Life will kill you

Why do you have concerns about aspartame, the artificial sweetener in many soft drinks and other low-calorie foods? What's a drinker of Diet Coke to think?

I can't tell you what to think: I can just tell you what I know, and what I recommend to my children.

In 1977, Richard Merrill, who later became dean of the University of Virginia Law School, was the chief counsel of the Food and Drug Administration, and he formally asked the U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury to decide whether or not to indict the producer of aspartame, G.D. Searle, for misrepresenting "findings, concealing material facts and making false statements" in aspartame safety tests.

This is not some left-wing group. This is the actual chief counsel of the FDA asking the U.S. attorney's office to convene a grand jury. It never happened, because by the time the grand jury was ready to be convened we had a new president. That president was Reagan, and within a month of Reagan taking office, he had a proposal from a guy you might have heard of named Donald Rumsfeld [who was then chief operating officer of Searle].

And Jan. 22, 1981, one day after Reagan's inauguration -- one day -- Searle reapplied for FDA approval. Prior to that, every single request for approval was turned down by all the scientists ever looking at the data. That's a fact. There's no dispute about that fact. And then, it gets approved May 19, 1981.

Remember what happened with the Reagan revolution? It was: "We need to get the government off our backs." One of the backs it got off of was suppressing the aspartame industry. Later, many of the people who worked at the FDA to evaluate aspartame ended up going to work for the company producing it.

So you tell people to avoid it?

Absolutely.

First of all, there's no evidence that it helps you lose weight. And there are people who drink a lot of diet soda. It's a question of a risk-benefit trade-off.

The thing that I'm most concerned about is the latest study from Italy. A typical rat study runs two years; that would be getting your rat to about my age: 60. People live now to their 90s. This study started their exposure when they were babies, like what we do now in the United States with aspartame, and let the rats live out their natural lifetimes until they were 3 years old.

And when they did that they found a significant increase in tumors that occurred only in that third year of life. Of course, the European Food Safety Authority, which sounds very independent, says the study is worthless. But I looked up the background on the people involved with the European Food Safety Authority, and many of them work directly for the food industry.

The Ramazzini Foundation, a toxicology institute, which did the study, is not known to be radical. Unlike most other sources of information in toxicology, it's truly independent. It is not funded by Monsanto. And what they found is that there is significant increase in lymphomas and leukemia, and that the increase comes not from consuming 800 cans of soda a day, but from consuming fairly moderate amounts of aspartame in these animals' lifetimes. They had 1,800 animals, and some of them were just consuming the equivalent of two cans of soda a day, two yogurts, 10 pieces of chewing gum. And at that level of consumption, there was a significant increase in cancer, and it only showed up in older rats.

How have recent court rulings made it harder to try to prevent cancer?

We have gone backward since the '70s. In the '70s, in the decision on lead in gasoline, the court said we could use experimental evidence that something was a threat to human health in order to prevent harm. The court repeatedly ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could use theories, models and estimates to prevent harm.

Now, we have to prove that harm has already happened before taking action to prevent additional harm. In the area of cancer this is a travesty, since most cancer in adults takes five, 10, 20 or 30 years [to develop]. It means that we have no opportunity to prevent cancer, because we must prove through human evidence that it's already happened. I think that is fundamentally wrong public policy. Ninety percent of all claims now for toxic torts are denied.

What the court decisions have done is to make the burden of proof close to impossible when it comes to human harm and environmental contamination.

Given that, when people choose products or foods, what guidelines do you think that they should be employing?

I think prudent precaution -- moderation in all things, including moderation. Sometimes when we look under the kitchen sink, and when we look at the products that we use on our bodies, or when our 5-year-old asks us for cosmetics, sometimes we have to say no.

Efficiency is generally going to reduce your toxic burden. You can do more with less. In my own home, my kids joke, I buy baking soda by the 10-pound bag. You can use baking soda for just about anything that you can use Comet cleanser for. And vinegar does a whole lot as well. There are a lot of very simple things like this that we can do, and move away from some of the more complex synthetic materials.

Just yesterday I was walking in Squirrel Hill, and I saw a very lanky 15-year-old boy, whose mother had asked him to weed the concrete driveway. He was lollygagging down there with a spray can of a pesticide wearing sandals. And I happen to know his mother, and I said: "Have you looked at the label on that thing he's using?" She said: "No." I said: "Well, you might want to think about it, but I don't recommend that someone his age uses pesticides at all. And spraying with that may not be a good idea."

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