- "Dead rats don't lie," says food safety campaigner,
Chris Wheeler, over the controversy surrounding the artificial sweetener,
aspartame, used widely in pharmaceuticals and diet products. "Before
the so-called 'scientist' critics supporting sweetener safety get too carried
away condemning the Italian rat studies demonstrating aspartame's cancer-causing
characteristics, on the basis that they never got to meet the rats, the
public needs to know just who's kidding who.
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- Dr Magnuson, a recent corporate-sponsored visitor, and
her ilk, are happy to use rat studies as a gold standard to 'prove' chemical
food additive safety when it suits them but when a comprehensive
series of studies come out from a prestigious, non-industry aligned research
institute like Italy's Ramazzini Institute showing dangers in aspartame,
then these food industry apologists quibble over whether the rats used
in the study were sufficiently upper class or went to the right school.
-
- "Dr. Soffritti, the award-winning scientist heading
the Italian rat studies on aspartame's cancer-causing potential, used the
same breed of rats used widely by the food industry itself to test for
toxicity. The fact that Coca Cola and Wrigley's and the rest of the powerful
international corporates backing aspartame don't like facing is that the
Ramazzini Institute's rats died from cancer in unusually large numbers
when fed steady diets including aspartame, within the human daily intake
range.
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- "Dead rats don't lie. The rats died because they
ate aspartame. Unlike Dr Magnuson and Professor John Birkbeck of Massey
University who, we would note in passing is the former head of the
industry-supported NZ Nutrition Foundation the rats at no stage in
their short careers ever received funding, directly or indirectly, from
Coca Cola, Wrigley's or any other of the international corporates using
aspartame in their products. The sacrifice these rats made in the cause
of human health should not be ignored.
-
- "Producing carpetbag scientists out of the woodwork
to defend unnecessary chemical additions to the diet is a sort of crude
witchdoctor ritual used by the food and beverage industry to trick us natives
down in the street into believing junk food is manna from heaven. This
cargo cult type of argument needs to be seen in its true light. The fact
is pretty-well 95 percent of the chemicals added by industry to our daily
diet have nothing to do with human health or nutrition. They are simply
put there to make rubbish "food" and junk beverages last forever
and make it possible for human beings to consume them without vomiting.
-
- All the best science, coming from independent scientists
not paid by the food industry, demonstrates hazards from nerve and muscle
damage to cancer and significant eye damage from using diet preparations
including aspartame.
-
- New Zealand's Abby Cormack isn't the only victim of aspartame
by a long shot. The problem is that our medical profession have bought
into the NZ Food Safety Authority's specious arguments that aspartame is
safe, based on industry data and the fact that the international regulatory
scene from the US FDA to the United Nation's Codex Alimentarius is stacked
with regulatory scientists who owe their main sources of income to the
additive-supplying industries they regulate. These days there's no such
thing as an 'independent' food regulator. NZ doctors simply fail to factor
aspartame in as a possible cause of the weird symptoms they are increasingly
seeing pass through their consulting rooms. They need to access the more
than 200 independent studies in the international medical press suggesting
significant health problems with aspartame product use.
-
- Unfortunately, the average New Zealand food scientist,
toxicologist, dietician or nutritionist (sic) owes their professional career
to keeping a favourable profile with major international corporations like
Coca Cola. To imagine that a New Zealand professional in the human dietary
field is going to come out with significant criticisms of an identified
nerve toxin like the synthetic sweetener, aspartame, is like expecting
Fonterra to properly police a Chinese subsidiary whose language and culture
they clearly don't understand.
-
- New Zealanders are babes in the wood in the hands of
major international corporates and the games they play over food safety.
It's indicative of the problems the New Zealand public have in believing
or trusting our own food regulators, when you realise that the only data
the regulators ever examine comes from the very industries our regulators
are supposed to be policing. Under those circumstances it's a case of the
same problem the computer industry has always acknowledged if the
incoming data is garbage, then the outgoing data will also be garbage.
What we have seen with Coca Cola's recent defence of its use of aspartame
in its diet products is the manner in which so-called "science"
can be misused to defend the indefensible.
-
- "The fact is, minority organisations like our own
NZ Safe Food Campaign simply don't have the resources to defend the NZ
public against the consequences of junk science. What we need is a food
safety regulatory environment where the public interest is the first priority
and not the defence of powerful international food corporate interests.
-
- "Fonterra's contaminated milk scandal should be
a wake-up call to us all over how easily food corporate interests take
priority over public safety."
-
-
- NOTE
- Chris Wheeler is the Auckland representative of the NZ
Safe Food Campaign and former president of the Soil & Health Association
of NZ Inc, New Zealand's oldest lobbying group over health and food safety
issues.
-
-
- Chris Wheeler, Mob: 021 110 9525, H/W: (09) 440 9442,
Email: chrisw2@pl.net>.
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- --
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- Chris Wheeler
- P O Box 44, Upper Moutere
- Nelson 7144
- NEW ZEALAND
- Tel: 021 110 9525
- Website:
- www.selfhelp-cancertherapy.com>
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