FDA continues to protect big business over citizens

Surprise. Here's yet another example of the FDA protecting the interests of big business over the interests of American consumers. Read it here at MSNBC.com.

An Italian research team recently published a new study showing aspartame, widely used in soft drinks, may cause leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer in rats. The article interviewed Michael Jacobsen (Kudos to Reuters for the great source) of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit group that for many years has monitored and reported on various health issues and poor nutrition. Check out Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks Are Harming America's Health.

The FDA won't admit that Americans are over consuming soft drinks at rates that exceed its recommended daily amount. Aspartame is not only used in sodas but in chewing gum, candy, diet foods, and many other processed foods and beverages. It's also sold in individual packets for people to use in coffee, tea and whatever else. So they can't just take soda consumption alone into consideration when studying the effects of this chemical sweetener. Americans have a serious sweet tooth problem, and the daily cumulative amount of aspartame in an average American's diet must be high. If one does this day in and day out for years, what are the effects? In the last 10 years, I've noticed the number of people drinking sodas for breakfast has incredibly increased. Observe for yourself. And it's not just kids I see with bottles of syrupy carbonated water (not to mention the new array of energy drinks), it's adults too.

The FDA's talking head said the department hadn't reviewed the new study, yet it somehow already knew the study's findings weren't "consistent with those from the large number of studies on aspartame that have been evaluated by FDA, including five previously conducted negative chronic carcinogenicity studies."

So are they just testing for carcinogenicity? What about other possible ill health effects like obesity and diabetes?

According to the Rueters article:

Jacobson said researchers in previous studies all killed rats at the age of two years. Allowing the rats to live longer may have been a better way to assess the natural risk of cancer.

The CSIPI said the Acceptable Daily Intake of aspartame in the United States is 50 mg per kilogram of body weight, equivalent to a 50-pound (20 kg) child drinking 2.5 cans of diet soda a day, or a 150-pound (68 kilogram) adult drinking about 7.5 cans a day.

The Italian researchers found a cancer risk at the very highest doses — double the U.S. Acceptable Daily Intake.

And what about all the high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, sucrose, dextrose, maltodextrin, sucralose, fructose, and all the other -oses that are added to processed foods? Next time you're grocery shopping, take a look at the ingredients of every cereal box on the cereal isle. You may only find one to three brands that don't have at least two kinds of sugar listed near the top of the list. Usually cereals contain up to five different types of sugars. Many kids (and adults too) add sugar on top of their bowls of cereal. Have some more sugar with your sugar! A tolerance for sweetness is quickly built up so that it takes more and more to satisfy the sweetness urge.

It's too obvious. The correlation between the rise of obesity, cancer and chronic illness and the increase of sugar consumption in this country is glaring. Here's another article by CSIPI about this. Read it here. This article was written in 1999. Sugar consumption has continued to steadily increase.

We should hear more discussions about a problem in the FDA called the revolving door, which is when people who've worked in executive and administrative positions at food and drug companies go to work for the FDA, the very industry that is supposed to regulate the businesses from which they came. It works the other way around, too. FDA employees go to work for the companies they used to regulate, and sometimes back again to positions within the government. To know more about this, check out the book Food Politics by Marion Nestle. Visit her website here.