Dead Rats Don't Lie by Chris Wheeler, Mission Possible New Zealand

[Guest guest]

>Dead rats don’t lie, says sweetener critic

>

>“Dead rats don’t lie,” says food safety

>campaigner, Chris Wheeler, over the controversy

>surrounding the artificial sweetener, aspartame,

>used widely in pharmaceuticals and diet

>products. “Before the so-called ‘scientist’

>critics supporting sweetener safety get too

>carried away condemning the Italian rat studies

>demonstrating aspartame’s cancer-causing

>characteristics, on the basis that they never

>got to meet the rats, the public needs to know just who’s kidding who.

>

>Dr Magnuson, a recent corporate-sponsored

>visitor, and her ilk, are happy to use rat

>studies as a gold standard to ‘prove’ chemical

>food additive safety – when it suits them – but

>when a comprehensive series of studies come out

>from a prestigious, non-industry aligned

>research institute like Italy’s Ramazzini

>Institute showing dangers in aspartame, then

>these food industry apologists quibble over

>whether the rats used in the study were

>sufficiently upper class or went to the right school.

>

>“Dr. Soffritti, the award-winning scientist

>heading the Italian rat studies on aspartame’s

>cancer-causing potential, used the same breed of

>rats used widely by the food industry itself to

>test for toxicity. The fact that Coca Cola and

>Wrigley’s and the rest of the powerful

>international corporates backing aspartame don’t

>like facing is that the Ramazzini Institute’s

>rats died from cancer in unusually large numbers

>when fed steady diets including aspartame,

>within the human daily intake range.

>

>“Dead rats don’t lie. The rats died because they

>ate aspartame. Unlike Dr Magnuson and Professor

>John Birkbeck of Massey University – who, we

>would note in passing is the former head of the

>industry-supported NZ Nutrition Foundation – the

>rats at no stage in their short careers ever

>received funding, directly or indirectly, from

>Coca Cola, Wrigley’s or any other of the

>international corporates using aspartame in

>their products. The sacrifice these rats made in

>the cause of human health should not be ignored.

>

>“Producing carpetbag scientists out of the

>woodwork to defend unnecessary chemical

>additions to the diet is a sort of crude

>witchdoctor ritual used by the food and beverage

>industry to trick us natives down in the street

>into believing junk food is manna from heaven.

>This cargo cult type of argument needs to be

>seen in its true light. The fact is pretty-well

>95 percent of the chemicals added by industry to

>our daily diet have nothing to do with human

>health or nutrition. They are simply put there

>to make rubbish “food” and junk beverages last

>forever and make it possible for human beings to

>consume them without vomiting.

>

>All the best science, coming from independent

>scientists not paid by the food industry,

>demonstrates hazards from nerve and muscle

>damage to cancer and significant eye damage from

>using diet preparations including aspartame.

>

>New Zealand’s Abby Cormack isn’t the only victim

>of aspartame by a long shot. The problem is that

>our medical profession have bought into the NZ

>Food Safety Authority’s specious arguments that

>aspartame is safe, based on industry data and

>the fact that the international regulatory scene

>from the US FDA to the United Nation’s Codex

>Alimentarius is stacked with regulatory

>scientists who owe their main sources of income

>to the additive-supplying industries they

>regulate. These days there’s no such thing as an

>‘independent’ food regulator. NZ doctors simply

>fail to factor aspartame in as a possible cause

>of the weird symptoms they are increasingly

>seeing pass through their consulting rooms. They

>need to access the more than 200 independent

>studies in the international medical press

>suggesting significant health problems with aspartame product use.

>

>Unfortunately, the average New Zealand food

>scientist, toxicologist, dietician or

>nutritionist (sic) owes their professional

>career to keeping a favourable profile with

>major international corporations like Coca Cola.

>To imagine that a New Zealand professional in

>the human dietary field is going to come out

>with significant criticisms of an identified

>nerve toxin like the synthetic sweetener,

>aspartame, is like expecting Fonterra to

>properly police a Chinese subsidiary whose

>language and culture they clearly don’t understand.

>

>New Zealanders are babes in the wood in the

>hands of major international corporates and the

>games they play over food safety. It’s

>indicative of the problems the New Zealand

>public have in believing or trusting our own

>food regulators, when you realise that the only

>data the regulators ever examine comes from the

>very industries our regulators are supposed to

>be policing. Under those circumstances it’s a

>case of the same problem the computer industry

>has always acknowledged – if the incoming data

>is garbage, then the outgoing data will also be

>garbage. What we have seen with Coca Cola’s

>recent defence of its use of aspartame in its

>diet products is the manner in which so-called

>“science” can be misused to defend the indefensible.

>

>“The fact is, minority organisations like our

>own NZ Safe Food Campaign simply don’t have the

>resources to defend the NZ public against the

>consequences of junk science. What we need is a

>food safety regulatory environment where the

>public interest is the first priority and not

>the defence of powerful international food corporate interests.

>

>“Fonterra’s contaminated milk scandal should be

>a wake-up call to us all over how easily food

>corporate interests take priority over public safety.”

>

>

>NOTE:

>Chris Wheeler is the Auckland representative of

>the NZ Safe Food Campaign and former president

>of the Soil & Health Association of NZ Inc, New

>Zealand’s oldest lobbying group over health and food safety issues.

>

>CONTACT DETAILS:

>Chris Wheeler, Mob: 021 110 9525, H/W: (09) 440

>9442, Email: <chrisw2.

>

>--

>

>Chris Wheeler

>P O Box 44, Upper Moutere

>Nelson 7144

>NEW ZEALAND

>Tel: 021 110 9525

>Website: <www.selfhelp-cancertherapy.com>

>

>

> " God is not on the side of the heavy battalions,

>but of the best shots. " Voltaire, 1694 - 1778, The Piccini Notebooks

>