Whether you realize it or not, you probably consume some level of the artificial sweetener aspartame every day of your life because it appears in more than 6,000 food and beverage products, often without being identified on labels. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the aspartame manufacturer insist the additive is safe for human consumption, but two different longterm studies by a team of Italian researchers have produced contrary results.

In the latest study, published this month in the medical science journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, 4,000 rats ingested aspartame their entire lives until death, when autopsies revealed a higher than normal rate of leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer cells. This study replicated previous findings by the same research team.

What made the latest Italian study unique, in contrast to studies that had found aspartame to be harmless, is that it tracked the lab animals throughout a natural life cycle, as opposed to the previous studies in the U.S. and elsewhere that failed to detect cancer because their rats were killed at just two years of age. Allowing the rats to live longer is a better gauge of cancer risk than to arbitrarily kill them.

Cumulative impacts of aspartame collecting in body tissues over a lifetime seem a much more reasonable way to assess the health risks in humans, but the problem in doing human trial studies is that it is virtually impossible to find a comparison group of people who haven't been exposed to the synthetic sweetener. So far the U.S. studies of humans and aspartame have been nothing more than food questionnaires that people filled out and that National Cancer Institute researchers used in an attempt to calculate how much aspartame they consume and whether their risk for cancer increased.

As for why U.S. scientists have been so lenient toward aspartame use, Dr. Morando Soffritti, who led the Bologna-based study group, called it an example of how "some researchers are ready to put themselves at the disposal of that industry that produces sweeteners." This was a polite way of saying that too many scientists in the U.S. are either prostitutes to manufacturers, or they are too lazy to conduct proper longterm studies.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest organization issued an appeal to the FDA to review its stance on aspartame based on these new study results.
"This review is particularly urgent with regard to aspartame-containing beverages, heavily consumed by children," said the group's executive director.

You can probably guess how the FDA responded. "The FDA finds no reason to alter its previous conclusion that aspartame is safe as a general purpose sweetener in food," declared FDA spokesman Michael Herndon.

So if you are going to protect yourself from the longterm effects of aspartame, it will be up to you to make lifestyle changes, since the FDA refuses to even acknowledge any problem might exist.