Hi, everyone!
A few of you left some comments on my last blog. I just got back from vacation so I apologize for not getting to the comments until now. I responded to the stability-ball comment in the blog.
The other comment was in regards to aspartame. I was going to respond in the comment section of the blog, but this comment deserves a detailed response. Thus, I will post my response here so that I can provide more detail.
The excerpts that I am responding to are bounded by asterisks and are in italics.
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Try this article instead - it quotes actual research and doctors studies on Aspartame instead of referring the reader to Wikipedia, as the one in Daily Science does.
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Science Daily does not refer the reader to Wikipedia. There is not a single link to Wikipedia in the entire article. Their source is from the University of New South Wales, where the carcinogen research was conducted. You can find the reference at the bottom of the article.
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www.nytimes.com/.../12sweet.html
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I have actually read this NY times article before, and I have the original research paper by Dr. Soffritti. There are numerous problems with his research which I will outline here.
1. The research paper was published by the Ramazzini Institute. The article was printed in a journal (European Journal of Oncology) that is owned by the Institute itself. Soffritti is a member of this institute. The journal is not indexed by MedLine because it does not meet the requirements of thorough and unbiased review.
2. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and UK Committee on Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products, and Environment thoroughly reviewed Soffritti's study in 2005. Their comments were as follows:
"Overall, members concluded that, in view of the problems in the design of the study and some concerns about the microbiological status of the colony, it was not possible to draw conclusions about the potential carcinogenicity of aspartame from the results. After its evaluation the Panel considers that the study has flaws which bring into question the validity of the findings, as interpreted by the European Ramazzini Foundation. In particular, the high background incidence of chronic inflammatory changes in the lungs and other vital organs and tissues and the uncertainty about the correctness of the diagnoses of some tumour types were major confounding factors in the interpretation of the findings of the study."
Further comments from the committee can be found here.
The FDA reviewed the study and came to similar conclusions.
3. The conclusions of Soffritti's study are in direct conflict with U.S. and European cancer incidence data since aspartame's approval and widespread use. Aspartame consumption increased dramatically from 1980 - 1995. This was followed by a modest increase from 1995-2002. If aspartame truly caused lymphoma and leukemia, you would have seen an increase after aspartame's introduction to the market. However, cancer rates for Hodgkin's lymphoma and leukemia decreased slightly from 1973 - 2002.
4. Extensive postmarketing data shows there is NO relationship between aspartame use and any type of cancer.
5. Four previously conducted long-term cancer studies, as well as studies by the National Toxicology Program, have shown NO cancer causing effects of aspartame.
6. The methodology of Soffritti's study did not follow internationally established protocols for animal cancer studies. Soffritti allowed the study to go until the animals died spontaneously. This is considered unacceptable by most cancer researchers, because it becomes difficult to establish whether the treatment or old age is the cause of the tumors.
7. The animals in the aspartame groups actually lived longer than the control animals. This would make it appear as if they got more cancer, because the longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer!
7. Soffritti combined tumor results in an inappropriate way, mixing different cancer cell types. This is like mixing apples and oranges, and is of questionable statistical validity.
8. Soffritti and his colleagues only provided information on total tumors per group. They did not provide information on the number of tumors per animal, which is the more appropriate way to examine the data.
9. There was no clear dose-response relationship. If aspartame was truly carcinogenic, you would have seen more cancer at higher doses. But this did not happen. In fact, the cancer rate for the female control rats was essentially the same as the cancer rate for the rats consuming aspartame.
10. The Institute did not allow outside pathologists to analyze all the tissue samples where tumors were found. In fact, the FDA requested to review the pathology slides and the Institute refused. When an organization refuses to be transparent and release their data for inspection (especially with something as serious as a potential carcinogen), it makes me think that Soffritti and his colleagues are more interested in attention-grabbing headlines rather than scientific truth.
11. As stated in the NY times article, Soffritti only looked at 70 tumor slides, despite the fact they produced over 9,000 tumor containing slides! This is dubious to me. As I mentioned in #10, when scientists hide data like this, it makes their results highly questionable.
The bottom line is that the study by Soffritti is bunk. It was highly flawed and was not published in a peer-reviewed, unbiased quality journal. Also, their refusal to release their data for inspection makes the results even more questionable.
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the doses, however, are NOT outrageously overestimated, because people who write about aspartame, you included, seem to forget that it is in everything from any "lite" or "low-cal" yogurt and yogurt drink in the dairy case, to "reduced sugar" cereals and literally thousands more foods than diet soda.
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Research on aspartame intake completely takes into consideration the fact that it is found in many foods, and that exposure is widespread. However, numerous studies show that aspartame intake, even among the highest consumers, is well below the Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI). In fact, here are two recent comprehensive reviews by scientists on this topic.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17397982?ordinalpos=7&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17828671?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
The ADI for aspartame is equivalent to 19 cans of 12-ounce diet soda or 97 packets of Equal for the average-weighted person. This is extremely high and the vast majority of people will never exceed this. On top of that, there is already a 100-fold safety factor built into this number. The way the ADI is set is that the FDA takes the highest amount that has been found to be safe for animals, and then divides it by 100 to set the limit for humans.
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What these articles fail to mention, and this NYT article covers very thoroughly, are the MILLIONS of complaints and undeniable links from aspartame to migraine
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The NYT article says nothing about millions of complaints or undeniable links between aspartame and migraine. Also, complaints registered to the FDA cannot alone be considered evidence of a link between aspartame and migraine. There are so many potential triggers to migraine that it is impossible to isolate the true causes through complaints alone. In fact, there was one study where people who claimed to get headaches from aspartame also got headaches from a placebo. If it's not aspartame causing the headaches, then what is it? In this study, one woman, who often ate peanuts with her diet soda, was allergic to peanuts. Another subject drank too much caffeine. This is exactly why anecdotal evidence alone is not sufficient to establish a link between aspartame and migraines.
Now, I do think that it is possible that there is a small percentage of people who may be sensitive to aspartame and may get headaches from it. If this effect is real, it is probably due to a rise in blood phenylalanine in the absence of other competing amino acids. There are a couple solutions to this. If you are convinced aspartame triggers migraines, then limit your consumption. Another solution is not to consume large amounts of aspartame in the absence of any protein (as some people do with large quantities of diet soft drinks or diet juices). The protein will introduce other amino acids that will compete with phenylalanine to cross the blood-brain barrier.
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Parkinson's and MS-like symptoms
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The National Parkinson Foundation has found that there is NO link between aspartame consumption and Parkinson's. There is no credible scientific evidence linking the two.
The same goes for MS. The National MS Society reports there is NO link between aspartame and MS. The MS Society of Canada says the same thing. Again, there is no scientific evidence that aspartame causes or aggravates MS.
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and the articles produced for airline and Navy pilots are numerous - drinking aspartame at altitude is even more dangerous
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This is also not true. A study by the Aviation Institute at the University of Illinois clearly showed that aspartame had NO detrimental effect on airline pilots. Here's another study showing the same thing.
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Using pseudo-authority as a "Senior Researcher" to pass along pop-culture articles without doing due-diligence.
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The title of "Senior Researcher" was given to me by 20/20 and the PRO Sports Club, so it is not a self-proclaimed title. Nevertheless, I am more than qualified for this title. I have two master's degrees, one in nutrition and the other in exercise physiology. I have published nutrition-related research in the Journal of Applied Physiology and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. These are prestigious, Tier I scientific journals, and it is very difficult to get published in them....only about 15% of the articles submitted get published. The abstracts for my two publications can be seen here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15107413?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16469983?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
I have a third research paper that is currently undergoing peer review.
I also am the science editor for the Journal of Pure Power, where I regularly review research in the field of exercise and nutrition. I also have written over 100 articles in various lay publications regarding the field of health, exercise, and nutrition. I have also given presentations at scientific meetings, and have also taught University level classes in exercise and nutrition.
Thus, I am more than qualified to critically analyze research in my field.
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to pass along pop-culture articles
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The vast majority of my sources are peer-reviewed, scientific research papers, as well as reviews from scientific organizations. These are not "pop-culture" articles.
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without doing due-diligence.
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The vast majority of my day is spent carefully searching PubMed for scientific studies, and reading and critically reviewing those studies. I also spend a significant amount of time sorting through those studies, synthesizing the information, and drawing conclusions from it. It requires an extreme amount of patience and diligence to do this, especially with something like aspartame, when there is so much misinformation out there regarding it.
The NY Times article you refer to is NOT a good source of information. First, the author has no background to critically evaluate the information. Second, newspapers and media are driven by controversy and sensationalism. Thus, they will present information in a way to create controversy, which may not accurately reflect the truth. Third, newspaper authors rarely have the time to thoroughly evaluate information presented to them.
Here's an example from the article. The NY Times article states:
"In any case, critics say that most of these studies were financed either directly or indirectly by manufacturers of aspartame, and that the results of aspartame studies tend to depend on who paid for them. In an analysis of 166 articles published in medical journals from 1980 to 1985, Dr. Ralph G. Walton, a professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine found that all 74 studies that were financed by the industry attested to sweetener's safety.
Of the 92 independently funded articles, 84 identified adverse health effects."
When doing my research on aspartame a while back, I took a close look at Dr. Walton's paper. Here's what I found out about his 84 articles that supposedly found adverse health effects of aspartame:
- 1 did not involve aspartame and used abuse doses of glutamic acid in infant mice
- 16 were letters to the editor (not studies). Some of these were written by the same person
- 5 did not identify any adverse effect of aspartame
- 1 used abuse doses of MSG, not aspartame
- 1 study didn't appear to exist
- 1 was a review paper looking at other studies that used abuse doses (a review is not a study)
- 9 were reviews or opinion papers (not studies)
- 7 used an abuse dose of aspartame
- 5 were case reports (not studies)
- 4 were high dose in vitro (in a test tube) studies, which do not reflect how aspartame is metabolized in the body
- 2 were not related to aspartame safety
- 1 was an analysis of consumer complaints and not a controlled study
- 3 did not involve aspartame
- 12 were book chapters (not studies)
- 2 were repeats of a paper already mentioned
- 2 were hypotheses, not studies
- 1 was a survey
- 1 was a terribly designed, now-debunked epidemiological study
- 1 was a now debunked study on formaledehyde
The NY Times author did not look into this as I did, and thus the article is misleading when read at face value. This is why one must be careful when using media reports as a source of information.
Also, one cannot claim that I have not given this topic due-diligence. The fact that I went through each of the 92 papers referenced by Dr. Walton, and cross-checked them to see if his claims were true, clearly shows that I gave this topic an extreme amount of diligence....more diligence than most people would give.
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But don't you think it's going out on a bit of a limb to tell all of those people, trying to get healthy, that it's SAFE, when you really don't know?
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First, there is no such thing as 100% certainty in the world of science. All things in science are based on probabilities. For example, we may be 99.99% certain that the earth is round, but we can never be 100% certain. How do we know that something is not distorting our observations? How do we know that we won't wake up tomorrow and the earth will be suddenly oval? We can't know these things with 100% certainty, but we can know these things with an extremely high probability, based on our past observations.
This is where the concept of repeatability comes in to play. I do an experiment, and I get result A under condition B. I do the same experiment again under condition B, and I get result A again. I repeat the experiment again under condition B, and get result A. I find that, over time, I keep getting result A under condition B. Thus, I can be reasonably (but not 100%) certain that I will always get result A under condition B.
That is how scientists develop knowledge about our world. They develop ideas (hypotheses), and test those ideas using experiments. If the experiments repeatedly support the ideas, then they become reasonably certain those ideas are correct. However, they will never be 100% certain. You never know when new information might come out that will make you have to modify or throw out your ideas. This is why our ideas about the world sometimes change as we gather new information. At one time in ancient history, people thought the world was flat. But as they gathered new information, they were forced to reevaluate that thinking. This is exactly why science is sometimes changing because we are always gathering new information about the world around us.
The same holds true with the safety of aspartame (or any other substance). We can never be 100% certain that aspartame is safe. However, based on carefully designed experiments, on knowledge of aspartame's composition and how it is metabolized by the body, and various other pieces of evidence, we can come to reasonable conclusions regarding whether it's safe.
And, the fact is, if you look at the large body of reliable evidence (over 500 studies!!!!!), it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that aspartame is quite safe for the majority of people, when consumed at amounts below the ADI.