Bill would allow cancer-causing poison in schools

Aspartame is an artificial sweetener commonly included in food items under the brand name NutraSweet. It's found in diet soda, sugar-free bubble gum, and other foodstuffs.

It's also been known for years to cause cancer, especially brain cancer, kidney cancer, and lymphoma. In the '90s, the FDA's Thomas Wilcox said complaints about aspartame accounted for a staggering 75% of all reports of bad reactions to substances in America's food between 1981 and 1995 - even though aspartame wasn't common until the mid-'80s. Doctors and consumers reported 92 different symptoms. As long ago as 1992, the Air Force even warned pilots not to ingest the sweetener before flying. Some of the chemicals in aspartame have been known for over 30 years to cause brain injury.

While sugar was used for thousands of years before people even found it causes cavities (a minor affliction compared to cancer), the carcinogenic effect of aspartame was discovered almost immediately.

While an advisory panel assembled by European health authorities tried to downplay a study linking aspartame with cancer, the Guardian newspaper reported that the head of this panel worked for the International Life Sciences Institute, an organization funded by food corporations that use aspartame. Other panel members were also associated with these companies.

Under the Carter administration, the FDA refused to approve aspartame because studies in lab animals proved it caused cancer. This poison was approved under Reagan's FDA commissioner Arthur Hayes, who was later disgraced when it was discovered he was accepting gifts from corporations. Hayes quit the FDA and joined G.D. Searle & Company, a firm headed by Donald Rumsfeld that made NutraSweet.

Corporate America continues its delusional insistence that aspartame is perfect. By having its associates serve on health panels to argue with previous studies, that just encourages more studies to prove what's already known, thereby using even more lab animals. Earlier this year, a study in Italy linked aspartame with leukemia, lymphoma, and breast cancer. This story was ignored by the American media, and Bush's FDA tried downplaying it.

People today never learn. A million studies about something can be conducted, and everyone acts like the studies never existed. Or maybe people learn, but Congress doesn't. An amendment to a federal farm bill dealing with school lunches would allow diet soft drinks containing toxic aspartame to be sold in America's schools - while prohibiting sodas containing sugar from being sold.

You read that right, peoplefaces: Aspartame is getting preferential treatment, despite being far more dangerous than sugar.

This bill would write into a law a voluntary agreement that was already enacted last year. That agreement was criticized by food safety advocates because most of it was written by large corporations.

From what I know, most of the remainder of the bill hasn't approached the level of deception found in a proposal introduced in the mid-'90s that would have cut school lunches in the name of fighting the "obesity pandemic." Still it has bad ideas, such as attempting to replace whole milk with skim milk. I know now they refer to skim milk as low-fat milk, but I still call it skim milk. To me it's more like skim water.

USDA statistics say per capita consumption of whole milk led skim milk by a 4-to-1 ratio in 1970 - but by 2004 skim milk led by almost 2-to-1. Yet kids in the later era have had more health problems. I think skim milk defeats the whole purpose of milk. Milk builds strong bones and a healthy bod, so why dilute it?

I'm not against healthier food in schools, but come on! Why do our lawmakers expect us to believe soft drinks with cancer-causing aspartame is an improvement over what schools have now?

Like last year's agreement, Corporate America helped write this bill too.

I'd be thrilled if the FDA said that products with aspartame had to start prominently displaying a skull-and-crossbones sign, the universal symbol for poison.

(Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Aspartame-linked-to-cancer-study/2007/06/26/1182623862983.html;
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/us/02school.html)