NutraSweet Fuss Amounts to Sweet Nothings

By Michael Fumento

Copyright 1996 Michael Fumento

Sadly, even when the media gets it right on health issues, they often only get it partly right. Consider the recent fuss over the study linking the artificial sweetener aspartame, better known as NutraSweet, to brain cancer.

The analogy, I think, is apt, because this is a study that doesn't deserve the least bit of ink. Indeed, the real story is that it's simply a piece of nonsense put out by a man who has spent the last two decades putting out nonsense and providing aid and comfort to fringe groups like the Aspartame Consumer Safety Network, which claims that sodas with NutraSweet are the cause of so-called Gulf War Syndrome.

The study in question appeared in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. The chief author was Dr. John Olney, a psychiatry professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Olney's "evidence," as it were, of the alleged link was that NutraSweet was introduced in 1981, brain cancers went up in 1985, therefore quite possibly – though he didn't say definitely – NutraSweet caused the cancer increase.

Honest, I've got the study right in front of me. That's all there was to it. Olney could just as easily have blamed the rise in brain tumors on Ronald Reagan becoming president, which also occurred in 1981. In fact, if he were Bryant Gumble, maybe he would have.

Actually, Olney's conclusions are even flimsier when you consider that according to his own data, fatal brain tumors leveled off right after that 1985 jump. Yet every year Americans eat more and more NutraSweet. Why hasn't there been a steady increase?

So where did Olney get this hare-brained idea? Turns out he's had it for decades. Since at least 1975, when aspartame was still being tested, he and an activist group called Consumer Action for Improved Food and Drugs have been railing against NutraSweet as having the potential to cause brain damage.

Olney's "study" wasn't making an observation; it was pursuing a vendetta.

Further, it failed a standard of proof Olney himself set back in 1987, when he told United Press International that brain tumors from NutraSweet wouldn't show up in cancer statistics for 20 years. This was an acknowledgment that with malignant brain tumors, as with all cancers, there is a lengthy lag time between the instigation of the tumor and the actual appearance.

Equal, made with NutraSweet, equals fewer calories, not more brain tumors.

But it seems that NutraSweet hasn't been Olney's only target. The three products that have traditionally brought the weirdos out of the woodwork in this country are artificial sweeteners, fluoride (added to water supplies to prevent tooth decay), and monosodium glutamate (MSG). So far as I know, Olney has had nothing to do with fluoride hysteria, but MSG is a different matter.

Since the late 1960s, Olney has also railed against this popular additive to Chinese and other foods. Indeed, in 1975 he and an activist group called Consumer Action for Improved Food and Drugs, declared that MSG combined with, yes, NutraSweet it would cause brain damage in children.

Olney was quoted as an "expert" in a 1991 60 Minutes segment, reported by Ed Bradley, that sought – unsuccessfully – to incite a national panic over MSG. This show was two years after Bradley kicked off the Alar panic.

Yet, the World Health Organization and the European Community's Scientific Committee for Food had already both concluded there was no research to indicated MSG was a health hazard. Since then, the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Drugs came to the same conclusion. Just within the past couple of months, an FDA panel found MSG to be harmless, save for the possibility that it could worsen symptoms in some persons suffering severe asthma.

None of this is to say that certain foods can't cause certain bad reactions in some individuals, including NutraSweet or MSG. (Tens of millions of Americans have bad reactions to sugar. They're called diabetics.)

Indeed, there have been people who have gone into shock and died after eating a single peanut.

Three years ago, I developed a slight case of hives after eating a Hostess apple pie, though I'd been eating them all my adult life. Go figure. But you don't see me going out and forming the Fruit Pie Consumer Safety Network.

Then again, if I develop a brain tumor in the next year or two, I know what national bakery I'm going to sue!

Read Michael Fumento's additional work on nutrition, on Gulf War Syndrome, and on cancer. Michael Fumento is the author of numerous books, including The Fat of the Land.