http://www.upi.com/Consumer_Health_Daily/R...aspartame/6520/

Eat To Live: New fears over aspartame
RSS Feed - Consumer Health Daily - Reports
Published: July 2, 2007 at 9:25 AM

By JULIA WATSON
UPI Food Writer

LE BUGUE, France, July 2 (UPI) -- Two years ago, Italian researchers at the prestigious Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences published a study that showed feeding rats aspartame at levels per body weight close to those of humans led to an increase in brain tumors, lymphomas and leukemia in the females.

Aspartame, familiar to consumers as brand names NutraSweet and Equal, is an artificial sweetener found globally in approximately 6,000 products.

It's contained in candy, desserts and yogurts. It's in diet sodas and hot chocolate and those sugar-free packets for coffee and tea in restaurants. It's also in some pharmaceutical products, like cough lozenges and vitamins. Some chewing gum is aspartame-sweetened.

At this level of saturation, it represents 62 percent of the artificial sweetener market.

As reported by Eat To Live last May, the FDA rejected the foundation's conclusions, saying they weren't consistent with other studies that the FDA had evaluated that confirmed aspartame was safe as a sweet alternative to sugar.

So the Ramazzini Foundation went back to the drawing board.

This time, it put 4,000 rats on doses of aspartame equivalent in respective body weight to the amount consumed by some people.

With this second investigation, they also began exposing rats to aspartame before they were born. And they allowed them to live until they died a natural death, instead of killing them at two years as in other studies elsewhere.

Their conclusions have just been published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Parents should take particular note.

Again, they found significant increases in lymphomas and leukemia. When fetuses were exposed to the sweetener, the potential carcinogenic effects increased.

A study last year from the National Cancer Institute involving 340,045 men and 226,945 women found no significant link between aspartame and cancer.

But the men and women studied were all between the ages of 50 and 69 and had only begun consuming the sweetener in adulthood.

Children are considerable consumers of aspartame through Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Kool-Aid, Jell-O gelatin dessert and pudding mixes and certain Popsicles.

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the acceptable daily intake of aspartame is equivalent to a child weighing 50 pounds drinking two cans of diet soda daily, or a 150 pound adult drinking just over seven.

It encourages people not to panic. Just to stop buying products containing aspartame.

However, the Ramazzini Foundation researchers write in their study: "On the basis of the present findings, we believe that a review of the current regulations governing the use of aspartame cannot be delayed.

"This review is particularly urgent with regard to aspartame-containing beverages, heavily consumed by children."

The FDA says it has not yet reviewed the report. But it appears it still finds no reason to revise its opinion or advice to consumers.

Since the study's publication, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, on its Web site Chemical Cuisine directory, has now demoted aspartame from the "use caution" category to "everyone should avoid". It also gives thumbs down to acesulfame.

If you want a sweet alternative to sugar, it recommends sucralose, commonly known by the brand name Splenda.

To satisfy a sweet tooth craving, try chewing on dried apricots or a handful of dried prunes or raisins. Stewing then pureeing dried apricots provides a very sweet sauce to pour round or over ice cream or slices of cake that already contain enough of the sugar you crave that you don't need to increase the amount with a butterscotch or chocolate sauce

They're adding/added that toxic crap into everything. Man i pity the next one or two generations...

Designer drugs -designer foods/GM foods - genetic manipulations -mental/health disorder pandemics ....

Yes its true -Aspartame causes brain cancer in rats and it's in everything from Diet Coke to Walkers crisps

PS Alluminium in underarm deoderant causes Alzheimers too!
)

You serious about the deodorant!?

Thats it, i'm going back to talc!

Thats good to know, after ive drank hundreds of gallons of the stuff. Diet softdrinks

You know this reminds me of the Asbestos cover up.
Companies were mining it for decades and the workers were practically swimming in it for years. The companies new full well of the long term side effects from scientific studies done early on and kept it all hush hush until decades later when those same poor workers started dropping like files from cancer(Asbestosis)and a lot of questions were beings asked about the companies prior knowledge of it's deadly long term effects as it became public/common knowledge that the product causes 'Asbestosis'.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits by the victims families are still pending.

I totally and completely agree with you. Why people think its okay to ingest chemicals is beyond me.

http://www.scheadlines.com/release.asp?relID=213

"Aspartame Triggers Infertility and Impotence. FDA Looking Into Blindness Reports from Impotence Drug Users
PRESS RELEASE
May 31, 2005"

FDA = Money making scum bags.

No Prime...you have to learn to tell us how you REALLY feel ...lol (just kidding)

Scary stuff, huh?

http://www.naturodoc.com/library/News/EU-aspartame.htm

It is scary reading that if a guy was drinking diet coke at the moment of conception ... that is enough to cause birth defects!!!!
http://infertility.health-info.org/fertili.../aspartame.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/InterGarden/permacu...2/msg04747.html

If you didn't ingest chemicals you would die. Just about everything is a chemical including pure water.

Yea sure Waspie, but where do we draw the line on natural chemicals and the man made chemicals(toxic)that we're purposely scammed into consuming?

Yeah... what REBEL said. I meant man-made chemicals. There are so many things added to food, supposedly to make us healthier, or the food better for us (or last longer, have more flavor or color etc.)

Seems like a good way to control the population without freaking everyone out....speaking of which...I'm going to smoke a cigarette.

If I put it anymore blatantly I would get banned

I could be mistaken but I'm sure I read somewhere that the main proponent/supplier of Aspartame in the US is Donald Rumsfeld.
Why is that not suprising?

Yes they mention about the 4000 plus pesticides involved in making cigarettes.... do they have organic cigarettes????? I know it is supposed to be illegal to grow your own tobacco but doesn't it grow wild in America???? if you smoke that would it be as unhealthy... without all the added chemicals... and fast burning powders added???? and they need to rework those filters... the number of times I accidently lit the wrong end after a drink or two.... those fumes are awful... make you feel sick for ages.... I'm sure there is a lot of toxicity in those once the heat from the burning cigarette releases the toxic fumes from the material the filters are made of.... maybe it's healthier to use unfiltered with those old cigarette holders????

I gave up about 4 years ago... after years of hastle from my kids.... but I do think that modern cigarettes make you sicker faster than the olden day...organic varieties... before the profit margin and flavour enhancement ...chemical addictive additives??? became such a big factor in all our food chains... Just a little grumble on behalf of the remaining smokers....


what I was trying to say before I sidetracked myself, is that at least cigarettes appear to be less toxic than our textiles market.......our clothes ....our warm snug beds.....

Yes, they have "natural" cigarettes. My mom wanted my dad to quit smoking so she bought him these thinking that at least they would be healthy. I walked into the house with my aunt, and she being the naive woman she was, asked mom what was cooking. I asked who was smoking pot, knowing full well Mom & Dad would NEVER allow anyone to smoke pot knowingly on their property. Yup, it was the cigarettes, needless to say only one got smoked and then the rest were chucked into the wood stove.

yes strange that!!!!!