Need Another Reason to Avoid Aspartame? Here’s 92…
If your health practitioner prescribed a medicine with 92 (or more) side-effects – some of them serious – you’d no doubt be wary of taking it. And we wouldn’t blame you. But millions of people choose to drink soda containing aspartame – a dangerous sweetener with as many side-effects – on a regular basis, some of them consuming the highly-sweetened drink daily.
Are you still drinking soda with aspartame?
Perhaps they’d think again after setting eyes on a staggering list of 92 side-effects online, as disclosed in this article.
Here are just some of the reactions experienced as a result of aspartame consumption:
- Abdominal pain
- Anxiety attacks
- Arthritis
- Asthma
- Asthmatic reactions
- Bloating, edema (fluid retention)
- Blood sugar control problems (hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia)
- Brain cancer (pre-approval studies in animals)
- Breathing difficulties
- Burning eyes or throat
- Burning urination
- Can’t think straight
- Chest pains
- Chronic cough
- Chronic fatigue
- Confusion
- Death
- Depression
- Diarrhea
- Dizziness
- Excessive thirst or hunger
- Fatigue
- Feel unreal
- Flushing of face
- Hair Loss (baldness) or thinning of hair
- Headaches/migraines/dizziness
- Hearing loss
- Heart palpitations
- Impotency and sexual problems
- Irritability
- “Like thinking in a fog”
- Marked personality changes
- Memory loss
- Migraines and severe headaches
- Muscle spasms
- Nausea or vomiting
- Rapid heart beat
- Slurring of speech
- Swallowing pain
- Vertigo
- Vision loss
- Weight gain
Aspartame Disease is also believed to mimic the symptoms or worsen the following diseases.
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Arthritis
- Birth defects
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Diabetes and diabetic complications
- Epilepsy
- Fibromyalgia
- Lupus
- Lyme disease
- Lymphoma
- Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS)
- Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
- Parkinson’s Disease
Next time you’re in the grocery store, will you rethink adding soda containing aspartame to your cart?
Don’t forget to take a look at Dr Betty Martini’s recent blog post on the dangers of aspartame, too.
Remember to always consult a licensed healthcare practitioner before embarking on any treatment, it’s your health and it’s IMPORTANT. www.naturalcures.com/disclaimer
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I am sorry, you are in error. The E.U. claim to have looked into it and have found Aspartame to be completely safe, so there is no need to worry any more. They themselves will of course stay well clear of it, so that they may have the chance to enjoy the payola that the industry will no doubt push their way. I do hope they will remind themselves that cash transactions above the level of 500 euros are to be made illegal within the E.U., but of course Swiss bank accounts will smooth the way for these sad degenerates. The next move, no doubt, will be to make the consumption of Aspartame, compulsory. Perhaps madness is our only escape.
The approval of aspartame is one of the most corrupt episodes in our government’s history. Google ‘Rumsfeld approves aspartame’ for the insight. And actually my research into this event has made me a believer that many in government are worshipers of satan. That’s how bad it is.
[...] Need Another Reason To Avoid Aspartame? Here’s 92 [...]
There are at least three fundamental problems with anti-aspartame science.
First
Everything about toxicology is dose. Every substance is toxic; it is dose alone that allows for safe use of substances as drugs, sweeteners, etc. This means that whatever the substance, be it methanol, ethanol, botox, cyanide, or even aspartame, will have a toxic dose. But that also means that critics who claim aspartame is ‘toxic’ have no understanding whatsoever of science, because these science-deficient critics believe there is NO safe dose. In reality it is safe dose that FDA, EFSA, and all regulatory agencies investigate for any substance. If critics had a case, they would say that it presents a hazard at X dose because of Y issue. They cannot do that and never could! And there is no evidence that the current limit for safe dose presents any hazard given hundreds of even governmental studies. That means that those reporting or experiencing a problem likely have some personal issue that explains their reaction. I tried to make that point in my earlier writings. But that also means that high dose aspartame studies are absolutely meaningless to safety analysis, because everything is toxic. That fundamental error on the part of critics excludes many studies from even being considered as relevant.
Second
Another fundamental error involves faulty experimental design and in that regard, no studies from either side have actually been done correctly. But this means that many, many studies including those you cite can be dismissed outright. You simply cannot compare results using aspartame vs a water control in animal studies. A very small amount of formaldehyde or formic acid reacts with the folate abnormally and that causes folate loss. Such loss is normally compensated for by vitamin replenishment. But these poorly designed experiments fail to recognize or consider this flaw, so in these experiments the treated group and only the treated group is being deprived of folate. Simply put, the loss of folate from methanol exposure alone is not happening in the water control. That makes comparisons invalid and thus invalidates the work. A fundamental tenet of science is dose-dependency of effect. Unfortunately these papers often can demonstrate dose-dependency, but of course it is dose dependent—one is dose-dependently depleting vital folate. Examine the papers you offer and consider this issue for each one of them. Interestingly, this same flaw happened in the earliest company studies; various people at FDA saw the results and that led to this conspiracy theory (critics often cite these twenty year old conclusions as valid, but they aren’t because of this issue). What happened is that later works used corn based diets for their animals; these are very rich in folate and this issue was not seen reproducible again. The matter arose again with Soffritti’s 2006 and later work, because they used life-time (~3 year) studies with Sprague-Dawley rats known to become folate deficient by 1 year of age. But it is the fundamental design issue that explains most such errant science. Critics just have never understood the folate issue, but it is key to any understanding of aspartame safety and that brings me back to the point I tried to make before.
Third
All issues with aspartame can be explained by folate deficiency, folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms), B12 deficiency, methionine synthase enzyme issues, and/or homocysteine accrual. All these are functionally interrelated and involve not just the normal, natural recycling of otherwise essential formaldehyde and formate produced from methanol into methyl groups that are vital to life (DNA) itself. Ethanol (primarily through its antagonist metabolite acetaldehyde) is a natural inhibitor of the vital folate reaction; so alcohol consumption may be a prime factor explaining any sensitivity to aspartame as well. Realize ethanol, not methanol, is the cause of fetal alcohol syndrome, and is a documented factor in facilitating many cancer types.
So in the end, I have examined aspartame literature for a decade now that even postulates a problem and the paradigm I have provided you above explains every paper either directly or indirectly (like the weight gain report I cited earlier). The fact is that aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed and EFSA, like every relevant regulatory agency in the world, has once again substantiated this point.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
Hi John
I’m interested in your comment that appears to say that you don’t actually believe
there to be any negative effects at any dose?
” If critics had a case, they would say that it presents a hazard at X dose because of Y issue. They cannot do that and never could!”
If that’s the case, I think I’d have to question your impartiality too.
The most crass, but poignant, example of the “safe dose” test I’ve ever heard is that if You and I were to share a coffee and I shared with you that I’d put a milligram of urine in your coffee, or “non-toxic” cleaning fluid…You’d be unlikely to drink that coffee…as most would
I agree that lots of comments on Aspartame appear to be anecdotal in nature, however there are lots of studies as well as practitioner feedback supporting “magical” disappearance of ADHD/ADD symptoms once aspartame is removed from the diet
However I also note your vociferous defense of Aspartame spanning the last 5 years including quoting studies sponsored and organised by a leading producer of MSG & Aspartame. I also note in your defense statement of aspartame to the NM proposal to ban aspartame you position yourself as an academic, but also a “consultant”. It leads me to wonder if one of those consulting projects has been for pro-aspartame organizations.
I’m not sure whether you are still an elected member of the Society of Toxicology, however far from being a comfort, you’ll be aware that every major drug maker in the land is a sponsor of that organization. Pfizer, Glaxo, Roche, Astra Zeneca etc.
Forgive my cynicism this time but you appear to be a full-time, active advocate of Aspartame as opposed to a full time toxicology stalwart
Lee
PS – For transparency I’m pro-Natural Health and as owner and CEO of NaturalCures.Com, I am awaiting convincing evidence that Aspartame, Splenda, Sucralose etc al are safe
Lee:
I appreciate your cynicism. I actually am now a retired academic. My consulting time was with an Italian Pharmaceutical company and had no link to aspartame. FYI, I have never received one penny from any organization or source regarding my views on aspartame. But this is contrary to critics that have many financial connections (books, aspartame cures, etc.) and although the link has been removed now, critics once stated motivation was to sue the makers of this substance. Reality is I really don’t care whether people use or don’t use aspartame. But I do care about people presenting lies and mistruths about its safety, as I would about any public misperception. I also do care about some ignorant scientists writing flawed papers (as I wrote about above) and then trying to influence regulatory decisions. But my vociferous defense of aspartame was unleashed when these ignorant critics tried to ban it in my state. I spoke out then and have since every time they try something again. And I will write websites perpetuating these untruths until this issue disappears.
Aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed. My vociferous defense of aspartame is because the opinion of thousands of toxicologists in 90+ regulatory agencies around the world as to aspartame safety is a solid opinion. It was attested to again by EFSA just a few weeks ago. If you lined up toxicologists I would guess 9,999 of 10,000 would have the same educated opinion–that 1 probably didn’t care either. That is why I speak out. The lies and misinformation about this substance simply must stop.
But there is a difference between what I write and the regulatory agencies opinion. The regulatory agencies concentrate completely on scientific issues as they should. But I have read and listened to critics stated concerns (the 92 symptoms). I don’t doubt some people have a problem with aspartame, but it is just some people. Most people do not have a problem with aspartame and the health advantage of a synthetic sweetener over natural sucrose, fructose sweeteners has proven immense. In fact since no substance causes 92 symptoms, rigorous examination of the arguments against aspartame led me to discover that ALL these concerns revolve around the paradigm I presented. And that is simply that PERSONAL health issues explain any sensitivity to aspartame.
And those personal issues revolve around a major public health issue that needs to be fixed. And that is another reason I write these comments—to inform the public of these endemic health issues. Originally these were just folate deficiency, which was documented even before aspartame appeared (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Tephly%2Cmethanol) and was documented by the 1998 mandate to include folate in all grain products sold in the USA, Chile, and Canada. That was to prevent major birth defects in children of deficient mothers, but it demonstrates the seriousness of the problem. FYI, European and many other countries failed to do so and some still have not seen the light. Today these personal issues have expanded to include corollary issues like, but not limited to, folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms) and likely many, many more folate related issues like brain uptake etc., B12 deficiency, methionine synthase enzyme issues, and/or accrual of homocysteine, which is a major marker of health problems (Wikipedia). All these are biochemically functionally interrelated—block one and you block them all. Genetics can impact one and that will affect the others too. These are important functional processes that normally and naturally detoxify otherwise essential formaldehyde and formate produced from methanol by converting them into methyl groups vital to life itself. Problems with insufficient vitamins raise concentrations of the true and potent excitotoxin homocysteine. For more about the connections between folate, homocysteine, and vitamin B12, the ‘Metabolism of Folic acid’ figure under vitamin B12 at Wikipedia.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
Mr Garst you are soooooo wrong sir!
Margaret Russell
Brisbane
Australia
Margaret:
I appreciate and welcome your comment. You are certainly entitled to your opinion. But you have to understand, first that I really don’t care whether people use or don’t use aspartame; that is one’s personal choice. What I try to provide is consumer information about why all the world’s relevant regulatory agencies deem aspartame safe. That includes amongst many not just the US FDA but your own regulatory agency, see http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumerinformation/aspartame.cfm, and EFSA, which in just recent weeks reaffirmed their opinion as to its safety http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/aspartame.htm.
What I am trying to provide is not just information about aspartame, but about one of the greatest continuing health issues known—folate and B12 vitamin and related problems. See these free full text papers from the Canadian Family Physician about these issues, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19005123 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ryan-Harshman%2C%20Aldoori%2C2008. The folate problem was addressed (but by no means completely) in the USA, Chile, and Canada in 1998 by mandatory fortification of grain products with folate. All conspiracy theory arguments against aspartame including this ridiculous 92 symptoms list arose before that date because of this inherent problem with preexisting vitamin issues. The rest of the world is slowly coming to understand the problem is ongoing everywhere, including Australia-NZ, which mandated folate starting in 2009, see http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/foodstandards/userguides/mandatoryfolicacidfo4208.cfm. For more Google folate fortification,europe; much of Europe is behind the curve on this problem and that translates into not just more cancers and disease, but explains personal problems with aspartame.
My argument is this. ‘All issues with aspartame are PERSONAL issues that can be explained by folate deficiency and corollary issues like folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms), B12 deficiency, methionine synthase enzyme issues, and/or homocysteine accrual. All these are functionally interrelated and involve not just the normal, natural recycling of otherwise essential formaldehyde and formate produced from dietary methanol into methyl groups, but the availability of these methyl groups to regulate vital-to-life (DNA) itself. See both the linked paper as an example and in it, the biochemical pathway involved that interconnects these issues in the figure both here, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17449906.
Another corollary to this PERSONAL issue is ethanol consumption. I’m not writing about a beer or a drink now and again, but too frequent consumption of ethanol. Ethanol (through its antagonist metabolite acetaldehyde) is a known ‘look alike’ inhibitor of these vital folate reactions. So, in these borderline cases where aspartame sensitivity occurs, alcohol consumption may be a prime factor explaining any increased sensitivity to aspartame as well. Realize ethanol, not methanol, is the cause of fetal alcohol syndrome, and is a documented factor in facilitating many cancer types, for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218157, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16508294, and work from Australia too, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19326430.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
[...] If your health practitioner prescribed a medicine with 92 (or more) side-effects – some of them serious – you’d no doubt be wary of taking it. And we wouldn’t blame you. [...]
You need another health practioner!
I need to work my way through every one of the 92, but perhaps refuting Trite’s list is a start.
So let’s take a look at some of the issues in just the last section of http://healthsp.com/dangers-aspartame/ titled Aspartame “may trigger, mimic, or cause the following illnesses” that were claimed tied to aspartame. But instead let’s see how folate deficiency, folate enzyme issues, vitamin B12 issues (methyl-B12 completes folate function), or homocysteine (a true excitotoxin that fosters many health issues [see Wikipedia] and often increases in blood because of folate related or methylation-related issues) better explain how personal issues, not aspartame, “may trigger, mimic, or cause the same illnesses (after the ailment note the number of National Library of Medicine citations, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed, even associating the ailment with aspartame, even if only suggestive; clearly unrelated abstracts and letters to the editor with notoriously unsubstantiated allegations are not considered valid.)
■Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, 1: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18604921. (“The findings provide unprecedented evidence that CFS frequently is a folinic acid responsive clinical entity accompanied by B-cell immunodeficiency and inappropriate antibody responses to EBV, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16889122.)
■Epstein-Barr (Epstein-Barr virus infection), 0, but also no PubMed evidence connecting this to any of the factors above either).
■Post-Polio Syndrome, 0, but also no PubMed evidence connecting this to any of the factors above either).
■Lyme Disease,0 (“The Lyme disease spirochaete, Borrelia burgdorferi, produces the LuxS enzyme both in vivo and in vitro; this enzyme catalyses the synthesis of homocysteine…”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17600074.)
■Grave’s Disease, 0 (“Previous studies have provided evidence that a high prevalence of MTHFR gene polymorphisms is frequently detected in patients with autoimmune disease, suggesting a novel genetic association with autoimmune disorders…..Our result provides epidemiological evidence that MTHFR mutation (C677T) protects women from GD”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20941748.)
■Meniere’s Disease,0 (“patient had an elevated fasting homocysteine level, which is a known risk factor for thrombus formation”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14661435.)
■Alzheimer’s Disease, 0 (“Thus, folate status may influence the expression of clinical symptoms of AD disease and aid in the delay or prevention of dementia”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22064069. But there is an interestingly strong association between the homocysteine oxidation product homocysteic acid (see more under epilepsy) and Alzheimer’s disease, “since amyloid-β increases HA toxicity and HA is an agonist of N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptor, we speculate that elevated blood HA affects the brain cognitive function through NMDA receptor-mediated toxicity in AD”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22531414.)
■ALS,0 (“Homocysteine is an excitatory amino acid implicated in multiple diseases including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) …”, MeCbl [Methyl-B12] decreases Hcy induced motor neuron death in vitro in a hybrid cell line derived from motor neuron-neuroblastoma and may play a role in the treatment of late stage ALS where HCy levels are increased in animal models of ALS, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21237187.)
■Epilepsy, 27 (Two points must be made here. It is difficult to decipher underlying factors in epilepsy. That is, which comes first in epilepsy, the seizure or the drug treatment consequence? Severe MTHFR deficiency [a vital folate enzyme] is an important diagnostic consideration in infantile epileptic encephalopathies, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21778025. A possible new disease, cerebral folate deficiency has been connected to epilepsy, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21737328. In any event epilepsy seems to involve homocysteine, which is a consequence of some folate or related irregularity. Anti-oxidants are also indirectly implicated too. For example, there is strong evidence that the homocysteine oxidation product homocysteic acid, a trioxygenated sulfur based acid and powerful NMDA receptor agonist, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2901456, can initiate seizures in animals, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22108622. On the other hand anti-epileptic drug therapy (AED) can raise homocysteine too:“CONCLUSIONS: These data support the hypothesis that AEDs [anti-epileptic drug therapy] play a major role in hyperhomocysteinemia development in patients with epilepsy. Adding folate and vitamin B12 to AED therapy is a safe and inexpensive way to reduce the risk of hyperhomocysteinemia”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22360846.)
■Multiple Sclerosis (MS), 1 (“Patients with MS were found to have raised homocysteine levels but low B(12) levels, which might contribute to the pathogenesis of MS.”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21570300.)
■EMS [Eosinophilia-Myalgia Syndrome] (none, but also no PubMed evidence that this has any connection to aspartame either. However, acetaldehyde, the primary metabolite of ethanol, is a powerful inhibitor of folate-mediated reactions, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20016718. The fact that acetaldehyde has been associated with formation of 1-Methyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-beta-carboline-3-carboxylic acid, a substance directly associated with EMS development is amazing, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8452569,http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8355179).
■Hypothyroidism, 0 (“Treatment with folic acid ameliorated the histopathological alterations caused by propylthiouracil-induced hypothyroid rat testes.”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22042771).
■Mercury sensitivity from Amalgam fillings, (Mercury amalgam, aspartame): 0 (Measles,Mercury,folate:“CONCLUSION: Stratification by susceptibility cofactors revealed opposing directionality for correlations between Hg and measles antibodies, with positive effect estimates at lowest exposures only among boys with higher MMA [methyl malonate-a B12 deficiency consequence], lower folate and higher homocysteine levels.”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21992842).
■Fibromyalgia (There are two direct and one indirect report associating fibromyalgia and aspartame, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=aspartame%2Cfibromyalgia. The problem with these reports is that they fail to explore the role of underlying true excitotoxin homocysteine that can be countered by folate or any folate status. “…adults diagnosed with fibromyalgia may have their symptom complex related to an adult onset mitochondrial myopathy. This is an important finding since [vitamin] treatment of mitochondrial myopathy resulted in resolution of symptoms”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22325469. Also homocysteine concentrations have been related to fibromyalgia, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9310111. Moreover, studies implicating an aspartame connection neglected even far more important factors of sleep apnea (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=sleep%20apnea%2Cfibromyalgia), blood ferritin, which seems low in sleep apnea, and celiac disease, all of which may impact proper [folate and vitamin] nutrition.)
■Lupus, 2 (“Since MTR [methionine synthase, a B12 enzyme] is located on 1q43, our findings confirm the significance of the role of 1q region and the methyl cycle in etiopathogenesis of SLE [Systemic lupus erythematosus].”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17664238.)
■non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, 1 (“Reported associations between genetic polymorphisms in folate-metabolizing enzymes and lymphoid malignancies suggest etiologic involvement of one-carbon metabolism and its related dietary exposures.…. Our results suggest that high intake of vitamin B12 among heavy smokers may be protective against NHL but warrant further studies, including among nonsmokers, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16775167. If that is insufficient consider this http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/14/12/2999.full.pdf+html.)
■Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), 11 (Of these 11 abstracts two of the more recent disprove any connection to aspartame, “the causes and mechanisms are still uncertain, but dietary sugar or aspartame and thyroid dysfunction do not seem to be major factors”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7581640and “although intakes exceeded average dietary levels, neither sucrose nor aspartame negatively affected behavior”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8052458. The most recent of all these noted “L-glutamic acid- and aspartame-induced neurotoxicity was reduced in the presence of CNS-1102 [NMDA antagonist, CNS-1102], http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16352620. However, as is nearly always the case in the questionable aspartame literature, neither homocysteine [a potent NMDA agonist] or any folate parameter were even explored. Folate polymorphisms must be considered in this disorder too: “CONCLUSION: Preliminary data imply a possible relationship between A1298C MTHFR [methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, see Wikipedia] polymorphisms and the ADHD”, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21897766.)
Dr Trites, it would seem that an investigation completely refutes your last claims leaving little support for all the other innuendo that cannot be scientifically substantiated either.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
If there was any truth in anything you have said, there would be a dramatic change since 1998. The studies still show aspartame to be unsafe. Victims are still having grand mal seizures and birth defects are skyrocketing. Pregnant women are told to take folic acid, but it hasn’t made a difference in all these autistic babies and today the cases are epidemic:
Autism Occurrence
New Rate of Autism 1 in 88 (March 2012)
Pediatrics Reports- One in 91 Children in the United States Has Autism (October 2009)
CDC: One in 110 American Children has Autism (December 2009)
AUTISM OCCURRENCE: One in every 88 children in the US has autism ( read CDC March 2012 Study). It is estimated that approximately 1.5 million individuals in the U.S. has autism. (Note: This number and the following statistics below do NOT include: PDD, Aspergers and other spectrum disorders.) These statistics are endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), American Academy of Pediatrics, and other federal agencies.
Now you say studies prior to 1998 are invalid, and then say ” in fact the same problem exists for ALL aspartame studies (none have been done correctly), including specifically those 2006 and later”}
So what you’re saying is nobody is right but you, none of the aspartame studies are any good, and you want people to believe this poison is a safe additive. People are sick and dying all over the world and you want people to believe its from a vitamin deficiency?
As Dr. H. J. Roberts said: “The assertion that methanol concentrations never are very high after aspartame ingestion is erroneous. I devoted an entire chapter to methanol toxicity in my text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic (pp 668-685), and show in Figure XXI-1 the dose-related blood levels of methanol lasting 8 or more hours.”
He also said “The assertion that many New Mexicans suffer from a folate deficiency is challenged. While I discussed such a theoretical deficiency in my text, there is no evidence that folate deficiency is widespread among Americans. For example, a Mayo Clinic study involving thousands of blood assays concluded that it was rare. Garst ignores the major roles of phenylalanine and aspartic acid in aspartame disease. Enormous effort has gone into this constructive attempt to ban aspartame products. I believe that it constitutes an imminent health hazard for New Mexicans.”
This, of course, is when you tried to mislead the New Mexico Legislature. So the Mayo Clinic did a study and found that folate deficiency is rare. Yet you want to blame all the symptoms and disease precipitated by aspartame on this rare deficiency.
If anyone believes this nonsense come to Atlanta where I have the Brooklyn Bridge to sell. No one can take you seriously. You’re just taking up people’s time. Who is paying you, John? I see where you got on another forum having to do with cancer, and the people didn’t like it there either realizing this is absurd. Betty.
If you go to http://www.mpwhi.com/aspartame_flack_tries_to_mislead_nm_legislature.htm you will find out who John Garst is. He is going from forum to forum trying to convince people aspartame is safe. You can see that he tried to mislead the New Mexico Legislature when we tried to ban it there… When EFSA in a review said it was safe, Parliament told EFSA to do the review again because there had been 3 Ramazzini Studies showing aspartame to be a multipotential carcinogen, and a study in Denmark with 60,000 women showing aspartame can jump preterm births up to 78%. The studies were continuing to come in as they have for over 3 decades with almost 100% of independent studies, peer reviewed showing the problems aspartame cause. They now talk about a comprehensive review but if you look at it, they are using industry studies to defend the product. They are doing the same thing as always, eliminating independant damning studies and using the manufacturers studies or those they pay. EFSA has now asked for comments to challenge. No one disagrees about the power and influence of industry. Dr. Ralph Walton flew to England one year to explain the seriousness of this toxin when some in Parliament wanted it banned. It is an addictive, excitoneurotoxic, genetically engineered drug. In “The Grocer” on the 12th of January it said: “Doubts have been cast over the reliability of the European Food Safety Authority’s review in aspartame, which found the sweetener posed no toxicity concern at current levels of exposure. EFSA’s findings were this week opemed up for a public consultation, but the watchdog is already facing questions about its research.
“Dutch MEP Karika Tamara Liotard filed a set of parliamentary questions to the European Commission after she noticefd a high level of absenteeism among the study’s aspartame experts with one meeting attended by just three of the 14 in total. “What message is the high absenteeism rate sending to the public?” she asked, and questioned whether the Commission had taken adequate steps to “ensure a reliable and serious investigation.”
This is what happened when members of Parliament in the UK wanted it banned. Were they told to stay home?
Some years ago I flew to Brussels with Felicity Mawson, Mission Possible UK, to have a meeting and offered EU with damning papers, studies, congressional records, etc. What they did was use industry studies and eliminated everything that showed the real facts on aspartame and its toxicity. The EU Commission on food was shut down and EFSA was started.
Garst uses industry propaganda as he did in another forum. He’s suppose to be a toxicologist but used the old “these aminno acids are the building blocks of protein”. He should know better. Aspartic acid, an ingredient in aspartame is an excitotoxin, and the phenylalanine as an isolate and at 50% of the molecule is a neurotoxin. He didn’t mention the methyl ester which immediately becomes free methyl alcohol and converts to formaldehyde and formic acid causing metabolic acidosis. Nor did he mention the molecule breaks down to diketopiperazine, a brain tumor agent that caused brain tumors in original studies.
World experts have answered Garst about his theory and showed that he is wrong. Just google John Garst misleads New Mexico Legislature, http://www.mpwhi.com and read what they say. It includes testimoney by Dr. Maria Alemany who did the Trocho Study showing aspartame embalms living tissue and damages DNA, and also Dr. H. J. Roberts who is author of the 1000 page medical text on the world plague called “Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic”, http://www.sunsentpress.com There is a lot more. I remember when he was bragging what he had done against the anti-aspartame effort to Tanya Crosby of http://www.dorway.com She is the daughter of Dave Rietz who lost his life to aspartame. She keeps DORway in memory of her father as he had asked.
No self respecting toxicologist would ever use propaganda on a product instead of facts. Wherever there is a forum on aspartame here comes Garst trying to mislead the public. His actions are shameful.
Dr. Woodrow Monte has now authored the book, “While Science Sleeps” and explains that the FDA made a deal with the manufacturer never to allow the birth defect studies on aspartame to be seen by the public. I was able to find two of them and Dr. Monte four of them. Go to http://www.whilesciencesleeps.com where you can read the last chapter which goes into aspartame and autism. It explains the epidemic.
What if someone believes John Garst, and say she is pregnant, she wouldn’t be warned in time. Aspartame is also an abortifacient so if she didn’t lose the baby there is the chance the baby could be autistic. All these details are also in Dr. H. J. Roberts medical text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, and Dr. Russell Blaylock’s text, Excitotoxin: The Taste That Kills. See the documentary “Sweet Misery: An Ignored Epidemic” which has the experts. It includes also Dr. Ralph Walton, psychiatrist, who did a study on aspartame. The administrator got a retinal detachment and lost sight in that eye, another one suffered conjunctival bleeding. The group that had depression issues before the study said they felt like they were being poisoned. That’s when they shut down the study and they weren’t even using the ADI. Monsanto had refused to sell Dr. Walton the aspartame because they knew they couldn’t control the study. What is being done by flacks trying to mislead the public is hideous. Garst knows the information on toxicity of aspartame is all over the globe. Even when I was in Albania people knew about aspartame.
Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum, Founder
Mission Possible International
770 242-2599
http://www.mpwhi.com
Ms. Martini is correct; I go from forum to forum trying to inform people why aspartame is safe. But then again, the regulatory agencies of 90+ countries agree with me; I am just explaining why it is safe. On the other hand she has 12 times (108,000) the number of GOOGLEd aspartame postings on forums than do I (9,100) and has been devoted to pursuit of her nonsense for more than 20 years. And she criticizes me? For all her effort, I think she said it was banned somewhere, because it caused cancer. It might even be banned in still other countries, but read further to understand that it isn’t aspartame that causes cancer, but endemic folate/B12 deficiencies, genetic issues, and related issues like homocysteine accrual.
In her posts she documents for the world to read that she has no understanding of toxicology at all. I have tried to provide to her the following two-paragraph short course before, but it is clear she cannot read, is blinded by her zeal, or has another problem. Nevertheless, I repeat it here.
The fundamentals of toxicology (the science of poisons) say “everything is toxic.” And that everything includes aspartame and all its three decomposition products, aspartate, phenylalanine, and methanol. But where the aspartame critics fail to understand and then mislead the reader is that dose is paramount to effect. Everything about toxicology is dose; the words ‘toxic’ or ‘poison’ mean nothing without consideration of a specific dose for that substance. The words ‘toxic’ or ‘poison’ are used when the doses required for effect are very low and thus exposure represents a hazard.
But dose alone separates a ‘poison’ from a food/drug. That there is a safe dose is the basis for the whole science of pharmacology (drugs). This is expanded upon in Adrien Albert’s classic 1985 book on “Selective Toxicity: The Physico-Chemical Basis of Therapy”, http://www.amazon.com/Selective-Toxicity-Physico-Chemical-Basis-Therapy/dp/0412260107/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358714557&sr=8-1&keywords=Selective+Toxicity. But, for example, the readers should consider that botulinum toxin (Botox), perhaps the most toxic substance known (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin), is also used extensively in cosmetic procedures.
Her comments about cyanide further document her ignorance of this science. Highly toxic cyanide is found in plant products we all consume; however, cyanide at those doses is safe, because they are readily detoxified by the cyanide-specific enzyme rhodanese, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodanese. In contrast ‘low-toxicity’ water drowns hundreds of people yearly, but water isn’t considered either ‘toxic’ or a ‘poison’. So the informed reader should understand that words like ‘toxic’ or ‘poison,’ which fill the anti-aspartame literature are really irrelevant to any safety issue. Any claim that any chemical substance is ‘toxic’ or a ‘poison’ is by itself is absolutely MEANINGLESS. Any claim that there is no safe dose is equally absurd, whether it come from Ms. Martini or some past official at FDA. Any such claims MUST include a specific toxic response at a specific dose to even be investigated. Aspartame critics cannot now do this and never could! That is part of the reason why they cannot get any regulatory agency to even listen to their long-failed arguments.
The reader must recognize that this hubbub about aspartame comes from people none of whom have toxicological training, very, very few of whom are even scientists, some of whom are physicians, who think they understand toxicological science but do not, others who are conspiracy theorists, or some of whom simply have ulterior motives.
Let’s consider Martini’s (physician) Dr. H.J. Roberts, for example. He has reported, mostly in unreviewed letters to the editor where he could insert his agenda, some studies suggesting some people have reactions to aspartame that disappear when aspartame is no longer used.
Actually, I don’t necessarily disagree with his observation, but I do disagree with his naive conclusion that the problem is aspartame. And that is unfortunate, because in all his years this MD has never done any internal control studies that even considered the possibility that such reactions stemmed from very vital, highly-documented, PERSONAL folate, B12, homocysteine or related issues. Real scientific objectivity has not been demonstrated by any of her other “experts.”
So let’s examine this point using just one of his more recent and outlandish claims. Roberts, (2007, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/17534100) presents the only claimed association between aspartame and thrombocytopenia. Read about thrombocytopenia here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombocytopenia. However, a simple analysis reveals that a Pub Med search of folate deficiency, thrombocytopenia (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=folate%20deficiency%2C%20thrombocytopenia) revealed 112 such citations on January 20, 2013. Analysis also revealed that a Pub Med search of folate, thrombocytopenia (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=folate%2C%20thrombocytopenia) over 583 such citations on January 20, 2013. Given the alternative, depending on which class of citations one chooses, that would suggest he has a 1 in 112 or a 1 in 583 chance of him being correct. And that doesn’t even consider the 102 B12, thrombocytopenia citations nor the 22 homocysteine, thrombocytopenia citations.
All issues with aspartame are PERSONAL issues; ALL can be explained by PERSONAL matters like folate deficiency and corollary issues (both known and some yet unknown) like folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms), B12 deficiency, methionine synthase enzyme issues, and/or homocysteine accrual. [This should also include vitamin processing to active forms (both folate and dihydrofolate must be enzymatically reduced to the active tetrahydrofolate and that has to be conjugated with the cell-type specific-length of glutamate). And it is beginning to seem like the different cell types have different uptake preferences, so that may or may not become a future concern, for example folate uptake into brain has been linked to some childhood autism, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23314536. Needless to say folate is an extremely complex system. And that doesn’t even address many other unknown variations.] All these are functionally interrelated and involve not just the normal, natural recycling of otherwise essential formaldehyde and formate produced from methanol into methyl groups, but the availability of these methyl groups to regulate vital-to-life (DNA) itself. Ethanol (primarily through its antagonist metabolite acetaldehyde) is also known inhibitor of these vital folate reactions. So in these borderline cases of aspartame sensitivity alcohol consumption may be a prime factor explaining any increased sensitivity to aspartame as well. Realize ethanol, not methanol, is the cause of fetal alcohol syndrome, and is a documented factor in facilitating many cancer types, for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22218157 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16508294.
The reader must realize the aspartame conspiracy theory originated well before the 1998 mandated folate fortification of grain products in the USA, Chile, and Canada that dramatically cut folate- deficient dependent birth defects, indicating the seriousness of widespread folate deficiency problem. Australia-New Zealand only in 2009 mandated the addition of folate to certain grain products. Most of Europe still doesn’t do it, but the EFSA in 2009 did recognize its importance, http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/supporting/doc/3e.pdf. See free full text papers from the Canadian Family Physician about these issues, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19005123 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ryan-Harshman%2C%20Aldoori%2C2008. If you want a cause for the many folate-deficiency and related PERSONAL issues like birth defects and cancers, blame the foot-dragging, not aspartame.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
Some of the aspartame experts have exposed John Garst and discussed why his theory of folate is wrong to begin with. When there was a TV interview in Atlanta one of the victims had never used aspartame in her life. Someone handed her a piece of aspartame gum and she immediately had a grand mal seizures. Tell her there is a safe dose. Also remember that aspartame is cumulative. They are consuming a poison and causing chemical hypersensitization. Like Cheryl in the movie Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World documentary all it took was one dose of aspartame for a code blue to be called. Before or after the formic acid issue people are still dying of aspartame. In another case we have a man had not used aspartame for a year but when given a cookie baked with aspartame it caused such a high tachycardia they had to stop his heart to save his life. Below are the experts answering John Garst. In the case of the New Mexico Legislature Garst waited until just the right day when he thought there wouldn’t be time to expose him, but these doctors did. He is saying the world experts on aspartame are wrong. Since the mandate about folate and most pregnant women are told to use it, they are still giving birth to children who are autistic. Neural tube defects and autism are both caused by methanol’s effect on different brains during different gestational times of pregnancy! Timing is a critical compionent of teratogenicity. Since the formate issue people are still sick and dying on aspartame. Whenever he contacts the aspartame experts they expose why he is wrong. He thinks he knows more than even the investigators in the aspartame case like Dr. Adrian Gross, lead scientist in the aspartame investigation who explained to Congress there is no safe dose of aspartame. Here is the testimony of FDA toxicologist Dr. Jacqueline Verrett http://www.wnho.net/j_verrett_testimony.pdf She is a toxicologist like Garst and she investigated aspartame. So Garst thinks he knows more than toxicologists involved in aspartame investigation. Here are 12 toxicologists more who asked for aspartame to be recalled. http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/aspartame_letter_to_fda.pdf This was after the folate mandate. So according to Garst all the aspartame experts all over the world are wrong, the FDA toxicologists who investigated aspartame are wrong, the 12 toxicologists who asked for aspartame to be banned are wrong and he alone is right. Women using aspartame in pregnancy who are using folate hasn’t stopped the birth defects. He puts down world renowned physicians who have devoted their lives to exposing aspartame and saving lives. The harm is in somebody believing this man and paying with their life or the life of their baby.
Read on to see what aspartame experts think about Garst’s theory.
Read below aspartame experts exposing Garst and showing he is wrong.
Betty
http://www.mpwhi.com
ASPARTAME FLACK TRIES TO MISLEAD NEW MEXICO LEGISLATURE
By Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum.
Mission Possible International
9270 River Club Parkway
Duluth, Georgia 30097
Telephone: 770-242-2599
E-Mail: BettyM19@mindspring.com
Web Site: http://www.mpwhi.com
Posted: 11 September 2009
John Garst brags that he played a major role in obliterating efforts to ban aspartame in 06. He’s trying to do it again by bombarding legislators with complicated lingo only a biochemist can comprehend. Its a vacuous bluff with hot air said James Bowen MD. who is a physician, surgeon, biochemist, and an aspartame victim with Lou Gehrigs.
New Mexico lawmakers are expected to take Garth’s word for it and do what he wants. This last-minute blast is an ambush in bad faith, like yelling fire in a crowded theater so the legislature will run for the exits. Garst wants a stampede!
Good faith requires him to come forward in time for his assertions to be examined. But then he would be exposed. With no time for deliberation the legislators are expected to just accept his say-so.
At the say-so level: R G Walton M.D. Chairman, Center for Behavioral Medicine at NE Ohio College of Medicine analyzed 92 peer-reviewed studies not funded by aspartame industry. 92% found PROBLEMS! There were also 74, sponsored by NutraSweet, which said its safe as rain. Dr. Walton concluded Serious questions have been raised about the reliability of industry-sponsored studies of the safety of synthetic chemicals. Aspartame, in particular, has been the focus of significant ongoing controversy Walton named numerous adverse clinical events including seizures, mood disorders, headaches and brain tumors. In 95 the FDA listed 92 reactions from 10,000 volunteered complaints, including death.
H. J. Roberts, M.D., FACP a diabetic specialist has produced 20 books and his first text on medical diagnosis was used by 60,000 doctors to prepare for their Board examinations. In his response to Garst’s allegation that aspartame sensitivity reflects folate deficiency, he wrote to the members of the New Mexico Legislature:
You have received correspondence concerning folate deficiency as the purported cause of aspartame disease. While folate plays a role in the metabolism of methanol (methyl alcohol), the severity and widespread nature of reactions to aspartame products suggest that this assertion must be tempered by the following:
The methyl alcohol in aspartame is FREE (rarely found as such in nature.)
The assertion that methanol concentrations never are very high after aspartame ingestion is erroneous. I devoted an entire chapter to methanol toxicity in my text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic (pp 668-685), and show in Figure XXI-1 the dose-related blood levels of methanol lasting 8 or more hours.
The assertion that many New Mexicans suffer from a folate deficiency is challenged. While I discussed such a theoretical deficiency in my text, there is no evidence that folate deficiency is widespread among Americans. For example, a Mayo Clinic study involving thousands of blood assays concluded that it was rare. Garst ignores the major roles of phenylalanine and aspartic acid in aspartame disease. Enormous effort has gone into this constructive attempt to ban aspartame products. I believe that it constitutes an imminent health hazard for New Mexicans. You are to be congratulated for coming this far in the face of severe corporate resistance.
H. J. Roberts, M.D., FACP, FCCP
Dr. Maria Alemany, Departament du Nutricio I Bromatologia, Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de Barcelona, who was the researcher for the damning Trocho Study wrote that he was deeply insulted by Garsts propaganda. Remember that Dr. Alemanys study proved the formaldehyde converted from the free methyl alcohol embalms living tissue and damages DNA. As we know when you damage DNA you can destroy humanity. So concerned for the public was Dr. Alemany that after his study he reported it to the authorities. He told me personally that he was concerned aspartame could kill millions and I said has killed millions. After all aspartame can trigger all sorts of neurodegenerative diseases and tumors and can precipitate diabetes. Even the FDA found many types of tumors and brain cancer on original studies and the Ramazzini Study in 2005 confirmed FDA findings reporting the study showed aspartame to be a multipotential carcinogen. Dr. Alemany is a hero to the world and proved beyond a shadow of doubt what aspartame experts believed for years.Dr. Alemany said: First, Garst suggests that perhaps aspartame just affects people with a metabolic deficit. If that were the case (I doubt it, deficits may just enhance the effect of aspartame), why then has it not been studied? In the case of cyclamate, the ban on its use is based on the deleterious effects on only a fraction of the population.
Second. Dr. Garst accepts that aspartame yields formaldehyde… then, why not give formaldehyde to the people to help them synthesize methyl groups? Did I understood well (after speaking of the double helix which has very little to do here unless for the binding of formaldehyde to its strands to induce mutation) that Dr. Garst suggests that aspartame may be beneficial because its derived formaldehyde may supply one-carbon units for methylations through the folate pathway? If that were the case, why not get the FDA approval for aspartame as a drug/vitamin substitute? This is an outright fallacy (or better said bull-manure).
Third. Please, not again the tale of the methyl-esters of pectins! It has been proved to nausea that most of the methyl-alcohol esters of uronic acids remain esterified through intestinal passage, and that freed in the large intestine by the action of the flora is majoritarily and keenly used by these microbes for their profit. The remaining methyl alcohol leaving the intestine is largely detoxified by the liver (this is a physiological mechanism well known and proved effective for millennia). Aspartame, however, is not fully hydrolyzed in the intestine, being absorbed in part intact. After the intestine-portal vein-liver trap is surpassed, the body protection against methanol wanes, and the tiny liberation of methanol in tissues yields little amounts of formaldehyde that cause serious damage, precisely because it behaves very differently from the natural products methanol. Even in cases of wood-alcohol (methanol) intoxication, the liver helps to stem the overflow of toxic. Methanol inhalation or injection is much more dangerous, because it goes directly into the bloodstream and tissues jumping the liver barrier. This is explained in elementary physiology and biochemistry courses, it is unbelievable that this is maintained as a “serious” scientific position by somebody that got a PhD, unless this is not a discourse of science but of economy.
Theories are nice, but have to be proved true. The one Dr. Garst exposes here is that maintained by pro-aspartame fellows for decades. This is how they explained the incorporation of aspartame label into protein and DNA in the earliest experiments on aspartame using tracers that were published (none was published by this group thereafter). This theory fits very well with the story of a harmless aspartame, but it has been proven untrue. We did it, and this is why our study was so damaging. If the theory recycled by Dr. Garst were true, then, the carbon of the methyl alcohol of aspartame would enter the one-carbon path mediated by tetrahydrofolate, this can be done via formaldehyde or via formate. These one-carbon units may be processed (depending on demand) to methyl groups, such as those found in carnitine, thymine and methionine (the only amino acid that can get back methyl groups in mammals), thus explaining the presence of label in protein (methionine) or DNA (thymine). We gave labeled aspartame to rats, and got their DNA and protein from a number of tissues, and found large proportions of label. So far no differences with the Aspartame-lovers theory. However, we hydrolyzed the protein and DNA and looked for label in thymine in DNA and methionine in protein. We found none. Instead, the label was in unknown spots in the chromatograms, which plainly indicates that the incorporation of label into DNA and protein was NOT through the incorporation of methyl groups, i.e. the one-carbon folate pathway. Other ways of label incorporation should explain the attachment of the label. The most logical explanation (justified by innumerable studies that show that formaldehyde attaches to protein and other molecules) was that aspartame-derived formaldehyde was chemically bound to protein and DNA, inactivating (embalming, in fact) proteins and altering DNA structure causing mutations.
The experimental studies show that the theory is faulty. No counter-experiments were published showing our possible “errors”, nor the theory of folate pathway incorporation has been proved experimentally (it is fairly easy to demonstrate, it only needs to be true, however). This is why I felt insulted. It is an insult to the intelligence of anybody with even a thin varnish of scientific knowledge to discard proven facts and stick to self-fulfilling harebrained theories. If what the aspartame lovers say about the fate of aspartame carbon is true, why nobody has proved it experimentally? It is easy to carry out and much less expensive than hiring lawyers to defend bad science with top dollar legal expertise I used as heading the famous initial words of the second Catilinary by Cicero, which I remember from my early high-school Latin. Since probably most Americans were lucky enough not to study Latin when 10-11 years old, I provide an approximate translation: “Up to when do you, Catilina, will abuse our patience?”, substitute Catilina for the present aspartame producers and probably it fits very well the picture. Good luck on the banning of this menace to our collective health.
Best regards,
————————–
Dr. Maria Alemany
Departament de Nutrici i Bromatologia
Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de Barcelona
Av. Diagonal, 645
08028 Barcelona. Espanya / Espaa / Spain
Today in Dr. Roberts medical text there is a page on pre-embalming thanks to the work of the courageous Dr. Maria Alemany.
————————–
Dr. James Bowen was extremely upset that John Garst tried to deceive the legislature, especially the day before the discussion and said, This is a brazen attempt to violate every due process procedure with respect to all scientific and legal hearings.. Dr. Garth’s ambush is only an attempt to win against the health and welfare of the people of New Mexico, by unlawful and unscientific ambush and by utilizing brazen pseudo science lying.
He hopes to impress by using impressive Big Words from science! This is merely science trash I will mention one case of his falsity: abuse of science and scientific process. Dr. Garst says that the folate issue is one reason not to disturb the present commerce of aspartame. This causes a highly synergized form in human metabolism, obligatory: methanol to formaldehyde to formic acid to carbon monoxide toxic axis! Molecule for molecule, the deadly formic acid congener (formate) from aspartame metabolism consumes (molecule per molecule) one molecule of folic acid (folate) to eliminate the formate without creating subsequent carbon monoxide poisoning.
Aspartame has caused many years of folate iatrogenic deficiency, already causing many human illness epidemics, fetal deformities. When in l984 I called the FDA about this, because they had concurrent with their licensure of aspartame, abandoned their 50 year standard of folic acid ingestion by pregnant women (1 mg), leading to grievous fetal defects, they like Dr. Garst lied their way out saying: We have already checked all that out. There just aren’t any problems at all. But neural tube, bladder defects and cardiac deformities escalated within our newborn population victimized by aspartame. Birth defects are a major epidemic caused by aspartame, with full protection and avid cooperation from the US FDA. James Bowen, M.D. Mark Gold of the Aspartame Toxicity Center says this short document answers all of the aspartame industry’s claims about aspartame and formaldehyde poisoning:
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/abuse/methanol.html
Dr. John Garst is a Ph.D and it’s obvious he knows he is publishing false information. His modus operandi is to use his credentials to deceive others because he can’t debate true experts who can easily take apart his nonsense.
The New Mexico legislature has better sense to even consider Garst’s claptrap. Aspartame manufacturers must sit up at night thinking of ways to deceive. Families all over the world have been destroyed by this poison causing male sexual dysfunction, cancer and diabetes and sudden death. Enough is enough. Aspartame must be banned from the planet to save the human race.
Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum.
Founder, Mission Possible World Health International
9270 River Club Parkway
Duluth, Georgia 30097
770-242-2599
E-Mail: BettyM19@mindspring.com
http://www.wpwhi.com
http://www.wnho.net
http://www.dorway.com
Aspartame Toxicity Center: http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame
Aspartame Documentary: Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World: http://www.soundandfury.tv
Betty Martini tells us; Some of the aspartame experts have exposed John Garst and discussed why his theory of folate is wrong to begin with. When there was a TV interview in Atlanta one of the victims had never used aspartame in her life. Someone handed her a piece of aspartame gum and she immediately had a grand mal seizures. Tell her there is a safe dose. Also remember that aspartame is cumulative. They are consuming a poison and causing chemical hypersensitization. Like Cheryl in the movie Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World documentary all it took was one dose of aspartame for a code blue to be called. Before or after the formic acid issue people are still dying of aspartame. In another case we have a man had not used aspartame for a year but when given a cookie baked with aspartame it caused such a high tachycardia they had to stop his heart to save his life. Below are the experts answering John Garst. In the case of the New Mexico Legislature Garst waited until just the right day when he thought there wouldn’t be time to expose him, but these doctors did. He is saying the world experts on aspartame are wrong. Since the mandate about folate and most pregnant women are told to use it, they are still giving birth to children who are autistic. Neural tube defects and autism are both caused by methanol’s effect on different brains during different gestational times of pregnancy! Timing is a critical compionent of teratogenicity. Since the formate issue people are still sick and dying on aspartame. Whenever he contacts the aspartame experts they expose why he is wrong. He thinks he knows more than even the investigators in the aspartame case like Dr. Adrian Gross, lead scientist in the aspartame investigation who explained to Congress there is no safe dose of aspartame. Here is the testimony of FDA toxicologist Dr. Jacqueline Verrett http://www.wnho.net/j_verrett_testimony.pdf She is a toxicologist like Garst and she investigated aspartame. So Garst thinks he knows more than toxicologists involved in aspartame investigation. Here are 12 toxicologists more who asked for aspartame to be recalled. http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/aspartame_letter_to_fda.pdf This was after the folate mandate. So according to Garst all the aspartame experts all over the world are wrong, the FDA toxicologists who investigated aspartame are wrong, the 12 toxicologists who asked for aspartame to be banned are wrong and he alone is right. Women using aspartame in pregnancy who are using folate hasn’t stopped the birth defects. He puts down world renowned physicians who have devoted their lives to exposing aspartame and saving lives. The harm is in somebody believing this man and paying with their life or the life of their baby.
Read on to see what aspartame experts think about Garst’s theory.
Read below aspartame experts exposing Garst and showing he is wrong.
Betty
http://www.mpwhi.com
I have tried in earnest to explain to the readers of this site why aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed. I understand the reluctance of a “natural” website, but the readers need to face the fact that as time goes by, newer information only proves aspartame even safer. But let’s consider Martini’s arguments.
She continues to cite “expert after expert”, who 20 years ago claimed aspartame was a problem. But that was long before the documented, massive folate deficiency issue was revealed and tackled by the 1998 mandatory folate supplementation. That discovery explains and obviates all earlier observations.
The fact is that metabolism of methanol in aspartame, just like in fruit juices, and many other “natural” products, including ‘oil of wintergreen’, etc., is completely dependent on people having adequate vitamin (folate and B12) status. This site promotes ‘natural’, why cannot your authorities and readers realize that good vitamin nutrition is paramount to life itself? Nutrition is the problem, not aspartame.
Martini then cites signatories of a letter to suggest that the FDA reexamine the safety of aspartame. Actually only a few were toxicologists; most were not. But FDA and regulatory agencies worldwide did take to the task and did reexamine aspartame; they all concluded yet again that the paper they wrote to support was seriously flawed. The regulatory agencies had their reasons. But I have recently provided at http://whatdoesthesciencesay.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/aspartame-and-formaldehyde/five reasons that this Soffritti lifetime-(~3 year) rat work is simply invalid. Any one of the five (including their outright refusal to provide dietary diet details to EFSA) would reject the paper, but there was systematic failure in their whole approach that the all reviewers failed to notice. Let’s start with the most obvious first. Soffritti et al used life-time (~3 year) studies with Sprague-Dawley rats; these rats are known to become folate deficient by 1 year of age, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12042458. That means folate deficiency, which is directly associated with aspartame metabolism, could easily after 2+ years of treatment have explained their abnormal results. But multiple other factors simply obliterate this paper; these include factual evidence that their diet was folate-deficient, that their experimental design fostered a folate deficiency, not just in these rats because of their innate susceptibility, but in mice and every species they study, because they compared their treatment results to a water rather than methanol control. Not only were their animals folate-deficient, but methanol especially at the highest doses (where they reported a problem) can slightly but significantly deplete folate if not replenished; that depletion was amplified by this experimental design and was simply not scientifically controlled.
Folate-deficiency can also cause illness in animals and documented illness in their animals–all of them–is what pathologists investigating their experiments actually discovered. By the way this paper, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12042458, had nothing to do with aspartame; it was intended to investigate mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease protection; Ghandour et al actually showed how methanol/folate actually protects against Alzheimer’s disease markers in those rats.
The whole concept I am writing about is NEW. But, it had its beginnings in 1976 (before aspartame) when Tephly documented the importance of the folate deficiency-methanol connection to toxicity in 15 papers before 1996, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Tephly%2Cmethanol%2Cfolate. Skeptics must realize that this factor is highly precedented. I have simply modernized the basic concept to include known corollaries of folate and related methylation factors, like B12, homocysteine, which is detoxified by these vitamins, and genetic factors affecting the entire process. Those include the complex process of tetrahydrofolate-glutamate active form production and localization and enzyme polymorphisms amongst many others. Whether skeptics wish to acknowledge it or not, taken together, these factors explain ALL 92 alleged symptoms.
The essential, but missing issue here is that even the simple folate-deficiency issue was unknown to early FDA toxicologists. It was and still is unacknowledged by Martini’s “experts”, but for that matter it was also unrecognized by most of the signatories to this FDA letter. All have failed to recognize the folate-B12-homocysteine methylation connection. But perhaps no scientists can really be blamed for failing to identify this oversight. Although the well-established senior toxicologists writing the Magnuson review did mention folate (http://www.fte.ugent.be/vlaz/Magnuson2007.pdf, pages 646 and 692), they too failed to recognize completely how defining folate and its 21st century corollaries are toward explaining not just the animal work, but ALL of the 92 symptoms reported here. However, because it is so important to aspartame metabolism, folate was taken into consideration in determining the allowable doses of aspartame in humans:
“Serum folate, urinary and blood formic acid, and urinary calcium levels were unchanged in both [the aspartame and in the control] groups. The authors concluded that daily doses of 75 mg/kg bw/day of aspartame were not associated with any significant changes in clinical measures or adverse effects (Leon et al., 1989)” http://www.fte.ugent.be/vlaz/Magnuson2007.pdf, p 692.
What Ms. Martini, aspartame skeptics, and this website must realize is that twenty-first century science has revealed not a safety issue with aspartame, but a major vitamin and related methylation issue underlying the health and welfare of humans everywhere. Together they explain all the anecdotal reports of aspartame sensitivity and are already documented factors in human cancer. See these free full text papers from the Canadian Family Physician about this matter, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19005123 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ryan-Harshman%2C%20Aldoori%2C2008. If those aren’t sufficient evidence consider, for example, the last line of the Australian report from Beetstra et al’s abstract on breast cancer, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16162645. It says “the results of this study suggest that moderate folate deficiency has a stronger effect on chromosomal instability than BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations found in breast cancer families.” The only remaining question for http://blogs.naturalcures.com is what is in the best interest of their public: fostering this rejected conspiracy theory, again dismissed by EFSA, or enlightening the public as to the real health problem?
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
Dear John,
You have been told and told by experts and researchers that you are wrong. Furthermore, we are not talking botox or other applications of poison. When Dr. Adrian Gross, lead scientist at the FDA told Congress there was no safe dose on aspartame, he’s talking about over half the population of the US using a chemical poison. Having worked with an allergist at one time, most doctors are aware of the add back diet. A physician keeps removing products until the reaction goes away. Then he adds it back to the diet, and if the reactions return knows he found the culprit.
I have probably spoken with, received emails and calls from at least 50,000 consumers. Thousands got better when the chemical poison was removed. Talk about ignorance, you’re trying to say this is a conspiracy theory!!! It was Joseph Goebbeos who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Here is an article by UPI of the politics used by the manufacturers:
http://www.mpwhi.com/upi_1987_aspartame_report.pdf
Here is a clip from “Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World” with James Turner, Attorney, discussing how this poison got marketed through the political chicanery of Don Rumsfeld. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oFG8eqJq8U
Go to http://www.mpwhi.com scroll down to banners and read 50 pages from the Board of Inquiry on why the FDA did not want this product approved for human consumption. Someone from Reagan’s transition team called FDA Commissioner Goyan at 3:00 AM and fired him. This was so they could get someone who would over-rule the Board of Inquiry and get this chemical poison on the market. I have a letter from his wife on http://www.mpwhi.com FDA tried to have G. D. Searle indicted for fraud but both US Prosecutors, Sam Skinner and William Conlon hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. Now on the first page read Dr. John Olney’s 49 page report to the Board of Inquiry. Notice birth defects are a given. Arthur Hull Hayes over-ruled the Board of Inquiry. For this he got $1000.00 a day on a ten year contract with their PR firm.
The FDA has now admitted they never did a Noael for methanol. http://www.mpwhi.com/fda_violates_data_quality_act.htm
What do you mean can’t get regulatory agencies to listen. Even in New Zealand I had a meeting with Food Standards. When they saw the documents they said, “We didn’t know all this. We relied on the FDA and never did studies in New Zealand.” We’re talking about the rubber stamp around the world. In l986 the Community Nutrition Institute tried to get aspartame off the market because it causes so much blindness and seizures. That was taken all the way to the Supreme Court. The FDA operates above the law. As Dr. Gross told Congress, aspartame violates the Delaney Amendment because it has been proven to cause cancer. He also said, “If the FDA violates its own laws who is left to protect the public?” Aspartame is illegally on the market. Furthermore besides the 12 toxicologists who filed for a ban there have been others, including Mission Possible. Dr. Ken Stoller also petitioned the FDA to ban it. They haven’t answered an imminent health hazard because they know they would have to remove it from the market.
Because your whole theory is wrong you attack eminent physicians and researchers. When they tell you, you are wrong you run to the next forum. You don’t get to mislead the public. Dr. Roberts is in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in Frontier Science and Technology and Who’s Who in The South and Southwest, 1960 to present. In 1984 he was selected at the “Best Doctor in the US.” He is so brilliant he graduated medical school when he was 21 or 22. In 1958 he wrote “Difficult Diagnosis: A Guide to the Interpretation of Obscure Illness, W. B. Saunders Company. This first text on medical diagnosis
was used by 60,000 doctors, especially to prepare for their Board examinations. Dr. Roberts was knighted by the Order of Saint George for his humanitarianism. He is corporate neutral! He is very capable of writing a 1000 page medical text on Aspartame Disease. He took care of the victims in the trenches of medical practice. He has seen how aspartame destroys people’s lives and their health. He is a giant in his field.
This is what he thinks of your misinformation: Written to the New Mexico legislature:
“You have received correspondence concerning folate deficiency as the purported cause of aspartame disease. While folate plays a role in the metabolism of methanol (methyl alcohol), the severity and widespread nature of reactions to aspartame products suggest that this assertion must be tempered by the following:
“The methyl alcohol in aspartame is FREE (rarely found as such in nature.)”
“The assertion that methanol concentrations never are very high after aspartame ingestion is erroneous. I devoted an entire chapter to methanol toxicity in my text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic (pp 668-685), and show in Figure XXI-1 the dose-related blood levels of methanol lasting 8 or more hours. ”
“The assertion that many New Mexicans suffer from a folate deficiency is challenged. While I discussed such a theoretical deficiency in my text, there is no evidence that folate deficiency is widespread among Americans. For example, a Mayo Clinic study involving thousands of blood assays concluded that it was rare. Garst ignores the major roles of phenylalanine and aspartic acid in aspartame disease. Enormous effort has gone into this constructive attempt to ban aspartame products. I believe that it constitutes an imminent health hazard for New Mexicans. You are to be congratulated for coming this far in the face of severe corporate resistance. ”
H. J. Roberts, M.D., FACP, FCCP
The people being poisoned and having their life destroyed are not toxicologists. They want to know what they eat is safe. Today there are operations like my own all over the world warning people off aspartame. Do you think they would do this for a conspiracy theory. The modus operandi of the manufacturer is to use propaganda, call names and try to assassinate the character of anyone who exposes them. The reason? Because they can’t debate the facts.
Dr. James Bowen, a victim of aspartame himself, was extremely upset that you tried to deceive the legislature, especially the day before the discussion and said, “This is a brazen attempt to violate every due process procedure with respect to all scientific and legal hearings.. Dr. Garth’s ambush is only an attempt to win against the health and welfare of the people of New Mexico, by unlawful and unscientific ambush and by utilizing brazen pseudo science lying. ”
“He hopes to impress by using impressive Big Words from science! This is merely science trash I will mention one case of his falsity: abuse of science and scientific process. Dr. Garst says that the folate issue is one reason not to disturb the present commerce of aspartame. This causes a highly synergized form in human metabolism, obligatory: methanol to formaldehyde to formic acid to carbon monoxide toxic axis! Molecule for molecule, the deadly formic acid congener (formate) from aspartame metabolism consumes (molecule per molecule) one molecule of folic acid (folate) to eliminate the formate without creating subsequent carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Aspartame has caused many years of folate iatrogenic deficiency, already causing many human illness epidemics, fetal deformities. When in l984 I called the FDA about this, because they had concurrent with their licensure of aspartame, abandoned their 50 year standard of folic acid ingestion by pregnant women (1 mg), leading to grievous fetal defects, they like Dr. Garst lied their way out saying: We have already checked all that out. There just aren’t any problems at all. But neural tube, bladder defects and cardiac deformities escalated within our newborn population victimized by aspartame. Birth defects are a major epidemic caused by aspartame, with full protection and avid cooperation from the US FDA.” James Bowen, M.D.
Mark Gold of the Aspartame Toxicity Center says this short document answers all of the aspartame industry’s claims about aspartame and formaldehyde poisoning:”
formaldehyde poisoning:
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/abuse/methanol.html
So you accept that in the studies when carbon-14 labelled aspartame in the methanol moiety (earlier studies of Stegink and Dr. Alemany’s paper) part of the label was found in protein. This is experimental work, repeatedly published.
Pregnant women today use folate but autism is skyrocketing. The FDA has now admitted they made a deal with the manufacturer to never allow the public to see the birth defect studies on aspartame. It took us many years to find them. Look at the chart and see how autism is sky rocketing even though mothers know to use folic acid. http://www.wnho.net/autism_chart.htm
I was given some syrup that had aspartame in it and broke out all over my body with urticaria. What is my safe dose? It’s zero. 360 children in the Dominican Republic were given aspartame in their juice and almost all of them became hyperactive, suffered behavioral problems, etc. Off aspartame they all went back to normal. What is their safe dose? It’s zero.
Physicians and researchers tell you, you are wrong! You must have gotten a golden parachute for spending so much time trying to deceive the public. We won’t let it happen. Aspartame was listed with the pentagon in an inventory of prospective biochemical warfare weapons submitted to Congress. It made the cover of the Ecologist in 2005: http://www.mpwhi.com/ecologist_september_2005.pdf What’s the safe dose for a biochemical warfare weapon?
Betty
http://www.mpwhi.com
Ms Martini has made a case out of a 1972, 52 week oral toxicity study that showed that monkeys in the medium/high group had grand mal seizures (see p. 38): http://ia601602.us.archive.org/28/items/OnAspartameMsg/monkey_study.pdf. Let’s look at this as just one indication of how all the work she cites is fundamentally flawed.
First, I will provide a general explanation of why these and especially all pre-1998 experiments are invalid and second, I will demonstrate in detail the failure of the monkey study using the principles I provide.
Realize that all these arguments and the entire aspartame conspiracy theory originated in the 1970-80′s well before the 1998 mandated folate fortification of grain products in the USA, Chile, and Canada. That fortification dramatically cut folate-deficiency-dependent birth defects, documenting the widespread problem with folate deficiency. That has helped greatly, but Australia-New Zealand only in 2009 mandated the addition of folate to certain grain products. Most of Europe still doesn’t do it, but the EFSA in 2009 did recognize its importance (link on their webpage).
Perhaps the alarm bells raised originally were correct about their concern with formaldehyde/formate then, but research starting in 1976 by Tephly and continuing through 1996, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Tephly%2Cmethanol%2Cmonkeys%2Cfolate has shown the problem wasn’t with these substances, but insufficient vitamins to achieve their destruction. That vitamin problem is particularly true of primates, including monkeys, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6631717. Today we recognize that dietary sources still cannot provide adequate amounts of folate. It has be consumed as a 400 to a 800 microgram tablet, still a very small amount, because natural foods are inadequate. But vitamin B12 is important too. That is because, metabolism and recycling of formaldehyde/formate into methyl groups for many biochemical purposes requires both folate and B12 (and corollaries thereof like genetic issues involving folate enzymes, methionine synthase, etc. B12 comes from meat origin, so it is mostly deficient in vegetarians). But both function together to recycle those one-carbon groups, Wikipedia folate for more. Google PubMed and in the PubMed search line type cancer,folate deficiency for 837 citations. What twenty-first century science has shown is that it is not the formaldehyde/formate, but the consequences of this vitamin deficiency, such as unmethylated DNA and unmethylated homocysteine accrual (Wikipedia homocysteine), that account for much, if not most, cancer and disease.
Now as to this specific monkey study concerns, realize the paper was dated in 1972. They used Similac® for their formula nutrition. I was unable to obtain through Google folate and other vitamin content for the 1972 version of Similac®; I could eventually discover that information. However, odds are extremely high it afforded inadequate nutrition for moneys, because it afforded inadequate nutrition for humans. Three supporting references include http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6963545, which in 1982 indicated a recommended human folate intake only 1/4 of today’s adult levels. The same problem was still demonstrable in human premature babies as late as 1994, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7985636. As to the grand mal convulsions reported in monkeys peruse the PubMed entry about grand mal seizures,vitamin B6 for 572 entries, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=grand%20mal%20seizures%2C%20vitamin%20B6. A 1978 book indicating that human infants can develop convulsions, consequent to inadequate vitamin B6 is particularly relevant,
http://books.google.com/books?id=yWYrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA260&lpg=PA260&dq=Vitamin+B6+requirement,infants&source=bl&ots=7PYBeDOuFV&sig=gQjfXkVcivr39S-_LfLb9YZFGiQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GYcBUYmyL4fi2AXkk4DoDw&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Vitamin%20B6%20requirement%2Cinfants&f=false. Today’s infant B6 recommendations are from the upper end to 3X that recommendation of the 6963545 reference, suggesting human B6 content would likely be deficient in that 1972 Similac®. Whether it would have been insufficient in monkeys too, I cannot say, but it certainly would seem likely.
Suffice it to say, and I repeat it again, no studies of aspartame prior to 1998 are valid, because vitamin issues weigh heavily on any manifestation of methanol or aspartame toxicity. That said there is no assurance that any study takes into proper consideration the vitamin and related methylation variables. In fact the same problem exists for ALL aspartame studies (none have been done correctly), including specifically those 2006 and later from Soffritti’s lab, because of their use of long-term investigations, regardless of which animal species was being investigated. Dietary folate deficiency can be documented in all his animals, but there are a host of even more folate relevant fatal errors that make such studies irrelevant to the safety of aspartame.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
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