ASPARTAME AND BRAIN TUMORS
NUTRASWEET IS SUSPECTED IN RISE IN BRAIN TUMORS
Copyright & copy 1996 Minneapolis-St.Paul Star-Tribune
WASHINGTON (Nov 5, 1996 01:01 a.m. EST) — Aspartame, thepopular
artificial sweetener sold most often as NutraSweet, isa leading
suspect in an upsurge of deadly brain tumors in the UnitedStates,
researchers at Washington University in St. Louis haveconcluded.Their analysis of National Cancer Institute data, to bepublished this
week in the Journal of Neuropathology and ExperimentalNeurology,
found that the number of brain tumors jumped by 10 percentin 1984, a
year after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvedthe
sweetener for widespread use in food and soft drinks.Similar
increases in brain tumors occurred in Europe, the researcherssaid.The U.S. increase — about 1,310 cases per year — wasmarked by
rising diagnoses of the same type of highly malignanttumor found in
laboratory rats in an aspartame study in the 1970s, thescientists
said.Dr. John Olney, lead author of the paper, is a noted neuropathologist
and psychiatrist who has challenged aspartame’s safetysince the
1970s.“Compared to other environmental factors, aspartame appearsto be a
promising candidate for explaining the surge in braintumors in the
mid-1980s,” Olney and three colleagues said, emphasizingthat they
were not asserting a causal link but rather urging furtherresearch
here and abroad.The FDA and aspartame’s top manufacturer disputed the paper’s
hypothesis.Dr. Michael Friedman, the FDA’s deputy commissioner foroperations,
said there are “serious methodological questions aboutDr. Olney’s
conclusions.”Neither epidemiologists at the National Cancer Institutenor the FDA’s
own scientists who reviewed the data “find even a weakassociation
between aspartame and brain tumor incidence in the UnitedStates,” he
said, saying no further study is needed.A spokesman for the Illinois-based NutraSweet Kelco Co.,which sells
close to $1 billion of aspartame annually, said the researchers
“manipulated the data to make their point.”“Aspartame is likely the most tested food additive in history,”the
company said. “There is no evidence that aspartame isa carcinogen,
let alone that it causes brain tumors.”The firm, a unit of the Monsanto Corp., sells aspartameas the
tabletop sweetener Equal, and supplies it for a smorgasbordof
products, including soft drinks, Crystal Lite, puddings,gelatins and
chewing gum, for use by more than 100 million people worldwide.While a highly profitable product, aspartame has been enmeshedin
controversy ever since the Chicago-based G.D. Searle &Co. won FDA
approval — first in 1981, for use in dry foods, and thenin 1983, for
soft drinks and other foods. At the time, Donald Rumsfeld,now
chairman of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, was G.D.Searle’s
chairman.Thousands of consumers have filed adverse-reaction reportswith the
FDA blaming NutraSweet for migraine headaches, visionproblems,
epileptic seizures and other maladies — links the companysays have
never been clinically proved.While the vast majority of industry-sponsored studies havesaid
aspartame causes no health problems, a number of independentstudies
have raised serious questions.Cancer concerns date back two decades. In the mid-1970s,12 of 320
aspartame-fed rats in a company-sponsored study developedbrain
tumors, compared with none in a control group. The companyprovided
other research to discount that finding, but in 1986,FDA commissioner
Alexander Schmidt told a Senate Committee that Searle’sresearch could
“at best be characterized as sloppy” and that its scientistshad made
decisions that “tended to minimize the chances of discovering
toxicity.”In 1981, acting on a petition from Olney and consumer attorneyJames
Turner, an FDA Public Board of Inquiry voted unanimouslyto keep
aspartame off the market because of concerns about braintumors. But
shortly after assuming the FDA commissioner’s job thatyear, Arthur
Hull Hayes Jr. overruled the board and approved NutraSweetfor limited
use, citing a late-arriving study sponsored by Searle’sJapanese
partner; that study’s statistical validity also has beenquestioned.Olney, who recently was elected to the Institute of Medicine,an
affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences, establishedhimself as
a pioneer in the field of food additive research in the1970s. His
discovery that monosodium glutamate killed nerve cellsin immature
animals caused the food industry to remove MSG from babyfood.
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