Aspartame Probe Call Rejected by FDA

WASHINGTON - A U.S. consumer group called for an urgent Food and Drug Administration assessment of the safety of aspartame as it can be cancerous, on Monday, but the FDA said there wasn’t an immediate need to do so despite a new study showing the sweetener may cause cancer.

A new study published by the Italian researchers points to the fact that aspartame can cause leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer in rats.

Morando Soffritti of the Ramazzini Foundation in Bologna, Italy, and colleagues tested aspartame in rats, which they allowed to live until they died naturally.

"This is the second study by the same lab showing that aspartame causes cancer in rats," Center for Science in the Public Interest executive director Michael Jacobson.

Aspartame is used by and large in soft drinks but is also sold in packets to use in coffee, tea or on food. "People can easily avoid products using Nutrasweet or Equal and keep these products away from kids," Jacobson added.

The researchers tested on 4,000 rats. The animals were fed on high doses of the sweetener for its lifetime. It was found that the rats had several kinds of cancers.

On the basis of the present findings, we believe that a review of the current regulations governing the use of aspartame cannot be delayed," Soffritti's team wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which is published by the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

"This review is particularly urgent with regard to aspartame-containing beverages, heavily consumed by children." Unstirred by the new findings the FDA spokesman Michael Herndon said the agency had not yet reviewed the study.

“However, the conclusions from this second European Ramazzini Foundation are not consistent with those from the large number of studies on aspartame that have been evaluated by FDA, including five previously conducted negative chronic carcinogenicity studies," Herndon said. He goes on to add “"Therefore, at this time, FDA finds no reason to alter its previous conclusion that aspartame is safe as a general purpose sweetener in food."

Jacobson said “researchers in previous studies all killed rats at the age of two years. Allowing the rats to live longer may have been a better way to assess the natural risk of cancer”. According to the CSPI, the Acceptable Daily Intake of aspartame in the United States is 50 mg per kilogram of body weight, equivalent to a 50-pound (20 kg) child drinking 2.5 cans of diet soda a day, or a 150-pound (68 kilogram) adult drinking about 7.5 cans a day.

The rats with the cancer were found when it was fed the highest dose of aspartame by the Italian researchers. This highest dose is double the acceptable daily intake in the US.

Merisant, which makes Equal, has this statement on its Web site: "The safety of aspartame has been confirmed by regulatory authorities in more than 100 countries, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, and the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Food, as well as by experts with the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization and World Health Organization."

Jacobson has asked people to avoid using products with aspartame for now.” People shouldn't panic, but they should stop buying beverages and foods containing aspartame," he advised.

Source-Medindia
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