Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Nutrasweet in Iraq

Have you heard about the Italian research group which published a study that supports the notion that aspartame is a carcinogen? The experimenters let the lab rats, to which they were feeding aspartame in amounts equivalent to a human drinking a half dozen cans of diet soda pop per day, live a longer time than researchers at G.D. Searle did in the original studies submitted in support of its application to the FDA. The rats, about 1400 of them, developed cancers in statistically significant greater numbers than the control group, which was a different outcome from Searle’s research, in which the rats were killed at much earlier ages compared to the Italian study.

Why do I bring this up? Don’t you think that Searle twisted the “facts” to support its position? Many cancers do not make their presence known until after age 50 in humans; so, if the population that is the subject of the study is less than age 50, the data will be skewed if applied to the whole population. So, Searle used some suspect data to support its application to the FDA, using a younger population and extrapolating the results for the entire population.

Searle’s application for FDA approval as a food additive was denied several times until shortly after Ronald Reagan took office in early 1981 and shortly before Reagan’s appointee as director of the FDA resigned to take a position with G. D. Searle. Yeah, that’s pretty bad. But that’s not the point I wanted to make. That’s just an interesting footnote.

Can’t we compare the case of G. D. Searle getting approval by use of some suspect in-house “scientific” studies to the Bush administration making the case to invade Iraq by using suspect “intelligence” reports, passing off suspect information and data as the truth in spite of the findings of weapons inspectors, to dupe a majority of the American public and its elected Congress into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them so as to get approval to attack Iraq.

Okay, you think it’s a stretch. Paranoia reigns, I suppose. How could I possibly compare those two things?

Well, the guy running G. D. Searle, the guy who was using suspect data and information to lead people to believe that aspartame was safe and to get approval of his billion-dollar food additive by the new Republican administration, was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, our Secretary of War.

The cancer continues to grow in Iraq.

Posted by Bill at February 17, 2006 10:00 PM