Saturday, May 26, 2007

Another Legacy from Rummie

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.4.07]

For awhile there in 2006, I thought it was prudent to drink diet soda. Sure it tastes funny, kind of metallic, but diet soda had less carbs than sugared sodas. Aspartame is the sweetener in most diet sodas. Surprisingly, it’s also in over 5,000 foods, drugs and medicine.

My diet soda jag wasn’t going well. Why was I having headaches and other minor ills? It could’ve been many things, caffeiene, alcohol, novacaine. Anyway, I decided to check trusty old google for aspartame references. And whoa! Who came up, but Donald Rumsfeld!?

During a time he was between appointments in Washington Searle made him CEO. Why would a drug company make a Washington insider with no real business experience one of their top executives? The operative word here is “insider.”

A little history:

Asparteme interacts with other drugs, has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG, and is a chemical hyper-sensitization agent.

The FDA’s own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and violated the Delaney Amendment which forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause Cancer. Detailed information on this can be found in the Bressler Report (FDA report on Searle).

Since its discovery in 1965, controversy has raged over the health risks associated with the sugar substitute. From laboratory testing of the chemical on rats, researchers have discovered that the drug induces brain tumors. On Sept 30, 1980 the Board of Inquiry of the FDA concurred and denied the petition for approval.

But then Ronald Reagan was elected 5 weeks later. Rumsfeld was on President Reagan’s transition team and a day after taking office Ronnie appointed Arthur Hull Hayes to be FDA Commissioner.

As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1985, then CEO of Searle Laboratories Donald Rumsfeld had said that he would “call in his markers” to get aspartame approved.

And though, for good reason, no FDA Commissioner in the previous sixteen years had allowed aspartame on the market, in 1981, the newly appointed Hayes ignored the negative ruling and approved aspartame. Later Hayes went to work for the PR Agency of the manufacturer, Burson-Marstellar, and has refused to talk to the press ever since.

[Sources for this story from Sepp Hasselberger, Mission Possible and News with Views, and there are thousands of references to this under-reported story and to the dangers of aspartame on Google.]


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