Those Dirty Rats

TCSDaily.com ^ | February 21, 2006 | Duane Freese

[Antroad]

TCS Daily

Those Dirty Rats

By Duane Freese

February 21, 2006

Here's some advice: If you want to avoid getting cancer, die young.

And if you're a journalist, here's some more: if you want to make a big splash about the above fact, spin it with an old story linking cancer to a popular food ingredient and wed that to 30-year-old alleged cover up.

That's essentially what The New York Times did in a 2,600-word expose in its Sunday, Feb. 12, paper.

"The Lowdown on Sweet?" by Melanie Warner has overshadowed the good news on the cancer front this month, the American Cancer Society reporting a decrease in the actual number of cancer deaths for the first time in 70 years and New York University researchers discovering a protein known to cause cancer can be manipulated, providing hopes for better cancer therapies.

Which is a bit sad, really, as this is the third go round for this scare. The basis of this old new story is a six-month old study by the European Ramaziini Foundation of Italy. In the study, researchers fed rats various levels of aspartame – the stuff in Equal and Nutrasweet and most modern diet pop and many diet foods. A group of 150 males and females each got none, zero, zip. Another 150 males and females got the equivalent of 4 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, or a can and a half a day. The other groups split up into 100 male and female pairs got levels of 20 mg/kg, or 7 cans; 100mg, 35 cans; 500mg, 175 cans; 2500 mg, 875 cans, and finally 5,000 mg, or the equivalent of 1,750 cans a day.

Food safety agencies have set the safe level of aspartame consumption at 40 to 50 mg a day, 15 to 18 cans. The big thing about the study was that it claimed its autopsies of the rats after they died found a significant increase in lymphomas and leukemias among the female rats, though not the male rats, at 7 cans a day. Mercy.

When the news first broke last July with publication of the study in the European Journal of Oncology, the Times didn't report it but other news organizations in Europe and here headlined its claim of a link between the sweetener and cancer while the usual consumer advocates demanded action by food safety agencies to protect the public.

Then a few months passed, and the Ramazzini study was published again in the November Environmental Health Perspectives, spurring another round of news stories and hand wringing.

By then, though, the sweetener industry was beginning to raise questions about the study. For example, unlike other studies that kill off the rats after two years and count the tumors, the Ramazzini study waited for them to die. "Rats, like people, develop a wide range of cancers in old age, and establishing whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship (at an age when cancers are common) is not possible," Joe Poulos, a spokesman for Merisant, maker of Equal, told Fox News.

Further, the regulatory agencies were taking a look at the published studies and raising questions, too. The Committee on Carcinogenicity in the United Kingdom at its December meeting made one telling statement: "There are slight differences in historical control data for the incidences of lymphomas and leukaemias in female rats between the published data (average 13.4%, range 7.0-18.4%) and data presented to the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) on 17 June 2005 (average 12.9%, range 4-25%). The incidences of lymphomas and leukaemias in female aspartame-fed rats occurred over the range of the historical control data sets presented in the paper. Members considered that a small increase a tumour incidence over such a wide range of doses was implausible."

In other words, the Ramazzini study's cancer rates for the aspartame fed rats fit in the range of cancers that the institute had historically found for its control rats. Furthermore, the cancer rates for the aspartame fed females remained pretty stable no matter the dosage. If aspartame were toxic, you would expect the rate of cancers to increase as the dosage increased.

Warner's editors let her ramble on for more than 600 words about the approval process, noting that "from 1977 to 1985 — during much of the approval process — (G.D.) Searle (which invented aspartame) was headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now the secretary of defense," and then running through a litany of supposed revolving door relationships and a lot of innuendo about a possible cover-up.

All of which is a bit bizarre, considering that Congress' Government Accounting Office (now Government Accountability Office) in 1987, on a request from Ohio Democratic Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, reported that the FDA had followed appropriate procedures in its approvals. Aspartame has received significant scrutiny in studies for use in Europe, Canada and other places as well.

Warner and the Times might have better spent their time looking at the Ramazzini study itself, in particular its charts on rat survival rates. There's something peculiar about them. An email to Ramazzini about the peculiarity has yet to be answered; but then, as Dr. George Pauli of the FDA told the Times, the agency "requested the data from the Ramazzini study in July 2005 but we have as not yet received the data."

Like Pauli, I wouldn't draw any conclusions from the charts until I hear more from Ramazzini – other than to note that at the 104 week mark, the charts show only 40% of the.control rats had survived and at week 120, only 15% were alive. Many researchers believe experiments with rats should be ended when the control group falls below 20%, so as not to skew cancer counting results.

Here's what's even stranger: the rats with the highest survival rates at 104 and 120 weeks, at 55% and about 29% respectively, were the rats that ate the most aspartame – the equivalent of 1,750 cans of diet soda a day. And the longest living rat of all consumed the equivalent of 175 cans a day. In short, the control rats died first; the heavy aspartame consumers lived longest.

Looks like if you want to increase your odds of living a long life, be prepared to burp.

Duane Freese is Deputy Editor of TCS Daily.

[spintreebob]

Did you realize that there is a high correlation between people who receive the last rites and the death of those same people?

Clearly we must hold the Church responsible for this.