Aspartame: Carcinogen or Harmless Sweetener?

Aspartame was developed by accident in 1965 by James M. Schlatter, who was working on an anti-ulcer medicine. It then took TWO DECADES for the FDA to finally approve it: in 1981 for use in dry goods and 1983 in carbonated beverages, and in 1993 for other beverages, baked goods, and confections. When it finally was approved by the FDA, it was under suspicious conditions. President Reagan fired the FDA Commissioner who refused to approve it. Reagan also happened to be a friend of G. D.  Searle, owner of G. D. Searle & Company, which manufactured aspartame. Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed as the new commissioner, and he set up a Board of Inquiry about the artificial sweetener. The board reported that the FDA should not approve aspartame, but Dr. Hayes overruled the Board of Inquiry and passed it anyways. Not long after he approved it for use in carbonated beverages, Hayes left the FDA for a position with G. D. Searle’s Public Relations firm. Suspicious indeed.

10% of aspartame is made of methanol, which is a deadly poison. I won’t go into all the chemical reactions, but methanol is released when part of aspartame encounters a certain enzyme found in the small intestine. Usually the amount released is very little and it would take a long history of aspartame consumption for adverse effects to occur. However, when aspartame is heated to above 86˚F, the absorption of methanol in the body is sped up considerably.  This heating up of aspartame can occur if the food or beverage containing it is improperly stored or if heated as directed, like in Jello. Note to self: don’t eat Jello. Ever again. Well, that’s unrealistic. I’ll still eat Jello, but I don’t think I can stomach eating much of it anymore.

The reason methanol is poisonous to the body is because it breaks down into formic acid and formaldehyde. Yes, formaldehyde. Like what preserved the bodies of baby pigs in 7^th grade dissection. Can you still remember the smell? The awful, disgusting, gag-inducing smell of a chemical that preserves dead bodies. On pig dissection day, one of my friends cut out a pig’s eye, lids and surrounding skin included, and chased people around the room making it wink at them and saying, “The pig likes you! See? Wink, wink.” Well, formaldehyde is not just used as a preservative of dead things—it’s a deadly neurotoxin. Because both formaldehyde and formic acid are toxins, the recommended limit of consumption of methanol is 7.8mg per day. A liter of a beverage sweetened by aspartame contains 56mg of methanol. The FDA has released a list of 92 symptoms associated with consuming aspartame. They include headache, dizziness, change in vision, seizures, sleep problems, and fatigue. To see the full list go here.

Victoria Innes-Brown conducted a 2.5 year study of aspartame effects on lab rats. She added NutraSweet, which is just one brand of aspartame, to the drinking water for 60 rats, 30 male and 30 female. 67% of the female rats (20 of them) developed tumors golf ball size or larger. And I’m not talking about rat-sized golf balls. However only 23% of male rats (7) developed tumors. Of her control animals (48), 21% of females (5) and no males developed tumors, though these tumors were generally smaller in size.

I shall leave you with a gem from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It was written in 1906, but honestly sounds like this could still be applied today, what with all the chemicals and additives that companies put in our food. Well the working conditions highlighted in most of the book are not the same, but this seems to be. “They were regular alchemists and Durham’s [canned food]; they advertised a mushroom-catsup and the men who made it did not even know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised ‘potted chicken,’—and it was  like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows?... They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper… All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham…men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly.”