The big health news from this past week is the petitioning of the FDA by two very powerful dairy organizations, The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), to allow aspartame and other artificial sweeteners to be added to milk and other dairy products without a label.
Aspartame, also known by the brand name Nutrasweet, is made up of three components: 50% phenylalanine (a chemical that affects human brain activity by transmitting impulses), 40% aspartic acid and 10% methanol (poisonous wood alcohol).
Based on the FDA’s track record in handling the aspartame issue, things are not looking good to stop approval of this outrageous measure.
For one, back in 1996 when aspartame was first approved for use in thousands of food products, the FDA used 15 “pivotal” studies as the basis for its decision.
One of these pivotal studies involved oral dosage of aspartame to infant Rhesus monkeys for 52 weeks. The research was conducted by the University of Wisconsin Medical Center in Madison, Wisconsin.
The monkeys were divided into three groups. A low dose group which received 1.0 g of aspartame/kg of body weight per day, a medium dose group receiving 3.0g/kg per day and a high dose group receiving 4-6 g/kg per day.
The high dose group ended up ingesting about the same amount as the medium dose group as the high dose monkeys would not consume intended levels of aspartame possibly because it was too sweet at that amount. There was no control group.
The monkeys in this study were served their aspartame in an orally consumed milk based formula.
Starting about 7 months (218 days) into the experiment, ALL the medium and high dose monkeys began having brain seizures.
“All animals in the medium and high dosage groups exhibited seizure activity. Seizures were observed for the first time following 218 days of treatment… The seizures were of the grand mal type… One monkey, m38, of the high dose group, died after 300 days of treatment. The cause of death was not determined…”
Grand mal seizures also known as tonic clonic seizures are horrific – a very dangerous seizure which affects the entire brain.
The low dose monkeys might have started to have seizures as well, but the death of one of the researchers, H. A. Waisman, caused a lack of staffing for the study. As a result, the low dose monkeys were withdrawn from the group at 200 days which is before the seizures in the medium and high dose group began occurring.
As soon as the aspartame was withdrawn from the monkey’s diets, the seizures stopped.
How the FDA could call a study “pivotal” for approving aspartame’s use in thousands of products where every single monkey suffered from grand mal seizures and one died while consuming milk based formula containing this artificial sweetener is incomprehensible.
According to Robert Cohen of Oradell, New Jersey, who rediscovered this study which was reported in 1972, the dairy formula/aspartame milk which the monkeys ingested would have been a key reason for the brain seizures.
Cohen, who holds a degree in brain chemistry, suggests that the ingestion of dairy has the effect of elevating the pH of the stomach. He contends that drinking a single 12 oz. glass of milk would have the effect of buffering the pH of the human stomach from 2 to 6.
When the stomach pH is 6, Cohen explains that the simple proteins that comprise aspartame would pass through undigested and hence move into the blood intact.
Testing of the monkeys in this study showed that there was in fact phenylalanine (which comprises 50% of aspartame) in their blood which proves that it is absorbed. Phenylalanine affects human brain activity by transmitting impulses and the brain seizures started occurring after this compound was detected in the monkey’s blood.
With aspartame, aka Nutrasweet, already used but still included on the label of many dairy products, it’s not a big leap for the FDA to take it to unlabeled status based on the petition from Big Dairy.
This is especially probable given the FDA’s backward interpretation of the Rhesus monkey study which it called “pivotal” in proving human safety and yet all the monkeys suffered from grand mal seizures while ingesting aspartame laced dairy formula.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Sources: Aspartame in Milk Without a Label? Big Dairy Petitions FDA for Approval
FDA Pivotal Safety Study: Aspartame Caused Brain Seizures
Sounds like someone has been paid off
I do have to say that store bought milk is not a safe product to drink. It’s better to do without than it is to drink it! It’s that contaminated!
Christy Lindsey it’s flavored milk .. not sure if organic would be exempt or not.
Are they exempting organic milk?
I di not understand how it is just fine to lie in the States,
Good God, was his name Art Robinson?
So really his degree is in knowing how to chemically hide pharmaceuticals in food (nutrition) to make it toxic! Yeah, he’s smart alright. Been drinkin’ the “milk”, I think.
Last time I checked, milk .. even supermarket milk, didn’t give me headaches or shaky hands like aspartame does.
There is so much misinformation out there about aspartame it is ridiculous. The fact is that aspartame is safer than the milk it is proposed to sweeten. Even more, it is ridiculous that people buy into this aspartame conspiracy theory. Virtually all the relevant regulatory agencies in the world have completely approved aspartame. So let me address this issue in a variety of ways.
First, for Fiona and those concerned about labeling, milk already contains much phenyalanine and aspartate, so neither warrants posting for phenylketonuria, as does aspartame when used alone. Second, toxicological risk assessment is about balancing risks. This whole issue is about getting children to drink milk, instead of sugary beverages. If it takes chocolate, aspartame-sweetened milk to make this switch, overall children are far better off with this change.
Now about two other relevant issues. Claims of safety concerns with aspartame are far overblown. It is the most tested substance in history; the furans from corn are more threatening. And actually any sensitivity to aspartame probably involves a personal nutritional adequacy, but I will explain both starting with the perception by some that aspartame is toxic.
The fundamentals of toxicology (science of poisons) say that “everything is toxic.” This fundamental tenet of toxicology was established by Paracelsus in the 1500’s (Wikipedia: Paracelsus). But everything about toxicology is dose; the words ‘toxic’ or ‘poison’ mean nothing without 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 also separates a ‘poison’ from a food/drug. For example botulinum toxin (Botox), which is the perhaps the most toxic substance known (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin), is also used extensively in cosmetic procedures. Highly toxic cyanide is found in plant products we all consume; however, cyanide at those doses is readily detoxified by a 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 ‘toxic’ or a ‘poison’. This principle of toxicology is as established as the concepts that the world rotates about the sun and that the world is basically spherical; these are not up for debate and the arguments of people who do not believe this principle are completely dismissible.
Again everything is toxic–that includes aspartame and all its three decomposition products, aspartate, phenylalanine, and methanol. Where the aspartame critics fail to understand and then mislead the reader is that dose is paramount to effect. That includes 99% of aspartame critics. Aspartame critics cannot now do this and never could! They believe there is no safe dose. And that is part of the reason why they cannot get any regulatory agency to even listen to their long-failed arguments. Realize, just this year the European Food Safety Authority again validated the safety of aspartame as have 90+ governmental regulatory agencies throughout the relevant world.
Now concerning aspartame itself, here are facts people fail to understand. To reiterate the point that these substances pose little risk at the doses involved, note that formate and formaldehyde are [quoting another] “produced in the body during the endogenous demethylation of many compounds, including many foods [fruit juices] and drugs. For example, the demethylation of the caffeine found in one cup of coffee produces 30 mg of formaldehyde (Imbus, 1988). Formaldehyde is essential in one-carbon pool intermediary metabolism. The metabolite of formaldehyde, formic acid, is a substrate for purine nucleotide synthesis (Sheehan and Tully, 1983). It can be calculated that more than 50,000 mg [that’s 50 g] of formaldehyde is produced and metabolized in an adult human body daily and that an adult human liver will metabolize 22 mg of formaldehyde per minute (Clary and Sullivan, 1999). Consequently, it is quite clear that the formaldehyde from aspartame provides a trivial contribution to total formaldehyde exposure and metabolism in the body” (p 18 in and refs from .
So the facts suggest clearly that any sensitivity issues with aspartame are PERSONAL issues; ALL can be explained by PERSONAL matters like folate deficiency and corollary issues (both known and some likely yet unknown) like often genetic folate enzyme issues (polymorphisms, Wikipedia: methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase), B12 deficiency (often vegetarian-related), (genetic) methionine synthase enzyme issues, and/or (genetic) 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 a cell-type specific-length of glutamate, most often pentaglutamate). And different cell types in different organs may even have different uptake preferences. Needless to say folate is an extremely complex biochemical system. And that doesn’t even address many other yet unknown genetic variations.]
Moreover, the folate system is not independent; folate, B12, and homocysteine are all functionally interrelated (Wikipedia: the metabolism of folic acid under Vitamin_B12). All 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 ethanol 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.
Critics have criticized aspartame as causing about every ill effect known to man. They claim some 92+ symptoms for aspartame. Analysis, however, directly links all of these issues to the above described personal issues. For example consider aspartame’s most widely reported issue, migraine headaches. In what I have written above I note that various folate, B12 and related issues better explain problems with aspartame. In this case that is even more likely because migraines have been linked directly to the MTHFR C677T folate polymorphism (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19619240 and . Both papers report complete resolution of these migraines with added folate alone. These investigations revealed that more than normal daily recommended amounts are needed (2-5 mg), but in these papers aspartame was not involved and increased folate doses ALONE solved the migraine problem. That alone suggests a human sub-population that is even more deficient in folate for which resolution of their symptoms requires even more folate. This year’s Norwegian autism study, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23403681, only confirms the current importance of the deficiency issue, but those results may also reflect the fact that most of Europe still has not mandated folate fortification. But this isn’t particularly surprising both in view of methanol’s requirement for folate for metabolism, but also because folate uptake into brain has been linked to childhood autism, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23314536.
One of the aspartame critic’s latest inventions is autism; they have spread this nonsense all over the web (Google ‘aspartame autism’ to see some of these claims). But a recent finding from Norway reported in JAMA found that autism incidence is markedly reduced by folate, http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1570279. That discovery only further documents my argument.
In summary each alleged symptom for aspartame, including seizures, can also be explained similarly by the issues discussed above and all are personal issues, not safety issues with aspartame itself.
John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
Rather than debate the merits of aspartame, maybe we should take a step back and discuss your assumption that we as a society have to put an additive to what say is a healthy food to entice youngsters to consume it. Maybe we could put our energy and resource s not on aspartame r & d but on education on nutrition.
My ‘personal issues’ are that I am allergic to wood alcohol. And since the vast majority of people haven’t been tested for this or most any chemical allergies, I wonder just how many more people are like I am.
I am a highly sensitive individual. I did a chemical patch test and 3/4 of them came back positive. I eat a walmart cake and break out in a rash normally by the next day.
Crazy stuff! Everyone has personal issues and there are far more of them than just what you scientifically consider significant.
While milk contains a significant amount of phenyalanine and phenylketonurics would aviod it anyway, for me it’s not that simple. I am a phenylketonuric and drink milk. I do not have classic PKU, but I have a PKU variant. But if I were to drink milk with aspartame I’d be in trouble. I still NEED that warning on the label!! So, it disturbs me that you seem to think it’s not needed, and as far as I know it must be provided by law as it should be, regardless of the product itself!!
(employed by makers of SweetLeaf Stevia…and a phenylketonuric ;D)
WHAT? That’s crazy! Totally crazy! Aspartame and MSG are brain killers. We need to have information. We must be informed. We live in a free society where information like this should not be withheld from an unsuspecting public.