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Thursday, November 3, 2005
Guest View: Aspartame Poses a Real Danger
Guest View
My commendations to you for covering pediatric concerns about aspartame and lead in Halloween candy (Telegraph, Oct. 27).
Many of the journalists and government officials in the entire USA seem to be "asleep at the wheel" on the gravity of this issue: the presence of a neurotoxic food additive and artificial sweetener in 6,000 products consumed by 70 percent of Americans and 40 percent of our children.
Although aspartame's FDA approval is already 24 years old, we are not powerless to correct it. Because it metabolizes into formaldehyde, aspartame is causing untold neurological damage to millions of Americans, including, I believe, neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, autism and attention deficit disorder in children, and sudden death syndrome in athletes and others, plus symptoms like headaches, seizures, convulsions and about 85 other symptoms which are actually listed by the FDA.
The FDA's unwillingness to rescind aspartame's approval stems from the commercial and political weight now invested in these 6,000 manufactured food products, which include "diet" beverages, sugarless gum, low-fat yogurt, coffee sweeteners and even children's vitamins and medications. The FDA's failure necessitated my request to the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board to convene a hearing to consider banning aspartame in food products by specific additions to the New Mexico Administrative Code.
My pro bono attorney was Stevan Douglas Looney from the Sutin firm. We were opposed by lawyers representing the Calorie Control Council, an industry front group, and the Ajinomoto Corporation, the world's largest aspartame and MSG manufacturer. On Oct. 4, the EIB voted 4-2 to give us a five-day hearing in July 2006. Many fine New Mexico legislators helped in this historic effort.
In the meantime, why wait for aspartame to be kicked out of all of the schools in New Mexico? On Oct. 6, I called upon both Gov. Bill Richardson and Attorney General Patricia Madrid to combine their legal powers in some kind of executive order to cease the sale of this formaldehyde cocktail in our schools. Time is moving by quickly with no response, and children and adults continue to suffer from the neurodegenerative effects of ingesting formaldehyde, methanol and a proven brain tumor causing agent, diketopiperazine, all found in this witches' brew, aspartame.
Therefore, I began the process of petitioning the New Mexico Board of Pharmacy to get rid of the dangerous ingredients in children's medications and children's vitamins, and their first meeting to consider this is Nov. 14-15.
I ask the reader to write to the N.M. Pharmacy Board, especially if you or someone in your family is a victim of aspartame poisoning.
Further, if you ask Rep. Rhonda King, Sen. Sue Wilson Beffort, Rep. Kathy McCoy and Sen. Pete Campos, your legislators in Santa Fe, to also write to the Pharmacy Board with your concerns, we, the consumers of New Mexico, will win— and the megacorporations that make children's meds and vitamins but are too cheap to use sugar to make their products taste like candy to children, the same corporations which would rather use this deadly neurotoxin aspartame to make a little extra corporate profit— they will lose in this state. That will be the second domino to fall for them in New Mexico.
IN THE MEANTIME, please read labels on children's meds and vitamins. You will be horrified to learn that hundreds contain aspartame, too many to list here— that is rather a job for the Department of Health and for the pharmacy inspectors.
But what a cruel joke for a parent to want to medicate a sick child, and then discover that the medicines or the vitamins contain something which is metabolized as formaldehyde, and thus the child becomes sicker!
My co-petitioner, Santa Fe pediatrician Dr. Ken Stoller, associate professor of pediatrics at UNM School of Medicine, is submitting a second related petition to the Pharmacy Board, asking them to put an end to the addition of thimerosal to vaccinations in New Mexico (thimerosal is 49 percent mercury by weight)— which, by the way, is also found in most of the flu vaccinations, so please ask for a mercury-free version to avoid the mercury!
If you have questions, or want to join us in these REAL consumer protection efforts, please let me know. I ask for your help, because after the Pharmacy Board, I will make a similar request of the New Mexico Board of Education to get aspartame out of school vending machines, cafeterias and sporting events.
We must create an unprecedented new level of consumer protection, the strongest medical, biochemical, physiological and, above all, pediatric level of consumer protection.
Letters to Gov. Richardson, attention Chief of Staff David Contarino, asking our chief executive to take the lead in this effort, will rapidly produce legislative results. On Oct. 5, Richardson told the Albuquerque Journal medical reporter that he supports the EIB hearings on aspartame.
However, that is scratching the surface of what our governor must do, starting with decently funded legislation banning neurotoxic food additives entirely in New Mexico in the next session in January 2006, whose agenda the governor completely controls, plus two bills to specifically allow both the EIB and the Pharmacy Board to reject FDA-approved products, when the duly determined medical facts warrant doing so.
Stephen Fox is a resident of Santa Fe. He can be reached at (505) 983-2002 or stephen@santafefineart.com.
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