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Dr. David Katz Misleads ABC and Listeners on Aspartame Study

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17 February, 2006
Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum, Founder
Mission Possible International

Dear Doctor Katz:

Only two things are wrong with your critique of the 3-year Italian aspartame study:
Your facts are wrong
Your conclusions are wrong.

YOU SAY:

The researcher studied the effects of about five sodas a day worth of aspartame on each of 1,900 rats that is the equivalent of 100 ounces of soda for a 150-pound person

2. The Italian doctor also increased the time the rats ingested the chemical

3. This is an animal study. Theres [nothing] to indicate this is the same threat in humans.

4. Rats have short life spans and are more susceptible to cancer. [Prove it!]

5. The major conclusion [you] drew is that rats and humans were both more likely to develop cancer toward the end of their lives.

6: If there is any potential harm its a very low level because of how widespread the use is, and its been around long enough.

Shame on you for dismissing this vital peer-reviewed research that proves aspartame causes cancer. Obviously youre blinded or hired by the aspartame industry! Here are the facts:

1: Each of the rats DID NOT GET the equivalent of 100 ounces of diet soda
300 rats received zero aspartame
300 received 12% of the human ADI
300 received 40%
Half the rats got zero or a fraction of the human ADI [Average Daily Intake] By the way, five 12-ounce sodas is 60 ounces, not 100. Who taught you math?

2: The rats received it their whole lives because people use it till they die. Makes sense.

3 & 4: The 300 rats that didn't get aspartame had no increase in cancer. Rat studies are standard procedure in medicine because of the many similarities of their metabolism to ours. The test animals were genetically uniform. Youre saying don't pay this study any mind cause they used animals. Well, for 22 years theres been an ongoing test going on humans, billions of them, and its killing us. FDA listed 92 symptoms of aspartame disease from 10,000 volunteered consumer complaints. Come down to my office and I'll show you thousands.

5: The conclusion of this study by the researchers: APM causes dose-related statistically significant increase in lymphomas and leukaemias in females at dose levels very near those to which humans can be exposed. Moreover it can hardly be overlooked that at the lowest exposure of 80 ppm there was a 62% increase in lymphomas and leukaemias compared to controls.

6: Youre saying: Ive smoked them all my life and I aint dead yet. Google lists 3,110,000 posts on aspartame.

Dr. Katz, is your problem ignorance, or old fashioned hubris? You have misled millions of ABC listeners with your spout suggesting that aspartame is no more carcinogenic than broccoli or peanuts. How many consumers have you met who eat 837 cans of broccoli, the number of sodas you say average Americans swallow? Do they have a course in remedial arithmetic for you at Yale, Dr. Katz? I ask because you say 837 sodas are 46 gallons. At 12-ounces/can its 79 gallons. Of course I understand that when youre doing a whitewash job little things like truth and accuracy don't count. Your abundant errors show you never read the impeccable Ramazzini Study, peer-reviewed by 7 world experts which proves beyond doubt aspartame causes leukemia and lymphoma, kidney cancer and cancer of the cranial peripheral nerves.

Only rats fed aspartame developed malignant brain tumors. But you say: "This is an animal study. There's (nothing) to indicate this is the same threat in humans." I was shocked to hear a doctor say something so dumb. Obviously you were told to allay the expected fears of the public. Neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, M.D. reviewed this study and said mothers should be terrified, as well as all aspartame consumers. Read his remarks:
http://www.wnho.net/new_aspartame_studies.htm Dr. Blaylock authored Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills,
http://www.russellblaylockmd.com and is a renowned neurosurgeon who has focused on aspartame excitotoxicity.

Dr Blaylocks book explains what animal studies tell us about humans. 40% of the aspartame molecule is excitotoxic aspartic acid. Dr. John Olney founder of the field of neuroscience called excitotoxicity has shown that MSG and aspartame produce the same damage to neurons in all animal species tested - dogs, rats, mice, chickens, and primates. And in each case, it is the same types of cells that are affected, those with glutamate receptors. There is a major difference, though, between humans and animals. We accumulate higher amounts of MSG in the blood following similar oral dose than does any known animal. Human brain cells are as sensitive to the damage of excitotoxins as lab animals, often even more sensitive.

H. J. Roberts, M.D., F.A.C.P., F.C.C.P, declared Aspartame Disease a global plague and published the 1,038 page medical text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, http://www.sunsentpress.com. He compares aspartame effect on humans and rodents. Corporate representatives assert you would have to drink enormous quantities before reaching the toxic threshold. This is nothing more than propaganda to bamboozle the public. Dr. Roberts says conversion of phenylalanine to tyrosine is much slower in man than rodents so the time is extended and toxicity to humans is intensified. Obviously, animal studies are essential, as a physician don't you know that?

FDA toxicologist Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress since aspartame causes brain tumors and cancer, FDA should not have set an allowable daily dose. Dr. Roberts says quantitative information about aspartame content is absent on labels of products in the US; so concerned parents are unable to calculate how much their children consume.

Dr. Frank E. Young, former FDA Commissioner, defined the ADI during the 11/3/87 Senate hearing on aspartame as "an estimate of the amount of the food additive expressed on a body weight basis in animal studies, that can be ingested daily OVER A LIFETIME without appreciable health risk. He focuses on continued lifetime exposure, not on a single days dose!

I ask a similar question: How do you set an allowable daily dose of an excitoneurotoxic carcinogenic drug that damages mitochondria and interacts with all drugs and vaccines - a chemical causing 92 documented symptoms including 4 types of seizures, coma and death published by FDA? Medical texts show it precipitates everything from diabetes, obesity, sudden cardiac death and all types of neurodegenerative diseases, blindness and birth defects.

Dr. Roberts, a diabetic specialist, says not only can aspartame precipitate it, but also aggravates and simulates diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy, destroys the optic nerve and interacts with insulin. Dr. William Deagle, M.D., FCFP, DABFP, AAEM, CCFP told me just today that aspartame is toxic to Beta islets that make insulin and pushes the blood insulin levels higher burning out the already enlarged pancreas in prediabetics and the last bit of autonomous production in diabetic patients. Insulin resistance is much higher in diabetics and the toxic effects of aspartame on mitochondria lower the calorie burn side of the energy equation, resulting in higher obesity and thus yet higher insulin resistance. Aspartame promotes neuropathy by direct toxicity to brain and nerve cells inducing peroxynitrile radicals and neuron death or apoptosis.

Professional organizations and front groups like the Calorie Control Council, the American Diabetes Association, the American Dietetics Association, etc, push aspartame on diabetics whereas it should never be used by a diabetic or prediabetic with insulin resistance syndrome or Syndrome X. Those responsible to solve the problem ARE the problem, just like yourself, Dr. Katz.. You say rats have short life spans and are naturally more susceptible to cancer. This is just whitewash; and hides the real issues.

The Ramazzini study was conducted on almost 2,000 rats as opposed to the 280 to 688 rodents used in Searle's studies, and the rats lived for up to three years instead of being sacrificed after two years, the human equivalent of age 53. "Cancer is a disease of the third part of life," Dr. Soffritti declares: "You have 75 percent of cancer diagnoses for people who are 55 years old or older. So if you truncate the experiments at 110 weeks and the rats are supposed to survive until 150 to 160 weeks, it means you avoid the development of cancer at the time when cancer would be starting to arise."

Such early terminations really help the poisoners. Just kill the rats before they get sick! Dr. Soffritti did exactly the right thing. In his book Dr. Blaylock says that when brain tumors develop spontaneously in rats, the rate at which they appear begins to accelerate after two years of age, exactly when the Searle's study ended. Importantly, brain tumors are extremely rare before age one and one half in the rat. So in truth the incidence of spontaneously occurring brain tumors would be even less than cited above. Yet aspartame fed rats developed 2 tumors by 60 weeks and 5 by 70 weeks.

He says in a collective study of 41,000 rats no tumors were seen before 60 weeks and only one by 70 weeks. That 320 aspartame fed rats developed six brain tumors by 76 weeks indicates an "incredible and unprecedented" occurrence. Within the final 28 weeks 6 more brain tumors occurred in the aspartame fed group. Dr. Olney said, "one must assume that many more (brain tumors) would have occurred after 104 weeks.

Dr. Blaylock says it became obvious that the G. D. Searle was trying desperately to protect their billion-dollar bonanza. In original studies tumors were dose related. In Dr. Soffritti's study tumors were dose related. You would expect aspartame to be a carcinogen. Dr. Roberts discusses the mechanisms obvious to any physician. Here are some from Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic:

* Many constituents in the human diet are nitrosated within the gastrointestinal tract to form potentially carcinogenic nitroso compounds. Shephard et al (l993) reported mutagenic activity by aspartame after nitrosation, using Salmonella typhimurium as the test organism.

* The diketopiperazine derivative of aspartame has been incriminated as a tumor-causing chemical.

* Formaldehyde released from the breakdown of methyl alcohol is known to be carcinogenic.

* The potential carcinogenic effects of chronic hyperinsulinemia have been discussed in prior publications, with special reference to the prostate. (Roberts l967d). Others have implicated hyperinsulinemia in the pathogenesis of breast cancer (Diamanti-Kandarakis l999).

* Alteration of glucose transport is a characteristic of experimental tumors. Reporting on this phenomenon, and the dramatic increase in total cellular glucose transporter protein, Birenbaum et al (l987) emphasized the induction of such transformation when fibroblasts are starved for glucose.

* Increased phenylalanine may play a role. Animal and human studies indicate that restricting dietary phenylalanine decreases tumor growth and metastases (Norris l990).


I could go on, but I suggest you get the medical text: Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic! I read your following statement twice because it sounds like the Twilight Zone. "If it caused any significant harm, we would know about it. If there was any potential for harm, it's a very low level because of how widespread the use is and because it's been around long enough."

FDA was so swamped with complaints it admitted in congressional hearings they sent them to the AIDS Hotline to get rid of them. There were three of these hearings because of the outrage of the public being poisoned. The aspartame wars are historic. There are millions of posts on aspartame and thousands of web sites carrying the warnings. I quoted a couple of medical texts on aspartame but there are stacks of books on aspartame toxicity, and a film: Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World. Get it on amazon.com or at Barnes & Noble. More are coming.

Aspartame is continuously in the news. Mission Possible International is a global volunteer force set up to warn consumers with operations in most states and over 30 countries. An Aspartame Information List keeps the public up-to-date, and is a support group as well.

In the UK Roger Williams, a Member of Parliament has called for a ban. I made two tours there. Robin Goodwin, Mission Possible Falkland Islands, petitioned for a ban. Stephen Fox petitioned the Environmental Improvement Board and Board of Pharmacy in New Mexico to ban it and wrote a ban aspartame bill for the legislature. See http://www.wnho.net , click on aspartame. Activists in other states are about to follow in the footsteps of New Mexico. A letter to Governor Richardson signed by 10 Senators asks that New Mexico be declared a state of public emergency so aspartame can be immediately banned without waiting for the next legislative session.

Petitions to ban aspartame have been submitted to the FDA on several occasions, including my own which they refuse to answer, even though the law requires FDA to do so. In l996 Dr. John Olney made world news on the aspartame/brain tumor connection on 60 Minutes. Dr. Ralph Walton joined him with research showing 92 % of independent peer-reviewed studies show problems. http://www.dorway.com/peerrev.html

I find it very unusual that you don't know what's been going on, especially since you're at Yale. Isn't that Monsanto/Searle's CEO Robert Shapiro's old stumping grounds? Isn't Yale where Dr. David Kessler went when he resigned from the FDA after granting blanket approval for this toxin to be used everywhere, like sugar, even though Searle's own secret trade information admitted it couldn't be used in everything? Unless you been on sabbatical on another planet, I don't understand how you can say If it caused significant harm we would know about it. In reality it has created a global plague.

You mention alternatives like Splenda (Sucralose) and refer consumers to this trichlorinated sugar molecule, which liberates deadly chlorine. http://www.wnho.net/splenda_chlorocarbon.htm
The one caution you give about aspartame is that it makes you crave carbohydrates. Yes, its addictive. It liberates free methyl alcohol causing methanol poisoning. This affects the brains dopamine system and causes addiction. True, if you want to get fat NutraSweet is where its at.

You make light of this impeccable study and say even healthy foods like broccoli, spinach and beans contain potentially carcinogenic compounds. Frankenfood companies have genetically engineered broccoli with rat genes, but it doesn't destroy families. Aspartame triggers male sexual dysfunction, ruins female response, is an abortifacient, teratogen (triggers birth defects and mental retardation) and even damages DNA, which can destroy humanity. Here's the history of aspartame: http://www.wnho.net/the_ecologist_aspartame_report.htm

Your report was broadcast to millions, Dr. Katz. You owe ABC and the public an apology and a retraction! Aspartame experts have always said the original studies need to be repeated because of all the shenanigans committed by Searle, the reason FDA had asked for their indictment. They simply couldnt take a poison and show safety, and they were caught doing such things as excising the brain tumors from the rats and putting them back in the study. When the rats died they would resurrect them on paper. (Bressler Report, FDA audit - http://www.dorway.com/bressler.txt ) FDA toxicologist, the late Dr. Jacqueline Verrett told Congress that all original studies were built on a foundation of sand and should be thrown out. Now the studies have been repeated and the world owes thanks to Dr. Soffritti. The New York Times article shows Dr. Soffritti standing before us like the hero he is. Now the public knows what the aspartame manufacturers and their front groups have been covering up for years.

Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum, Founder
Mission Possible International
9270 River Club Parkway
Duluth, Georgia 30097
770 242-2599

http://www.wnho.net and http://www.dorway.com
Aspartame Toxicity Center, http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame


Dr. David Katz

ABC News Medical Contributor


- In 2005, Dr. David L. Katz became a medical contributor for ABC News, with regular appearances on "Good Morning America" and occasional appearances on "20/20," "World News Tonight" and other ABC News programming.

Katz is an associate professor of public health at the Yale University School of Medicine. He directs the Yale Prevention Research Center, which he co-founded in 1998. In July 2005, he became the associate director for nutrition science at the newly established Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University.

His ninth book, "The Flavor Point Diet," is due out from Rodale in January 2006.

Elected to the governing boards of both the American College of Preventive Medicine and the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine, Katz was recognized in 2003-04, and again in 2004-05, as one of America's top physicians in preventive medicine by the Consumers' Research Council of America.

Katz has been an expert consultant on obesity control for the U.S. Secretary of Health, the FDA commissioner, several governors, private corporations and the health insurance industry.

He and his wife, Catherine, developed an innovative nutrition-training program for elementary school students called "The Nutrition Detectives Program."

Katz earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College, his M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his master's in public health from the Yale University School of Public Health. He is board-certified in internal medicine and preventive medicine/public health. In 2000, he founded, and currently directs, the Integrative Medicine Center in Derby, Conn., a unique facility in which conventionally trained and naturopathic physicians work collaboratively to provide patients with evidence-based, holistic care.

Committed to "practicing what he preaches," he works out for at least 40 minutes most days. Katz believes he should not be offering advice that he himself would be unwilling to follow.

Katz lives in Connecticut with his wife and their five children: Rebecca, Corinda, Valerie, Natalia and Gabriel.


Artificial Sweeteners: Are They Safe?

Animals in Study Ingested Huge Amounts of the Chemical

Feb. 13, 2006 - The debate over the safety of artificial sweeteners intensified over the weekend, when an article in The New York Times said Aspartame, the most popular sugar replacement in America, might cause cancer in rats.

Aspartame, which was invented in 1965, is found in more than 6,000 products, and most people know it by its trade names, NutraSweet and Equal. It is estimated that 200 million people consume Aspartame so if it is unsafe, the effects could be far-reaching. Dr. David Katz, ABC News' medical contributor, said that people should not jump to conclusions based on the rat study.

"If it caused any significant harm, we would know about it," he said. "If there was any potential for harm, it's a very low level because of how widespread the use is and because it's been around long enough."

Katz, a Yale professor and the author of the "Flavor Point Diet," said that the latest study, which comes from Italy, demonstrated a "statistically significant increase in lymphomas and leukemias over
three years." The Italian researcher studied the effects of about five sodas a day worth of Aspartame on each of the 1,900 rats -- that is the equivalent of 100 ounces of soda for a 150-pound person every day. The Italian doctor also increased the time the rats ingested the chemical.

Katz said: "This is an animal study. There's [nothing] to indicate this is the same threat in humans."

Katz said that rats had short life spans and were naturally more susceptible to cancer. He also pointed out that even healthy foods like broccoli, spinach and beans contained some potentially carcinogenic compounds.

Considering that the average American drinks 837 sodas each year, equivalent to 46 gallons -- and 27 percent of that is diet soda, sweetened with artificial sweetener -- the new study has alarmed many people.

There are alternatives to Aspartame like saccharin (Sweet'N Low) and sucralose (Splenda), which Katz said were not the same chemically, but served the same purpose.

"We seem to have the notion in our society that science is something to be suspicious of and the natural stuff is safe," Katz said. "But we know peanuts are dangerous to some people, and we never discuss banning peanuts."

Katz said there were bigger reasons to be wary of artificial sweeteners.

"I think artificial sweeteners are harmful and, not because of the cancer risk, but because as a class they are 300 times more sweet than sugar," he said. "You may not get calories from diet soda, but because you drink it, you develop a sweet tooth and have these cravings."

If people are worried about getting cancer, Katz said, they should keep their weight down and avoid tobacco. Katz said that the major conclusion he drew from the Italian rat study was that rats and humans were both more likely to develop cancer toward the end of their lives.

"More cancer was seen in this study, and the study's author, Dr. Morando Soffriti, was saying if you're studying cancer, it makes more sense to look at the stage of life when the cancer is likely to crop up."



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