When In Doubt, Blame The President...

...or his Secretary of Defense, or his Secretary of Defense twenty-five years ago when he served for a few years as Chairman of G.D. Searle, or the President's dog, or the President's limousine driver...

Or, IF THERE'S A BUSH CONNECTION, THERE'S EVIL TO BE FOUND

As Duane D. Freese reports in today's Tech Central Station Daily , the mainstream press's Gray Maiden is at it again, this time with a Sunday edition "expose" of aspartame.

Which is a bit sad, really, as this is the third go round for this scare. The basis of this old new story is a six-month old study by the European Ramaziini Foundation of Italy. In the study, researchers fed rats various levels of aspartame – the stuff in Equal and Nutrasweet and most modern diet pop and many diet foods. A group of 150 males and females each got none, zero, zip. Another 150 males and females got the equivalent of 4 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, or a can and a half a day. The other groups split up into 100 male and female pairs got levels of 20 mg/kg, or 7 cans; 100mg, 35 cans; 500mg, 175 cans; 2500 mg, 875 cans, and finally 5,000 mg, or the equivalent of 1,750 cans a day....
Those Dirty Rats, by Duane D. Freese, TCS Daily

It seemed more or less a standard study until....

The sweetener industry was beginning to raise questions about the study. For example, unlike other studies that kill off the rats after two years and count the tumors, the Ramazzini study waited for them to die. "Rats, like people, develop a wide range of cancers in old age, and establishing whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship (at an age when cancers are common) is not possible," Joe Poulos, a spokesman for Merisant, maker of Equal, told Fox News. Further, the regulatory agencies were taking a look at the published studies and raising questions, too....

Okay, what's hiding here? Where are the regulatory agencies? Well, it seems they found that...

...the Ramazzini study's cancer rates for the aspartame fed rats fit in the range of cancers that the institute had historically found for its control rats. Furthermore, the cancer rates for the aspartame fed females remained pretty stable no matter the dosage. If aspartame were toxic, you would expect the rate of cancers to increase as the dosage increased....

If this plot is thickening, it had better happen quick. Aha!

[NY Timeswoman] Warner's editors let her ramble on for more than 600 words about the approval process, noting that "from 1977 to 1985 — during much of the approval process — (G.D.) Searle (which invented aspartame) was headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now the secretary of defense," and then running through a litany of supposed revolving door relationships and a lot of innuendo about a possible cover-up. All of which is a bit bizarre, considering that Congress' Government Accounting Office (now Government Accountability Office) in 1987, on a request from Ohio Democratic Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, reported that the FDA had followed appropriate procedures in its approvals. Aspartame has received significant scrutiny in studies for use in Europe, Canada and other places as well....

The devil himself! It isn't aspartame that causes cancer (see below) but Donald Rumsfeld! What else could it be?

The rats with the highest survival rates at 104 and 120 weeks, at 55% and about 29% respectively, were the rats that ate the most aspartame – the equivalent of 1,750 cans of diet soda a day. And the longest living rat of all consumed the equivalent of 175 cans a day. In short, the control rats died first; the heavy aspartame consumers lived longest.

No thanks to Donald Rumsfeld, I bet.

Maybe next the NY Times expose could be how aspartame combined with IED's causes Iraqi civilians to die compared to how many reporters faint when exposed to sugar in Scarsdale.

Luther