Aspartame Coverup Reaches Into High Places

By James Donahue

March 2005

When the R. G.  Searle Co. put Aspartame on the market as the artificial sweetener NutraSweet in the 1970s, records indicate that company officials and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already knew it was an unsafe neurotoxin that triggered brain tumors, seizures and a variety of other brain disorders.

A paper by Dr. Betty Martini notes that tests on monkeys and hamsters clearly showed severe problems with the product. FDA toxicologists Adrian Gross and Jacqueline Verrett strongly objected to its approval for public consumption. In fact, the FDA withheld approval of the product for 16 years.

Yet it was eventually marketed anyway, making its way into soft drinks and a wide variety of other prepared foods and promoted as a safe alternative to sucrose and sugar.

Since that time there has been a massive increase in brain disorders in both children and adults throughout not only the United States but also in many other countries where Aspartame or American-made products containing Aspartame are sold. These disorders range from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases and Multiple Sclerosis in adults to Attention Deficit Disorder, other learning and behavior problems and severe depression sometimes leading to suicide in children.

New reports now indicate that Aspartame also interacts with most drugs, causing them to be ineffective or changing their properties.

Author Dr. James Bowen wrote: "Because aspartame in the processes of digestion and metabolism, forms about ten other known severe poisonings, and intermediate metabolites, its potential for drug related interactions is immeasurable. To top that off, the aspartame molecule is so heinously poisonous in different ways that it never passed a single FDA standard toxicity test.”

Instead of taking Aspartame off the market, the pharmaceutical industry, with the FDA’s approval, has marketed a spate of powerful and costly drugs, including putting children on the controversial mind bending narcotic Ritalin, to control behavior.

How could this happen in a nation like the United States, where we always thought the FDA was keeping close watch over the safety of the products we consume?

The blame appears to lay on the cunning of Donald Rumsfeld, the man now serving as our Vice President and who was the CEO of Searle Co. at the time Aspartame was finally put on the open market.

Bowen was quoted in Martini’s paper as charging that Rumsfeld was apparently hired by Searle as a way of using political power to get Aspartame approved. Rumsfeld’s authority reached all of the way into the White House, where newly elected President Ronald Reagan took “direct executive measures to paralyze (the) FDA from further action against Aspartame,” Bowen wrote.

He continued: “Our FDA has never been the same since. Deadly chemicals now being blessed by FDA are marketed as wholesome pharmaceuticals, are just the tip of the iceberg, and the result of Rumsfeld's damage.”

The agency now, instead of being a watchdog for the public, appears to be controlled by the pharmaceutical and chemical cartel in America. In a sense, it is linked to a form of organized crime involved in a massive rip-off of the public pocket book.  

Bowen wrote that Aspartame also is found to be a “destroyer of DNA,” attacking the mitochondrial and leading to birth defects that can be passed on to all future generations. Not only that, but the sweetener is found to be a “virulent brain carcinogen. No other chemical causes the brain cancer rate to jump as much,” Bowen said.

Stephen Lester, a spokesperson for The Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, wrote that the FDA now recalls drugs that are found to interact with Aspartame, and leave the toxic sweetener on the market.

One example of this was the recent decision to pull ephedra, or Chinese MaHaung, from the market after an athlete died that was also using Diet Coke with Aspartame. Lester noted that Dr. John Olney reviewed the FDA records on ephedra and found it to be safe. Yet nobody thought to look at Aspartame and its interaction with ephedra as the possible cause of the athlete’s sudden death.

The bottom line to all of this is the willingness by the big drug and chemical companies to break the rules for more and more profits at the expense of the general public.