It’s official: I have kicked my daily Diet Coke habit. Why bother–especially since I was only drinking one or two cans a day? Haven’t you been paying attention? Remember this post from a month ago:
Convincing evidence that drinking soda isn’t good for myeloma patients
IMF Medical Director, Dr. Brian Durie, came-out forcefully against it last year. Truth-be-told, he isn’t a fan of drinking any kind of soda, banning it from all IMF functions–an unusual step for an otherwise conservative, western medicine type.
But if you read the evidence, his concerns seem justified. On the other end 0f the medical spectrum, I sometimes read alerts from a “way out there” kind of guy, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Dr. Mercola is obsessed with nutrition and stopping unsafe lifestyle practices. He is credited with developing the raw food diet, insisting that at least 80% of everything we eat should be unprocessed and eaten raw; raw fruits and vegetables, but eggs and meat, too. He is sort of like the Ralph Nader of nutrition.
I always read info from obsessed extremists like Dr. Mercola with a skeptical eye. But when his opinions line-up squarely with a more traditional voice like Dr. Durie’s, I sit-up and take notice. And when our favorite nutritional watch-dog, Danny Parker piles on, I’m sold!
What do Dr. Durie, Dr. Mercola and Danny Parker all have in common? They all unequivocally and forcefully insist aspartame, the artificial sweetener used to make NutraSweet® and Equal®, is terrible stuff and should be avoided by anyone–but especially blood cancer/myeloma survivors.
I don’t know how I missed this, but Danny forwarded me a link to one of Dr. Mercola’s alerts from November to me last week. All he wrote was, “More and more…”
Let’s take a look at what he meant:
Aspartame Associated with Increased Risk of Blood Cancers in Long-Term Human Study
November 07, 2012 – Dr. Mercola
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener used in diet soda and over 6,000 other sugar-free or “diet” products. New research1 linking aspartame to cancer in some individuals has sparked a flurry of commentary, including an “apology” from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard University teaching facility, for promoting the results2.
I first found out about the study when ABC News contacted me and requested that I provide them with a comprehensive analysis of this 40-page study within an hour. Fortunately, I have extensively reviewed this topic and was able to provide their requested review.
Funding was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The Harvard hospital originally sent out a press release with the headline: “The truth isn’t sweet when it comes to artificial sweeteners.” Alas, just half an hour before the release of the study, the hospital suddenly got cold feet, issuing the following statement:
“Upon review of the findings, the consensus of our scientific leaders is that the data is weak, and that BWH Media Relations was premature in the promotion of this work. We apologize for the time you have invested in this story.”
According to Erin McDonough3, senior vice president of communication and public affairs, this was “the first time something like this had ever happened in her 25 years of working in media relations.”
NBC News stated4:
“Not all science deserves publicity. Some is not done well. Some comes to equivocal conclusions and serves solely to alert other researchers of the need for further study. The research… about a potential cancer from aspartame falls squarely in that second category. If such a study does get attention, it can often increase the confusion and anger that many people feel about science in general – and the study of possible risks and benefits of our diet, in particular.”
None of this surprises me. After all, can you imagine the liability the food and beverage industries, not to mention virtually every public health agency in the US, would face were there convincing evidence that aspartame is carcinogenic? They simply cannot afford such evidence to be accepted.
But make no mistake about it, this study is of great importance because it’s the most comprehensive and longest human study — spanning 22 years — that has ever looked at aspartame toxicity. The study evaluates the effect between aspartame intake and cancer, and they found a clear association between aspartame consumption and non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and leukemia.
Ignoring First Long-Term Human Study Would Be a MAJOR Mistake
This is the first large-scale observational human study to report an association between aspartame consumption and blood cancers. The long-term nature of this study is really crucial because one of the primary tricks companies use to hide the toxicity of their products is short-term tests.
As the study mentions, the longest study prior to this one was only four and half months, far too short to reveal any toxicity from chronic exposure. Unfortunately, because there are so many of these short-term trials, they get away with saying that aspartame is one of the most studied food additives ever made and no health concerns have ever been discovered. The beverage industry was quick to respond5 to the study saying aspartame has been “deemed safe for decades by the world’s leading toxicologists.”
Well, they simply didn’t look long enough! But the average person does not realize that all those industry-funded studies were so pathetically short, and the media doesn’t inform them of this fact either. Hence, people are easily misled.
A number of animal studies have clearly documented the association between aspartame and cancer, as the study points out. But what most researchers do not appreciate is that humans are the only animals that do NOT have the protective mechanism to compensate for methanol toxicity. So evaluating methanol toxicity in animals is a flawed model for testing human toxicity.
This is due to alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). In humans, methanol is allowed to be transported in the body to susceptible tissues where this enzyme, ADH, then converts it to formaldehyde, which damages protein and DNA that lead to the increased risk of cancer and autoimmune disease.
Interestingly, the previous AARP Diet and Health Study, which did not find an association with aspartame and cancer, used fruit juice as the control. Most are unaware that canned or bottled fruit juice is loaded with methanol that dissociates from the pectin over time and can actually cause similar problems as aspartame. This does not occur in freshly consumed fruits and vegetables, only ones that are bottled or canned. Hence no major difference could be discerned between the aspartame and the control group.
Why Was Aspartame More Toxic in Men than Women?
The health statistics for nearly 48,000 men and over 77,000 women over the age of 20 were reviewed for the featured study. They found that men who consumed more than one diet soda per day had an increased risk of developing multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Interestingly enough, this association was not found in women.
Leukemia was associated with diet soda intake in both sexes.
One hypothesis for the difference between the sexes is that men have a higher activity of the enzyme ADH, as I mentioned earlier, which metabolizes methanol and converts it to formaldehyde. More formaldehyde circulating in your blood would naturally have more opportunity to cause greater damage.
While the findings from this study add credible evidence that consuming aspartame over a long period of time can pose significant health risks, it also demonstrates that our understanding of the precise mechanism of harm is still lacking and needs to be investigated further, as it’s unclear why the women in this study didn’t experience the same increased rates of cancer.
It’s possible that there is some hormonally mediated protection against the adverse effects of aspartame in women, in addition to men having higher ADH activity, but the study was not designed to answer that question.
All in all however, I believe the study offers significant supporting evidence of the danger that “diet” drinks and foods pose. Many have indeed been injured by aspartame — there are more adverse reports to the FDA on aspartame than all other food additives combined. It’s also widely known how massive industry and government collusion at the FDA was ultimately responsible for its approval after it failed to be approved for many years.
Although the authors’ summary conclusion mentions they do not rule out the possibility of chance for this association, it’s worth noting that this is because they could not offer a conclusive explanation for the difference between the sexes.
I carefully reviewed this study in its entirety, and found it to be extremely well executed. While the mechanism responsible for the difference between the sexes for certain cancers need to be studied further, a biological mechanism for cancer from aspartame does exist, which I’ll review in a moment. Furthermore, it was the reviewers of the study that pushed back during the editing process, insisting that it should be made clear that chance was a plausible explanation for the findings6.
Lead researcher Eva Schernhammer, MD, DrPH stated in the original press release (which has since been removed):
“The sex difference we observed deserves consideration. There are many possible explanations in this, one being chance, however these differences could be related to a yet-to-be-discovered risk factor for lymphoma and leukemia, which are associated with soda consumption in men, but not women.”
One thing I love (and hate) about Dr. Mercola’s posts. He goes on and on and on. Lots of detailed information, which is good. But sometimes he gets off track. So I’ll cut things off here and let you sift through the rest if you’re interested:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/11/07/aspartame-causes-blood-cancer.aspx?np=true
Back to Diet Coke. I’m not a coffee drinker, so my DC was the only way to inject a bit of caffeine into my life. So after breakfast, “POP!” went the tab. I would finish my DC in 15 or 20 minutes. Another would follow mid-afternoon when I started dragging a bit. No big deal, but after reading all of the damning data, from these and other studies, time to go “cold turkey” and dump the DC.
That was six weeks ago. How did it go? I’m lucky. It wasn’t that hard for me. Maybe because I didn’t make it a life-or-death kind of thing. If I didn’t really need it, I skipped it. Simple. So every other day I fudged and had part of a can. I thought I would miss the caffeine but you know what? I don’t!
But at the movie theater? I cheat and take a few sips. Stomach jumpy and it seems like just the thing to help? Why not?
All in all, I have cut-back by 80% or so. But diet soda’s aren’t the only place you find NutraSweet® and Equal®. But for now, let’s keep it simple and allow me to get on with my day.
DUMP THE NUTRASWEET and EQUAL! And most if not all other artificial sweeteners–and as much sugar as you reasonably can, too. Your body will thank you for it.
Feel good and keep smiling! Pat
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