Dr. Morando Soffritti and the FDA

Italian cancer researcher, Dr. Morando Soffritti, who works for European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences (ERF), conducted a study after he felt that a study done in the 1970s was inadequate because the rats were put to death after a two year life span. ""Cancer is a disease of the third part of life," Dr. Soffritti said. "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." (nytimes.com)

His study included 1,900 Sprauge-Dawley rats that were used when they were eight weeks old tell their natural death. Soffritti and his team fed the rats in the treated group feed that had doses of aspartame in it. The control group received the same feed, but it was aspartame free.

The last rat died at 159 weeks old, which is a little bit over three years. After each rat died of natural causes an autopsy was conducted. Through the autopsy's, Dr. Soffritti and his team discovered some surprising and disturbing results from the rats in the treated group. They found the rats had an increased risk of developing malignant tumors on peripheral nerves and an increase in lymphomas and leukemia.



When these results were shown to the FDA, things didn't go so smoothly.

The FDA has been dealing with aspartame complaints since the 1960s about aspartames link to brain, pancreatic, uterine, ovarian, thyroid, mammary, and testicular thyroids. Knowing these results, the FDA didn't allow aspartame to be approved for over fifteen years. During the 1970s the scientists at G.D Searle had filed a petition for the FDA to approve aspartame, claiming the research they had done it concluded it was safe. The FDA responded by saying they discovered numerous errors and inadequate results with Searle's results.

Another group of scientists tried to stop the FDA from approving aspartame. Regardless of the errors in Searle's studies and the results found in other studies that concluded aspartame was not safe, the FDA investigators approved aspartame. One of these people was Arthur Hull Hayes, who then left the FDA to work for Searle.

Sounds a bit fishy, eh?

So when the ERF presented their results to the FDA, the FDA claimed that there wasn't enough information provided by the ERF to say there was really a problem with aspartame. " Based on our review, pathological changes were incidental and appeared spontaneously in the study animals, and none of the histopathological changes reported appear to be related to treatment with aspartame." (FDA)

To review the ERF's study follow this link:
http://www.sweetpoison.com/pdf/Soffritti_et_al_in_EHP.pdf

To review the FDA's dismal of their claims follow this link:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodIngredientsPackaging/FoodAdditives/ucm208580.htm