By: Jean Johnson for Reflux1The average American consumes soda at the rate of more than 42 gallons a year. Do the math and you come up with a staggering consumption of two to three quarts a week.
No matter whether our choice is sugared, diet, big name brands, or cheaper versions, American consumption of cold, sweet, fizzy drinks has more than quadrupled since the post-World War II era began in 1946.
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Fast Facts on Aspartame
According to some psychiatrists, aspartame exacerbates mood problems in people with depression, bipolar disorder, and tendencies toward panic attacks.
Ralph G. Walton, M.D. professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine said “For people with panic disorders, for instance, we’ve seen that when we eliminate aspartame, it’s much easier to control their illness. The number of panic attacks goes down.”
Aspartame is composed of two amino acids: phenylalanine and aspartic acid. Phenylalanine occurs naturally in some foods.
“If your blood phenylalanine level was increased five times, in my view there would be a safety concern,” said professor of endocrinology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles, William M. Pardridge, M.D. “The question is whether aspartame use could ever increase levels that much, and the answer is yes. We’ve know that for twenty years.”
For complete coverage on aspartame and its history see The New York Times, 12 February 2006
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Whether or not our habit of bellying up to the soft drink bar has health consequences is debatable of course. Pundits have argued over the effects of carbonation, caffeine, sugar and sugar substitutes for decades. But agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who we have charged to look after our well-being, give us and our cherished beverages two thumbs up.
Yea Says Yale
Focusing on potential relationships between soft drinks and esophageal cancer, Yale University School of Medicine cancer epidemiologist, Susan Mayne, Ph.D. and her colleagues queried almost 1,800 participants on their regular and diet soft drink consumption. Indeed, as rates of soda drinking have escalated, incidence of esophageal cancer has tripled since 1970 – and these particular types of malignancies are the fastest growing in developed countries. Mayne wanted to see if there were any correlations.
More to the question, carbonated beverages are generally implicated in gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) or acid reflux. Patients with GERD do have higher risks of esophageal cancer. Thus, many health care professionals and researchers have speculated about possible relationships between soft drink consumption and esophageal cancer.
But Mayne’s research net came up empty as far as cause and effect go. Her team published their results in a January 2006 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
“What we can say is that we did not see any evidence that carbonated beverages are contributing in any way to the epidemic of this cancer,” Mayne said.
The study used dietary interviews to obtain information on patterns of soft drink consumption from both their control group of 687 healthy participants and 1,095 patients with cancer. Findings showed no link between the number of sodas individuals drank and cancer. People who consumed the most were just as likely to be cancer free as those who consumed the least were to have a dreaded esophageal disease. Cancers of the esophagus are a particularly lethal form because symptoms often do not appear until late stages, by which time the tumors are well-advanced.
Thus in answer to those who suspected a relationship between Americans’ passion for pop and esophageal cancer, Mayne’s group says not only that their findings did not support the idea in the least, but that it was about time someone used science to have a careful, hard look.
“The theory that soft drinks could be causing this cancer was picked up by the media and widely disseminated,” Mayne said. “However, there was no direct evidence to bear on this hypothesis until we did our analysis.”
Even more at odds with what observers from the world of holistic heath have long raised their eyebrows over, are the Yale study’s findings on diet soda. By compiling separate databases on participants who largely drank regular soda and the diet soda crowd, Mayne’s research team determined that diet pop drinkers had a 53 percent lower risk for esophageal cancer.
Nay Says Italy
Before we rush out to start chugging diet drinks though, perhaps some heed to a new Italian study on aspartame is in order. After all, Italy is renowned for celebrating its healthy bounty in what has come to be known as the Mediterranean diet – a cuisine credited with national health statistics that leave average Americans devoted to their processed foods in the dust.
Morando Soffritti, M.D. looks as debonair as his name sounds. Posing in front of a New York Times photographer’s lens, Soffritti’s congenial brown eyes are framed by a heavy thatch of dark brows, and he sports a thick salt and pepper mustache. He looks as capable of lifting a glass of red wine to your health as he does standing there cuddling one of his test rats against his white lab coat.
Mediterranean mystique aside, Soffritti is the scientific director of the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences in Bologna – a center that according to the New York Times, “has earned considerable credibility since it was founded in 1971 for its pioneering research on chemicals.” Indeed, research emanating from the Ramazzini center on gasoline additives and cancer led to strict regulation in the United States along with outright banning of the chemical offenders in 29 states.
As far as the aspartame scoop goes, Soffritti’s research linked the chemical with a variety of cancers including lymphomas and leukemia. The million dollar study tested 1,900 rats on high doses of aspartame – the equivalent of four to five twenty-ounce bottles of soda daily.
The United States is taking the study seriously enough to have the findings published by the National Institutes of Health-sponsored journal in March 2006. In the meantime, the Soffritti results that were first released in the summer of 2005 are available on the web if you click here.
The FDA approved aspartame for use 25 years ago, but said they were aware of the Soffritti study and planned to review the situation. The Calorie Control Council – a group that has long championed artificial sweeteners – however, thinks there is no cause for concern.
“Aspartame has been safely consumed for more than a quarter of a century,” according to a press release by the organization, “and is one of the most thoroughly studied food additives.”
Two red flags go up here
The first flag is that instead of killing his rats at two years like most researchers do – an age equivalent to 53 years in humans – Soffritti allowed the rats in his study to live out their natural life spans.
Lyn Nabors, executive vice president of the Calorie Control Center said that “It’s difficult to determine if the cancers you find are due to something else. Just as in humans, the rat’s body slows down later in life and the aging process causes all kinds of things.”
Deputy director of environmental toxicology at the government’s National Toxicology Program, John R. Bucher, Ph.D., however, called the study “thorough… [and] impressive” in its design. He also pointed out that the reason rats are regularly killed at two years is because of the additional expense required to keep them alive beyond their usefulness to science.
Soffritti himself defended his decision to study the rats over their natural life spans. “Cancer is a disease of the third part of life,” he 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.”
The second flag, and more convoluted is the New York Times coverage that suggests industry, researchers, and federal regulators have colluded around aspartame to the detriment of the citizenry’s health. The line of reasoning goes like this:
G.D. Searle & Company created aspartame 25 years ago – when the current secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld headed the company. Despite repeated concerns over the studies Searle designed to test the safety of the product, there were internal disputes within the FDA. Still, approval finally came in 1981 under Arthur Hull Hayes, a new FDA commissioner appointed by President Reagan. After approving aspartame, Hull left his position within the year and accepted a consultant job with Searle’s public relations agency, Burson-Marsteller.
Further, professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio University School of Medicine, Ralph G. Watson, M.D., analyzed 166 articles on aspartame published in medical journals from 1980 to 1985 and found that all 74 reports favorable to the no-cal sweetener were financed by industry. Moreover, out of 92 independent studies, 84 found health risks related to aspartame.
“Whenever you have studies that were not funded by the industry, some sort of problem is identified,” said Watson. “It’s far too much for it to be a coincidence.”
Soffritti agreed that legitimate inquiry is the foundation on which science stands, and since his team released their aspartame findings he has heard from many of the 180 scientific researchers (in 30 countries) that he oversees in toxin research. “If something is a carcinogen in animals, then it should not be added to food, especially if there are so many people that are going to be consuming it,” he said, adding that, “It is very important to have scientists who are independent and not funded by industry looking at this.”
