In Science Without Sense, I said that to assess [risk] for success, the cardinal rule is always PICK THE RIGHT RISK.
Moreover, in the Chapter 1 section titled "Reducing or Eliminating Risk Should Involve No Perceptible Personal Sacrifice," I specifically stated
Don't pick a risk that would require people to sacrifice something near and dear to them. That means fast food, sweets or artificial sweeteners.
I guess Olney et al.'s copies of the book must have gotten lost in the mail or they didn't read them carefully enough. Boy, did they pick the WRONG risk.
Olney et al. have attempted to set off a scare about aspartame, the artificial sweetner known commonly as NutraSweet.
Olney et al. correlate an increase in brain tumor incidence during the 1980s with the increased use of aspartame in diet foods. They claim this correlation is biologically plausible because laboratory rats fed aspartame (in toxicology studies done for the FDA approval process) had an increased incidence of brain tumors. They also claim that aspartame can be changed chemically (nitrosylated) into chemical compounds that are associated with producing brain tumors in animals.
Now, as I said, if you pick the wrong risk, you can count on your scare (and your career) going nowhere. Olney et al.'s NutraSweet scare will soon be heading into the junk science annals of oblivion. Here are some of the reasons why.
It is physiologically impossible for aspartame to be a
carcinogen. Asparatame is metabolized by the body into comon dietary
components, including amino acids. Aspartame never enters the blood stream.
No exposure data. Olney et al. have no data that show that
any of the people who got brain cancer during the 1980s consumed any aspartame.
Faulty correlation between brain cancer incidence and aspartame
consumption increase. The increase in brain cancer since 1973 has since been
leveling off. In contrast, since 1981, consumption of aspartame has skyrocketed.
(I had two Diet Cokes while writing this!).
Rats! The laboratory rats used to test aspartame were
Sprague-Dawley rats — rats that are genetically programmed to get cancer
just by living. According to Dr. Adalbert Koestner, an expert in brain tumor
pathology from Ohio State University, the reported incidence in brain tumors
among the rats was "well within the range of spontaneous brain tumors"
normally experienced by Sprague-Dawley rats.
Click here for more detailed technical information.
As if the facts weren't enough, the public health research community is now piling on the battered Olney et al. study. Dr. Dimitrios Trichopoulos, Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention, and Dr. Paul Levy, Professor and Director, Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, are just two of those piling on.
Like the 1993 cellular telephone scare, the aspartame scare will fade away. Although the public is susceptible to some junk science, NutraSweet is too near-and-dear to our hearts. We like that we can eat and drink things with low or no calories. It keeps us slim. Obesity is a far greater health problem than brain cancer will ever be. Finally, NutraSweet permits diabetics to enjoy sweets.
Shame on Olney et al. for not heeding Science Without Sense. But maybe it's not their fault. After all, I did run out of copies of my book. But Olney et al. can still read it on this website.