Parliamentary Submission - Aspartame - New Zealand

[Guest guest]

At the writer's request no name is given. For more information on

aspartame see www.mpwhi.com, www.dorway.com, www.wnho.net Aspartame

Toxicity Center, www.holisticmed.com/aspartame

 

Dr. Betty Martini, D.Hum, Founder

Mission Possible International

9270 River Club Parkway

Duluth, Georgia 30097

770 242-2599

 

 

PARLIAMENTARY SUBMISSION - ASPARTAME

 

 

JULY 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

PARLIAMENTS HEALTH COMMITTEE

 

WELLINGTON

NEW ZEALAND

 

Re: ASPARTAME AND NEOTAME

 

 

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?

 

Aspartame illness is crippling the nation and harming our children

 

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice. Confucius.

 

 

When sugar-free gum came onto the market in the early to mid 1980s, I

embraced this as I was doing one of my attempts to give up smoking,

and chewing gum was a traditional way to do this. Quite early on in

my Extra sugar-free gum-chewing career I noticed strange things began

to happen. I would put things down and not remember where they were,

I developed migraines; I started to get tired for no particular

reason, even though my diet and fitness lifestyle were so fanatically

healthy and I was doing all the good things. All this was

inexplicable, and not anything I had experienced before, and crept up slowly.

 

It was in the late 1980s when I returned to the stress of newspaper

reporting and as workplaces gradually became smoke-free, that I

really began chewing sugar-free gum in earnest. I noticed that it

seemed to scramble my brain cells in some way, making concentration

difficult, although I didnt know what was causing this at the

time. I began sitting in front the computer screen struggling to

focus and concentrate. I compensated by drinking more coffee,

thinking I was just tired.

 

This situation continued, I needed to keep my job as I was supporting

my daughter, and like the lobster in the pot of cold water on the

element, who doesnt notice the water is gradually heating up and he

is going to be boiled alive because it happens so slowly and he

becomes acclimatised, I was slowly wrecking my health, nearly my

career, and my life in general.

 

Increasing tiredness resulted, but I was also craving the gum and

could make no connection between the two. Then in the early 1990s I

began drinking Diet Coca-Cola. I had never been a soft drink

drinker, I was scrupulous that my diet be as healthy as possible, but

growing tiredness meant I was using the soft drink as a caffeine

boost. I had figured, against my internal voice and natural

instincts, that it might be better than tea and coffee, and believed

the advertising and the mantra that sugar-free was best, and was

particularly swayed by a dishonest and very defective article in Time

Magazine on aspartame claiming it was perfectly healthy.

 

This is when the trouble began in earnest. I quickly became

addicted, building up to two 2.5 litres of Diet Coke a day by

2001. Over those years my life became a nightmare, of illness and

pain, and an inability to get it together.

 

Slowly over time I had to watch everything slide, but became

unwittingly addicted to aspartame, as it is a highly addictive

psychoactive neurotoxin. I was also working in the fashion-media

world where I bought the brainwashing and thought drinking Diet Coke

would make me thin. So I couldnt work out WHY I started to wake up

in the middle of the night with the right side of my body

frighteningly paralysed. I couldnt work out WHY the nerves in my

teeth were dying one after the other for no apparent reason.

 

I couldnt work out WHY I was plagued with brain fog, permanent

exhaustion, pins and needles, numbness in fingers and toes, blurred

vision, inability to concentrate, and pain, everywhere it seemed. The

problems rotated themselves in constantly shifting motion, from one

part of the body to the other. It often brought to mind a line from

Hamlet: What fresh hell is this?

 

The migraines intensified and were set off by very little. My

physical ability to work out at the gym declined, and I had to let my

membership just hang there in the wind, unused. I would start an

aerobics class but my ability to exercise without becoming exhausted

would last about two minutes. Previously, before the late 1980s, I

could get through two aerobics classes a day if I wanted to. Finally

the gym graciously agreed to let me bow out of my contract because of illness.

 

Every morning for years, bewildering, dark and frightening years, I

would wake full of hope. I would think: Today is going to be a good

day and I will feel normal again, and my life, all my ambitions, the

things I want to do, my personal life, will begin again.

 

Every night I would go to bed exhausted, sick and tired, and think:

Tomorrow I will wake up refreshed, my life will begin again, my legs

will not go from under me today and I will not cascade down the

stairs at work for no reason, I will not be slumped in an

uncoordinated heap on the pavement outside a department store in the

lunch hour simply because the muscles in my legs are so weak they can

barely hold me, I will be able to think and to do my workload without

still being at the office at 3am sipping on a can of Diet Coke and

struggling to connect the dots to write, I will not have the

frightening brain fog, and the feeling that an unseen force had taken

me over and blanked out my mind. I will be able to cope with stress,

I will not snap at people, I will not appear stupid. I know I am not

at all stupid. What has happened to my mind? I mentally and

emotionally tried to fight this bewildering illness every step of the way.

 

Tomorrow didnt come for a very long time. And I got very, very sick

and tired of feeling sick and tired.

 

After leaving my job in 2001 I struggled my way through the two-month

dream holiday through Europe I had worked hard and saved for, came

back to New Zealand and tried to take up my much-anticipated place on

the fashion design course at design school, which had been a lifetime

dream of mine. But three months down the track I was diagnosed with

glandular fever (again), chronic fatigue syndrome, and finally,

multiple sclerosis symptoms.

 

Heartbreakingly, I had to leave my dream course on illness

grounds. Home alone in the flat I took a call one day from a friend

who said his doctor had told him to pack in the Coca-Cola (he drank

the regular sort, not Diet) because it was ruining his kidneys. I

went on the Internet for him and Googled dangers of Coca-Cola. Up

came aspartame. I opened a site and read on. The rest is history as

they say, and I was so lucky, it was the luckiest phone call I have

had in my life to date, it truly and literally saved my

life. Incidentally, that morning had started with an aspartame-laced

supermarket Vitamin C tablet fizzing in a large glass of Diet

Coke. Ironic, isnt it? Thats the last time I knowingly took in any aspartame.

 

Shortly after giving up the Diet Coke and Extra gum and several weeks

of the most horrendous withdrawal symptoms that you can imagine, I

joined my then-partner in Europe, for a few months, where he was

contracting for American IT companies. In such a beautiful and

interesting city, I spent most of my time indoors, in bed. On the

occasions I did go out I was dragging my right leg around. The bodys

synovial fluids had just about been cemented rigid by the aspartame

accumulating in the tissues, and slowly my body began to try and

remove the gunk. That too, was a bizarre experience.

 

Two years later and on a diet that was as fresh and raw and organic

as possible, and I was ready to work and study. Seven years down the

track and there are only residual problems. I believe it could take

up to 10 years to get back to normal. Because every year, even now,

this long after quitting aspartame ingestion, I continue to feel

better and better.

 

I have taken back my life, thanks to my friend and his casual remark

in that phone call to me in 2001, and thanks to the

Internet. Because over all those years and visits to clueless

doctors, years of frustration and loss because of my health status

and the brain fog, the answer was so simple, and so unbelievable at

the time, and the outcome of that knowledge and the change that has

occurred since so profound.

 

I feel it is imperative everybody in the community knows the

truth. They have a RIGHT to know what is in their soft drinks, their

chewing gum, their diet products, their childrens medicines and

vitamins, their supermarket water soluble vitamins, and any number of

the estimated over 5000 products worldwide, including toothpaste and

mouthwashes, that contain this noxious poisonous cocktail of

methanol, formaldehyde and aspartic acid.

 

Former American Food and Drug Administration investigator Arthur

Evangelista has written a compelling, authoritative text, Aspartame:

The History Of A Killer - The Whole Story, on the sordid history of

aspartame approval. It is the story of how the power of big business,

public relations, and a slick operator called Don Rumsfeld, have

ruthlessly and without conscience, knowing that rats were dying of

brain tumours in lab experiments to test aspartame, condemned

millions of unwitting and innocent humans worldwide to inexplicable,

sometimes lifelong, misery. The kind of baffling misery that is also

bewildering for their friends and loved ones to witness if they are

not also victims themselves.

 

To continue to foist this poison on the New Zealand population

without consideration for what is real and what is true - the

undeniable evidence that this product is so toxic; to ignore the

millions of heartbreaking stories that are available from overseas

and those that are being presented to you this week by Abby Cormack

and myself and others; to ignore the evidence from some of the worlds

most eminent doctors, like Dr H J Roberts of Florida, USA, and

researchers, such as neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock - is as grave a

travesty of common sense and justice as a New Zealand Parliamentary

select committee could ever commit.

 

I hope this committee, in which I have faith, is gifted with seeing

what is real and obvious, and sincere, and will make the

groundbreaking decision to make New Zealand the first country in the

world to do the right thing - to pull aspartame products off the New

Zealand market. We were the first country to go nuclear free. Lets,

please, also go aspartame free. Let us be the first nation to my

knowledge on this earth to do what is right in this matter. For the

sake of us all, for our children, and for the health of future generations.

 

The one thing you cannot do, ladies and gentlemen, is give me back

those years and the things I lost because this product was approved

as safe for consumption in foodstuffs and other products in New

Zealand. That is what I have to live with. I appeal to your

intelligence, your common sense, your consciences, and above all,

your integrity, to do, as Confucius said, THE RIGHT THING.

 

 

 

July 22 2008

 

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