I really thought that I had written my last of many articles about the real dangers of aspartame about ten years ago and that everybody by now would know how dangerous it is. But the light has not yet dawned on the ad happy American public. And then of course the clever drug manufacturers never stop their wily ways.

The current manufacturer of aspartame is Ajinomoto, a fine American name, and they are going to rename their aspartame and call it Amino Sweet, and millions will fall for it and be harmed. This last set of comments is the best I can do for you and the last time that I will deal with aspartame. If this doesn’t help my readers then ignorance and money will once again prevail.

Years ago in the 70’s it was the aspartame manufacturer Searle who wanted FDA approval for their new sweetener Nutrasweet, that was based on aspartame.

But aspartame was not approved as an ingredient in dry food until 1981. For over eight years even the FDA refused to approve it because of the seizures and brain tumors it produced in lab animals. Indeed those fine people at the Pentagon had listed it as a biochemical warfare agent! That of course is no barrier to putting it in people’s food in the States, as long as the profits are large enough to support political lobbyists. They did it with sodium fluoride. (See The Fluoride Cover Up 10/11/2008)

Then Rumsfeld, as a major figure at Searle told them that he could get it approved by political means since science wasn’t working for them. He talked to President Reagan, who was friendly with the Searle people and Reagan fired the FDA Commissioner who wouldn’t approve it, and appointed his own man, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes.

Even then there was so much opposition to approval that a Board of Inquiry was set up. The Board conclusion was, ‘Do NOT approve aspartame.’ But under the rules Dr. Hayes could overrule his committee. He did so and aspartame VERY rapidly entered into over 1200 products.

It will not surprise people who read my postings that Dr. Hayes left the FDA very soon after doing his hatchet job and went to work in the PR section of Searle, his real employers, under conditions that prevented his being interviewed about it by the press for ten years.

In a different context " Congressman John Conyers said in a written statement hours before the recent vote on the war in Afghanistan, "those who are forced to bear the costs of war are the first to recognize a flawed policy, while those who profit from perpetual war do their best to blunt any change in course." IF the public were able to see the war against them being waged incessantly by the drug companies, maybe, just maybe they would do something about it.

Monsanto bought Searle in 1985 and became the better known multinational, multibillion dollar industry that sells toxins to the public. So many FDA people have left that department to find really lucrative jobs in Monsanto that it has been suggested that the FDA be renamed the Monsanto Chemical Department, and be done with all the hypocrisy about the pretense of testing for the public benefit.

The Government, the FDA, Congress, a past president and other associated government organizations such as the CDC, FTC, NHI and others have all catered to the chemical industry. This leaves the know nothing public pretty much on its own, And Fox News isn’t going to enlighten them.

The law isn’t going to help either. It was the Monsanto lawyers who succeeded in making it illegal for anyone to say that their milk did NOT contain Bovine Growth Hormone, on the grounds of false advertising!!!

The same lawyers tried to distort the legal definition of the word ‘organic’ so that every big food manufacturer of processed food had free play and the real organic people would be at a big disadvantage.

On that occasion the health magazines managed to get the news out to the public and the FDA was swamped with thousands of calls and faxes. Remember that. If you don’t get off your arse and do something these people are more than ready to kill you and your children if it makes them a profit.

India has an appalling rate of farmer suicides since Monsanto began operations there. The Monsanto plan is to use genetically engineered seeds that are resistant to the special weed killer they manufacture. They also produce hybrids that can only be fertilized by their specially manufactured fertilizers. Farmers become captives of the company and must pay exorbitant prices to do the farming that was once fairly inexpensive.

That little canter was just to show you how ruthless are the people who push toxins on the unsuspecting public. Indian farmers are burning the crops produced by Monsanto seeds in an attempt to stop the corrupt practices in agribusiness. They are not likely to win. Money rules there as here.

You have met aspartame as NutraSweet, Equal and Candarel, and soon you will see it as AminoSweet with the deep male voices and sweet ladies in white coats on TV explaining how everyone is mistaken about thinking it dangerous.

Changing the name doesn’t change the chemistry however. Right now it’s just as dangerous as it ever was and is in over 6000 foods including many of the high fructose corn syrup soft drinks, (a double whammy), breakfast cereals and jams, chewing gum, vitamins and prescription drugs, to name a few. It is even in some of the packets of sugar that you get at the restaurant of your choice.

Aspartame producer Ajinomoto is going to broadcast the message that AminoSweet “tastes just like sugar, and that it’s made from amino acids – the essential building blocks of protein."

That much is true…but the deception starts because ignorant people will assume that if it uses the building blocks of protein that it must be safe.

Ajinomoto will plug the story that because it is made of amino acids that it is safe. That is a lie and they know it is a lie. Not the first one you heard on TV though is it?

There have been over 10,000 adverse reports to the FDA for aspartame reactions. That’s more than the total for all other food additives combined. And the FDA estimates that only about 1 in a 100 who experience a bad food reaction report it. Do the math. A million or more people already and the FDA people knew it was bad news from the start.

Dr. Morgan Ralford M.D., D.Sc., a doctor of ophthalmology reported that aspartame stimulates damage to the brain and central nervous system having the manifestations of what is known as PKU Neuro Damage. Over 3000 cases were reported to the FDA in the period of safety assessment and the FDA ignored the evidence. I’ll mention Dr. Ralford later as he goes into the deadly and irreversible effects of aspartame damage to the optic nerve.

Let’s have a quick look at what some medical authorities said about aspartame around the time it was being pushed through the FDA by political chicanery.

Here are the words of Dr.James Bowen in his report to the FDA. Some of the language is slightly technical so I have put into bold face the conclusions and dangers that are written in plainer English in case you tend to skip past medical terminology. The bold face was not in the original. I add some comments, always in parentheses, (….)

“….Every known metabolite of aspartame is of marked or questionable toxicity and patently unsafe for human use. Methyl alcohol is metabolized to nascent formaldehyde in the eye, nervous system and other metabolically active organs.” (Above 85 degrees aspartame breaks down into Methyl alcohol and formaldehyde…the toxic substance in the trailer homes given to the Katrina victims by the Bush administration who bought them cheaply because of the contamination.)

“It immediately attacks and denatures the tissue structure proteins in which it is metabolized to nascent formaldehyde. (Nascent means coming into being.)

“This stimulates specific organs and subcellular autoimmunity which seems to be the preponderant source of the bad experiences reported by Nutrasweet victims.

“…This corresponds well with the symptomatologies often experienced, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, bulbar palsies, neurochomornal disorders, etc. Also visual disturbances, heart palpitations,infertility and fetal loss may be traced to aspartame ingestion.

He also mentioned that he didn’t think anything would be done about the adverse reports.

“…There is the issue of the approval of aspartame for market which has violated every principle of responsible science and responsible government….I highly recommend that you deny in every way possible any subterfuge of respectability that the aspartame people have enshrouded themselves and their product with, in hopes of qnickly denying its access to the worldwide marketplace. I write this, not believing that it will do the slightest bit of good in the sense of affecting the labeling issue per se, but that it might reach some honest, concerned, conscientious individuals in the process.”

Doesn’t sound like scientific approval of the substance or the method used to force it onto a totally unsuspecting public. The last sentence of the paragraph is also the reason that I have written about the despicable deceptions in the medical industry for years.

Here are some verbatim comments of one of the honest FDA toxicologists, Dr. Adrian Goss:

“ The views of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety read like a script written for Abbott and Costello in the sense of their having perceptions inside out and upside down, e.g. 329 fetuses were examined in 2 days by a single person, a clear impossibility.

Searle has not submitted all the facts or experiments to the FDA, retaining unto itself the unpermitted option of filtering, interpreting and not submitting information—an attitude of disregard for FDA’s mission of protection of the public health…conduct which compromises the scientific integrity of the studies.”

(At this point in the report some 14 test blunders are listed, including: Substitution of animals, meaning hiding of deaths of some animals, using sick animals on drugs, incomplete examinations, unreported tumors, missing batch records, mixing food so that some rats in the test could avoid the product and destroying other rats before they could be analyzed. Doesn’t sound like either honesty in testing, or scientific investigation.)

And yet these were the very studies that were used to approve aspartame. Total deception.

Dr. Gross continued…”It seems bizarre that essentially the same set of studies could provide a foundation for a decision that demonstrated the safety of aspartame. Although the General Accounting Office expresses the view that the FDA followed its required process, I sharply disagree—although the FDA may have gone through the motions, such a process or dance represented no more than a farce or a mockery.”

Since aspartame affects the central nervous system it produces symptoms that mimic other better known diseases and patients with aspartame poisoning are often diagnosed with one or the other of these diseases because the doctor knows them better and isn’t up on problems due to aspartame poisoning.

Here is a list that contains many of the diseases mimicked by aspartame poisoning:
Multiple sclerosis, Lymphoma, Panic disorder and depression, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Attention Deficit Disorder, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and there are others. But you could be diagnosed for one of these and then have incorrect treatment because of aspartame poisoning, and still carry on poisoning yourself too, making matters worse.

Over two thirds of the problems associated with aspartame are neurological and some of them are irreversible and cannot be remedied by stopping eating or drinking the stuff.
Here are the actual words of the doctor of ophthalmology previously mentioned. Dr. Morgan Ralford says in his report on aspartame:

“The above product is also manufactured as NutraSweet(Equal). This pharmacological spinoff is a highly profitable item with a growing market. These products are used as a sweetener, some 200 times as sweet as regular cane sugar. This product has some highly toxic reactions in the human visual pathway, and we are beginning to observe the tragic damage to the optic nerve such as blindness, partial to total nerve atrophy.

“…The medical community must alert itself that we have a problem that has surfaced due to the factor of the drug industry. Parents must be alerted to the side reactions of this toxic product and its reactions.”

Here I note briefly the amazing annual increase in ADD and children with psychological problems and obesity…both of which are likely due to drinking sodas with aspartame and high fructose corn syrup.

Remember too that we had a fairly recent war called the Gulf War. Troops came back with Gulf War Syndrome and were called fakers by the Pentagon. But those troops drank lots of soft drinks in the desert, and the temperature was often more than the 85 degrees at which aspartame breaks down into methyl alcohol and nascent formaldehyde. The symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome are very similar to aspartame poisoning but the connections are invisible, possibly because of the money of the soft drink industry.

Those soft drinks containing aspartame are advertised as low calorie ways of losing weight, but more than low calories is involved. Those drinks destroy your ability to count calories and open you up to over indulgence. Aspartame chews up the nervous system and high fructose corn syrup makes you obese. A great way to improve your health?!

There were some studies favorable to NutraSweet, about seventy of them, and all came from inside the drug industry. Of the just over ninety studies done by independent researchers over 90% said in effect…BAD! DON’T TOUCH IT!
Aspartame has been proven to be a cause of depression, interference with the brain chemistry and a reason for the destruction of brain cells. There is NOTHING good about it whatever the TV authorities say.

If you must have a sweetener use Stevia until you can give up the need for sweet stuff altogether, but note well that if you are craving sweetness in your food then your diet is not good for you. Examine it to see what’s missing, and trust me, you don’t have an aspartame deficiency.