletes or other healthy or attractive people, suggesting health benefits without making any direct health claims.
The failed attempt in New Mexico came in the wake of massive corporate lobbying from all directions, from soft drink giants to food and chemical giants.
A number of prominent health professionals in New Mexico made compelling public statements supporting the proposal, like HJ Roberts, Internist; Russell Blaylock, Neurosurgeon; and Ralph Walton, Psychiatry. Details can be found by entering these names into an Internet search engine such as Google or Yahoo.
The battle in Hawaii looks set to be a fierce one, and unfortunately the local press seems to be ignoring it. Most of the attention has been from New Mexico’s press. The stakes are high for all of us, and after all the issue is not making aspartame products unavailable, because they could still be imported informally from other states or prescribed by doctors. What’s at stake is the freedom of choice, because passage of this bill would mean alternatives to aspartame would be more readily available to Hawaiians.
This is a battle we should all be watching and supporting. If you have contact with friends, media or health professionals in Hawaii, please ask them to help. Success or failure in Hawaii could could have ramifications felt all over the world. Even if the bill in Hawaii doesn’t pass, benefits can be had if world attention is drawn to the debate, so be sure to spread the word.
Man, I love how much I learn by reading your blog! Wonderful!
I wish I could believe that Hawaii’s legislators were truly motivated by health and diet concerns, and not at all influenced by Hawaii’s status as a major sugar producer coming under some threat should Aspartame ever become a major alternative sweetener.
😉
It’s worth having a look at this video explaining Donald Rumsfeld’s involvement when he became CEO of Searle in 1977:
http://www.soundandfury.tv/pages/rumsfeld2.html
Rumsfeld literally got aspartame approved in the same way he ran the war in Iraq, like a charging elephant with soundbites, rhetoric and brushing aside any information contrary to his position.
I have a personal involvement in this story, because I grew up an easy bicycle distance from Searle Labs in Skokie, Illinios, and I was in High School while aspartame was being approved by the FDA.
The mother of a friend of mine worked for Searle at the time. Before aspartame was approved, Searle served it to their employees at lunch time and with their coffee. They were not particularly discouraged from taking it home, and my friend’s mother smuggled some out for my mother, who was only too pleased to be one of the first few people outside of Searle to try it. My mother went on to be a big fan of aspartame, and in addition to develop many of the same medical problems we now know are associated with it.
One of the things being discussed is possible litigation against the companies behind aspartame, similar to that involving the tobacco companies over the last decade or so.
Aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed in healthy people. All this garbage about it not being safe is just that-garbage. The scientific community doesn’t believe these lies (see snopes.com, aspartame.net). If you want the real story on aspartame, read the full text of the latest comprehensive analysis (2007) by people with skill in toxicology (the science of poisons) at http://www.fte.ugent.be/vlaz/Magnuson2007.pdf . Avoid websites by physicians with little training in this field and New Mexico activists that failed twice to get aspartame legislation even out of committee in New Mexico.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Toxicology)
New Mexico
Searching on John E. Garst gives some interesting results. It seems he has left nearly identical comments on a number of blogs. Other than he seems to have been an editor for the Journal of Animal Science a few years ago, there aren’t a lot of professional references anywhere on the Internet.
The study he sites was apparently sponsored by Ajinomoto, the worlds largest manufacturer of both MSG and aspartame.
Hmm, interesting. I’m always a bit suspicious of people who feel the need to put letters after their names along with a list of all the things they’re an expert in. What they really mean to say is “I know far more about this than you, so you shouldn’t be expressing your opinion”. It’s the classic ploy of pseudo-science.
I’m married to an academic scientist, and he doesn’t go around the internet leaving arsey comments on people’s blogs. Nor does he assert his authority by listing his qualifications.
It’s possible that Dr Garst is a real scientist with an interest in the aspartame industry. If so, it shows what a big impact bloggers have in raising a dissenting voice against big corporate interests. Up until now they’ve had huge control of public opinion through media PR campaigns and selective academic funding. One thing they can’t control is concerned individuals writing stuff on their blogs. If someone with a PhD has got nothing better to do than tick people off for writing blog posts then the industry must be getting really rattled.
Rebsie J. Fairholm, Piano Grade 3 (Folk Singer, Amateur Plant Breeder) Cheltenham
You’ve covered this already, but this is kind of an update and a different take; the key thing right now is to get both bills scheduled for hearings, and then passed through the two houses’ health committees (by the way, there is not one whit of motivation coming from the legislators having to do with Hawaii as sugar producer; they are only responding to the pleas and insistence of victims of aspartame poisoning in Hawaii, and some excellent sleuthing on Garst; he sent similar BS to NM legislators and I have concluded he is a retired chemist formerly in the employee of some related manufacturer; if it were so harmless, he should drink a case of diet sodas a day for a month, and then get back to us on the extent of neurodegenerative damage from the formaldehyde and methanol metabolized from aspartame):
Senator David Ige chairs the senate; Sen. Carol Fukunaga is the vice chair
Rep. Josh Green, MD, chairs the house comm.; Rep. John Mizuno is the vice
chair.
Can you please mobilize some letters from Hawaiians to them, please, starting
with your own? Folks should also then follow up early next week with calls to
their offices. All contact information is on the website for the Hawaii
Legislature.
_________________________
You’ve covered this already, but this is kind of an update and a different take; the key thing right now is to get both bills scheduled for hearings, and then passed through the two houses’ health committees:
Senator David Ige chairs the senate; Sen. Carol Fukunaga is the vice chair; Rep. Josh Green, MD, chairs the house comm.; Rep. John Mizuno is the vice
chair.
Can you please mobilize some letters from Hawaiians and mainlanders emailed to them, please, starting with your own? Folks could also then follow up early next week with calls to their offices. All contact information is on the website for the Hawaii Legislature.
_________________________
Bills to Ban Aspartame Progress in Hawaii; Tactics and Consumer
Considerations
Greetings from New Mexico!
I am grateful for the broad Hawaiian support thus far for the bill to ban aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener, from human consumption or sale, which I hope will be heard soon and strongly support in the Senate Health Committee and in the House Health, and Consumer Protection and
Commerce Committees. I was the main force behind this massive effort in the NM legislature in 2006 and 2007, and I can share with readers a few insights on the pitfalls and stumbling blocks that will be thrown at this legislation by corporate lobbyists representing some very evil doing corporations in the USA and in Japan which manufacture and use this poison to save a few bucks on adding real sugar as a sweetener.
I have been discussing this at length with Dr. Adrian Chang of Honolulu, the nuclear engineer and force behind the very brilliant and ultimately successful effort to stop fluoride being added to municipal water supplies, thanks to the Oahu County government’s decision to not add fluoride (the legislature actually gave up on doing this for the entire state).
I am sure that these Hawaii bills to ban Aspartame can be passed, despite
blatantly corporate-serving and corporate-lobbyist-advanced theories that all of these concerns are entirely pre-empted by the federal authorities, or that Hawaii state government would automatically be sued by manufacturers. About the worst to legislators in Hawaii that could happen if one of these bills passes and is signed by Gov. Lingle is that the FDA Commissioner, Dr. Von Eschenbach, would be forced to revoke the approval for aspartame, which
should rightly have been done long ago.
This legislative passage could occur with the right help from the Medical community in Hawaii, particularly the experts in toxicology, internal medicine, pediatrics, oncology and biochemistry at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine. I encourage Hawaiians to contact whomever you consider
as both ally and as impeccable and unimpeachable sources of testimony at the
Medical school and in the Medical community, who can come and testify and/or write a strong letter to the Committee members.
We will generate strong letters of support from the three top mainland physicians in this regard, who are really the top leaders in the world on aspartame’s proven medical and neurodegenerative harm, and all readers of this would do well to easily google and read their articles:
HJ Roberts,Internist; Russell Blaylock, Neurosurgeon; and Ralph Walton, Psychiatry. All wrote great letters to the entire New Mexico Legislature members, and readers should take the time to google and read their articles.
The New Mexico bills were overwhelmed and eviscerated by the most vicious corporate lobbyists I have ever encountered, representing Ajinomoto of Japan, the world’s largest manufacturer of both aspartame and MSG, as well as their duped American corporate henchmen/partners-in-poisoning who use massive amounts of Aspartame, like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Altria/Kraft CorporateServices, and others. The same corporations and even more will show up in Honolulu, make no mistake, probably to include Wrigley’s Gum, all of whose products contain aspartame, which is metabolized as methanol and
formaldehyde, and even more dangerous since gum releases poisons absorbed under the tongue, which go directly to the brain.
In Santa Fe in 2006 and 2007, there was a regrettable and probably avoidable strong partisan context (which we hope will prove irrelevant in Hawaii) since so much criticism was leveled at Donald Rumsfeld, aspartame progenitor when he was CEO of G.D. Searle, the patent holder, back in 1981
in one of the darkest and dirtiest chapters of the checkered history of failures at the FDA, when Rummy as part of the Reagan Transition Team, forced the appointment of a crony, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, as FDA
Commissioner, in exchange for agreeing to approve aspartame, despite 16
years of the FDA saying no, based on the obvious and rudimentary toxic biochemistry of its metabolized components.
The first salvos against ignorance and for true consumer protection in Hawaii have very recently been fired in the news report on KHON-2, a rather conservative station and Fox Affiliate in which the predicatble professor from the Medical school basically said “a little bit doesn’t or won’t hurt
you.” Of course, this is absurd: a whole lot of little bits of poison are cumulative and end up killing you, whether through cancer, heart disease, Multiple Sclerosis, etc.
We hope to see a Hawaii Capitol Press conference with the bills’ sponsors(Kalani English, Suzanne Chun Oakland, Mele Carroll, and Calvin Say) to illuminate the press about the medical harm done by aspartame!
I have communicated a basic letter to the editor to all of the press and all of the radio stations in Hawaii, but few have responded thus far. Nothing will really take shape, I fear, without massive press coverage, and we were able to achieve that in New Mexico, which included all of the main television stations in New Mexico.
Readers should watch the online posting of the brilliant documentary, SWEET MISERY, the DVD by a recovered victim of aspartame poisoning in Tucson, Cori Brackett, the most convincing possible communique on this subject, according to the New Mexico Senate sponsor, Jerry Ortiz y Pino.
Please let me hear from you if you have questions or want to contact your friends, family, or colleagues in Hawaii to get this done….
Thank you, and Mahalo,
Stephen Fox
Managing Editor of Santa Fe Sun News
Founder, New Millennium Fine Art
217 W. Water St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505 983-2002
stephen@santafefineart.com
Hello, found your site while browsing through agro.biodiver.se’s blogroll, and checkout out a few posts.
Somehow, I hadn’t heard of this legislation until now! I wrote a post recently about legislation in Maryland against food dye, another additive that we don’t need, that may have some adverse health effects, so the topic of legislation like this has been on my mind. While I agree that we don’t need and probably shouldn’t use aspartame, manufactured food dye, trans-fats, corn syrup, or a million other things – I wonder if legislation is the way to go.
In my post, I suggest that we use scannable labels that take us to a database of ingredient details (or simply a reliable ingredient list online, perhaps maintained by the FDA) so those of us who want to know can easily find out. There isn’t conclusive science to back up claims of harm from a lot of these additives, so I don’t know if it is appropriate to legislate them away. It is a free market, after all. Why can a person make and market one thing but not another? Of course, once you add in the problems of lobbying and corporate control of federal agencies… well, we can all just hope that the new administration will work to get science rather than greed in charge.
I was wondering what’s the reason to ban aspartame and not other things? I read your post about research that found a link between aspartame and cancer, but that’s only in amounts that an average person would never consume. Perhaps that means a warning label is warranted (don’t consume 1.5g of aspartame per day if you weigh 75kg), but if we go around banning everything that can be linked to disease when consumed in large amounts, we’d have a lot of banning to do.
Similarly, if using GM microbes to assist in the production of things was considered to be a reason to ban them, you’d have to ban a whole list of important medicines, including insulin. Enzymes produced with recombinant DNA techniques are invaluable, including enzymes that allow products to be made more efficiently than could be done without them. Without restriction enzymes that cut DNA at specific points, we’d be unable to use DNA to diagnose genetic disease, for forensics, for paternity tests, and more. There isn’t any scientific reason to ban or regulate products that use GM microbes in their production, and we’d be a lot worse off without them.
Hi Anastasia,
I think you intended to leave a link to your recent post, but something happened and it didn’t come through. I think the link you intended is this:
http://www.geneticmaize.com/2009/02/to-dye-or-not-to-dye/
Thanks for stopping by and leaving the comment. I’ve seen your blog before, also by following a link the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, and I’m pleased to see you here.
Commissioning a scientific study takes money and is a very political process. Just because there isn’t one that unambiguously proves harm, in my opinion is not a very good indication of product safety. Take for example tobacco that wasn’t proved to be associated with cancer or addicting until the 1990s. In fact, in my opinion, it’s not the responsibility of some unnamed person to prove a product like aspartame is dangerous, it’s the responsibility of a company like Searle or Monsanto to prove the product is safe before they sell it, something they never did. The safety testing that was done before it’s release on the market was deeply flawed, and has been repeatedly refuted.
In the meantime there are a lot of indications aspartame is a very dangerous product. A study recently done in Italy showed it was a carcinogen. The FDA has a list of ‘symptoms’ known to be associated with the product which included cancer, MS and a number of neurological problems, weight gain, even death. More than 50 medical doctors have spoken publicly about the connection between aspartame and medical problems their patients have, and some of these stories and the associated diseases are pretty horrific. A number of people have also come forward on the Internet and other places and told their own stories, many of which are also very compelling.
It’s also known and been described how aspartame breaks down in the body into among other things, methyl alcohol and formaldehyde, a known neurotoxin and carcinogen. Like most other toxins, these haven’t been studied in combination with other food additives or environmental pollutants so it’s not possible to determine in a credible way exactly what safe levels of consumption for these really are, and it’s my very strong feeling they don’t play a constructive role in anyone’s diet.
Your mentioning GM microbes used to manufacture insulin, and this is a good example too of a potentially dangerous product. Since it’s introduction, many diabetics complain it does not control their illness as well as insulin from animal sources as well as causing other side effects. There is clearly an alternative to insulin of GM microbe origin, and it may be superior, but it’s availability is limited for people who need it.
For the record, I have never spoken out against the use of GM microbes in laboratory research or diagnostic tests, and I am not opposed to this at all. Nor am I against their use where alternative treatments don’t exist or are unaffordable. This is assuming of course that sensible safety procedures are followed. My problem is not with the science or products themselves, but the way people’s options for alternatives are taken away from them.
In the case of aspartame, thousands of products all over the world contain it ranging from foods to pharmaceudicals, and in many cases good alternatives are not available.
The reason I supported a ban in Hawaii was not to take away people’s choice, in fact it was to make alternatives available. The 50 US states share open borders and anyone in Hawaii who wanted would have been able to import aspartame products from elsewhere. It would however been a mandate to make alternative and safer products available for Hawaiians.
I’m very suspicious of John E. Garsts’ true motives. I’ve found his argument against the dangers of aspartame popping up everywhere on the net. He sounds more like a corporate hack than a doctor. sighed .. a victim of aspartame…
Came across this interesting website (…and the comments therein!) but as a lay person with no qualifications in this area I am finding it almost impossible to gauge what the ‘truth’ is regarding aspertame. Recently I came across this review of current scientific literature (http://www.dieteticai.ufba.br/Temas/ACUCARES/ASPARTAME.pdf) which concludes that there is not sufficient evidence to prove its alleged harmful effects. Has anyone here read this document and can someone help me understand where its findings sit within the discussion on aspertame. Many thanks in anticipation.
Hi James,
Thanks for posting that link.
This discussion is 4 years old now, so I doubt many of the original people who left comments are still reading it. I’ll try to give the best answer I can, but maybe over time some more comments will appear.
I’ve just quickly scanned through the document, and have a couple of observations.
First it seems to have been sponsored and funded by the NutraSweet corporation. This seems like a little bit of a conflict to me. Second, a lot of it’s language is very dismissive and sarcastic, which in my opinion is not very helpful. Finally, at a first glance, it doesn’t seem to have any or much new studies or data in it. It’s just a bunch of people paid by the NutraSweet corporation to write a bunch of opinions that differ from a large number of other scientists. The issues in the paper seem to have been selected by the authors themselves to write about, and there doesn’t seem to be anything independent about it’s findings.
The paper purports to ‘prove’ aspartame is safe, but I would suggest that this is something that cannot be done. It’s just not possible to know you are considering every way it could be dangerous.
For many years the tobacco companies insisted their products were safe and non-addicting, because no one could prove otherwise, until after decades it was finally possible to document one of the likely many ways tobacco can cause cancer. This didn’t happen until the 1990s!
In my mind this study doesn’t add much new to the discussion of aspartame.
Another way of thinking about it is there’s very little that ‘proves’ or even suggest very much ordinary sugar is in any way bad for you. Lots of people and food industry promotions suggest it is, but if you research ordinary sugar in the same way you are researching aspartame now, and think about what you read, I don’t think you will conclude there are any real reasons it’s bad. I think you then have to ask yourself why are you even bothering with aspartame?
Many thanks for coming back to me with a quick response – apologies, I didn’t read the dates of other comments as I was so engrossed in what I was reading! The reason I came to this subject is because whilst shopping I noticed that Robinsons (juice manufacturers) highlight the fact that there is “No Additional Sugar” in their products. However when I looked at the ingredients label on the back, I was very surprised (in truth ‘annoyed’) to read that they clearly were ‘adding’ aspertame and sacchrin! How is this not additional sweetening? Pointing this out to the manager of my local supermarket was a complete waste of air as he hadn’t even heard of aspertame – sheep being supplied by goats me thinks!
James
James
It really comes down to junk and chemicals we don’t need, doesn’t it?
This John E Garst is nothing more than a paid shill.
He has no empathy, therefore is a psychopath.
How could he advocate a neurotoxin to children?
I would love to meet him, so I could laugh in his soulless face.
I guess he serves a purpose; he allows people to blatantly see his deception and awaken.