Poisoned For Profit: The Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners - Show #19

August 11, 2008

 
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Inadvertant huffing is bad for youDiana Walker: Hi this is Diana Walker and today I have a wonderful friend and guest named Laury Orndorff who is going to talk to us about our title. Our title is Poisoned for Profit, The Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners. Laury has been sharing with me recently all her research that she’s done over many years and first I’d like you to tell me, introduce yourself a little bit Laury and tell me a bit of your background and then we’ll get into our subject today.

LAURY’S STORY – GETTING OFF DIET COKE

Laury: Ok that sounds good Diana. Thank you so much for having me on the call. It’s great to speak with you about this subject because I was a big time Diet Coke drinker in high school. I was weight conscious like most teenage girls are and drank a lot of Diet Cokes. The funny thing about drinking diet drinks is most of the time when you do that you don’t do it in moderation. It seems it can kind of become your water and that’s very dangerous.

Diana Walker: You think that you are doing something good because you are on a diet or you’re watching your weight, it has zero calories.

Laury: Also back then I absolutely knew nothing about health and nutrition. My parents didn’t either. They started to get into nutrition and health later also after I graduated. Anyway, so we just kind of learned as we lost our health. You become your researcher and you just start to learn about what is going on with your health.

I got off the diet drinks and I felt tremendously better. I was sick a lot in high school, had constant tonsillitis to the point where I almost got my tonsils removed. It’s interesting how life is a journey and looking back when I was so sickly in high school not one doctor asked me what are you eating and drinking everyday. That was my biggest problem.

Diana Walker: They have no training in that. They aren’t nutritionists but most think they are.

Laury: If I look back at my diet and go I had a bowl of cheerios for breakfast, three diet cokes with a bagel at lunch and nothing for dinner or more Diet Coke and fast food for dinner or something. I just did not eat well so I was sick all the time.

FACTS ON ASPARTAME AND FDA

I think that most people really would like to hear some of the facts on Aspartame and that’s what I want to bring to the table today is the facts. There is really an Aspartame timeline I have, if you will, to go into the background into the past of the battle that raged within the FDA to even approve Aspartame as a sweetener anyway.

Diana Walker: You know I didn’t know this and you and I were talking earlier and I am fascinated with this because I always have in the back of my mind oh that FDA why did they approve Aspartame. I did not know this timeline so please tell us.

Laury: Well yeah. The FDA today as we know it is broken and in American Public we see that because there are situations like Vioxx and we knew there were problems with Vioxx before it was marketed. Hundreds of people died so of course the media couldn’t ignore that so it hit the news.

Way back when the FDA commissioner had some power then things were very well investigated before they went to the market and I will get to that but first lets talk about how Aspartame was even discovered.

Back in 1965 G.D. Searle, a company that made chemicals had researchers and one of their researchers was working on an ulcer drug and got some on his finger and instinctively he licked his finger and noticed it was sweet. It had a very sweet taste and that was literally the first of Aspartame. So G.D. Searle started a 52 week study on monkeys, so these were the first tests that were ever run on Aspartame.

Diana Walker: What year was that?

Laury: This was back in I believe 1970, around 1970 or so, or maybe 1968. It was years after the researcher discovered it, a few years after and maybe not quite as far as 1970, so somewhere around late 60’s.

Over the 52 week study seven monkeys or primates were fed Aspartame and milk because milk can kind of slow down the phenology content that is in the Aspartame if it’s fed in milk but still five of those monkeys had grand mal seizures and one died from cardiac arrest from an over stimulated nervous system. So G.D. Searle went back and got another doctor, Dr. Wellington and they just redesigned the monkey study. It was just kind of a whole cover up that happened.

In 1970 a famous Dr. by the name of Dr. Olney discovered that oral intake of aspartic acid caused brain tumors in the mice that he was testing. Why this is significant is because Aspartame breaks down into three things into the body: aspartic acid, phenylalanine and formaldehyde. That’s what it literally breaks down and methanol. These poisons are what is going to happen to you if you are ingesting this poison.

Diana Walker: That’s four poisons.

Laury: It’s aspartic acid and basically what it does is it raises the phenylalanine content in your blood if you are drinking aspartame and so that’s why there’s all those warnings on Aspartame products warning this product contains phenylene. Because if somebody has that Phenylketonuria or PKU they can’t have more of this amino acid in their blood because it will make them very sick and they will die.

There was an attorney and he’s a real good guy, James Turner and in mid 1973 Searle applied to the FDA to use NutraSweet as a sweetener but James Turner talked to Searle and he also talked to Donald Rumsfeld and he was just like look this battle about NutraSweet, NutraSweet is the brand name for Aspartame, is a scientific struggle. It’s just absolutely a scientific struggle. He was telling them it shouldn’t be approved because of the brain damage that Dr Olney discovered.

There were all these major concerns happening so Dr. Olney and James Turner filed a formal objection saying that they believed Aspartame caused brain damage and they were fighting against it, they just did not want this to happen.

In 1977 there was a huge investigation on G.D. Searle and it was not good. The company was going down the tubes because there were the good guys like DR Olney and James Turner who were raising the awareness of the brain studies. Nobody could deny the fact that when animals were fed Aspartame they were producing brain tumors.

I have to say in 1974 the FDA gave approval to the limited use of Aspartame but the sad thing is that G.D. Searle never gave the brain studies to the FDA. In this timeline, in 1973 there were no requirements on the FDA to study effects on the brain from food additives on the brain.

There were cancer studies but there were not actual brain studies. So you can see that here all these years flowing by and there’s all this to date and all of these things happening. In 1980 the public board of inquiry voted unanimously to reject the use of aspartame. They voted all together that they wanted more studies to be done and they wanted those to be brain tumor studies.

Diana Walker: Ok so they rejected it unanimously and this public board of inquiry — is that associated with the FDA?

Laury: It seems like it from all my research. I don’t know if it’s associated with the FDA exactly but I do know that it’s something that kept the FDA in check and they were just like you know what; so basically it was ruled by law in the public board of inquiry that you can not produce this market now because we are too concerned that all these FDA scientists, there were 3 out of 5 FDA scientists that were just adamant that this was toxic to the brain that it would cause brain cancer and brain tumors and they didn’t want it on the market.

You just go ok so it was ruled by law that you can’t market it and they are slowing it down again. You see this had gone on from the time it was found in 1965 and 1968 or so those primate studies were done and the monkeys had the Grand mal seizures and here we are at 1980.

Well Donald Rumsfeld came on the scene and he took on G.D. Searle as a political issue. He wanted to save this company. It was going down the tubes, there were grand jury investigations, there was a whole fire burning about NutraSweet and they wanted a new artificial sweetener pack.

All I can tell you is it was like this political triage happening and in 1981 Ronald Reagan signed an executive order, it’s one of the first things he did as President to suspend or basically eliminate the authority of the FDA commissioner to take any action to protect the public.

Back when the FDA wasn’t broken like it is now the FDA commissioner had a lot of power. They could take action but now because of what happened in 1981 they can’t. In 1981 Aspartame became approved to be used in dry goods. The night before they were having the hearing those three FDA senior scientists that I mentioned a few minutes ago, they met with Arthur Hull Hayes who was with the new FDA commissioner that was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld and they begged him not to approve it and he did.

So in 1983 it was approved, Aspartame was approved for use in carbonated beverages and it’s just been downhill ever since. There is a very well known neurosurgeon by the name of Dr. Russell Blaylock. He wrote wonderful books Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills and Health and Nutrition Secrets that can Save Your Life, he’s just brilliant. He says that when Aspartame came onto the market in 1983 he knew that something was very wrong because by 1984 brain cancer alone, it tripled in the United States of America when all other forms of cancer stayed the same.

Diana Walker: Oh that’s shocking.

Laury: It is very shocking and very disturbing because it literally is a poison. It’s not something we should be drinking, it’s not something we should be eating and it’s something that’s so saturated in our food supply today that unless you are going the extra mile to read every single label of what you are buying you are getting it in your diet somewhere even if you don’t’ realize it. The biggest place is gum and mints.

People think oh it’s just a little gum, it’s just a mint how much Aspartame could be in it to hurt me? But honestly it only takes a single stick of chewing gum and Dr. Blaylock says it lowers the dopamine level in your brain, that there’s enough from one stick of chewing gum and it’s literally a neurotoxin.

So that’s what got my attention. I started to read his books and get on Dr. Blaylock’s website and read and research some wonderful websites I’m going to give everyone at the end of this call so they can do their own research if they want to.

If you have a brain surgeon who operates on brain tumors telling you that he believes that Aspartame causes brain cancer and that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will. Don’t you agree Diana?

Diana Walker: Oh totally. That is just totally unbelievable. Unbelievable. I’m still gasping about the gum and mints. You told me that the other day and I really didn’t know it was that bad.

A note from Diana: Join me next week for part 2 of my interview with Laurie to hear some amazing true stories of people who were poisoned by artificial sweeteners. It’s truly amazing!

As always, I invite you to visit http://www.diana2.com for nutritional information and products that will help you kick your food cravings.

What I enjoy as replacement products: Sunrider Stevia ; Sunrider Fortune Delight

Diana Walker, The Cravings Coach

Creative Commons License photo credit: greefus groinks

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Comments

6 Responses to “Poisoned For Profit: The Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners - Show #19”

  1. Melissa Ingold on August 11th, 2008 10:52 am

    Wow this is shocking! During my last pregnancy I found out that I had gestational diabetes. They gave me a list of the types of artificial sweeteners that were safe to use during pregnancy, and there were others that were not safe. They told me I could drink diet pepsi.

  2. DianaWalker on August 11th, 2008 11:02 am

    Melissa,
    Thanks for your comments. Yes, my friend Laury has certainly done her work, and her mission is to educate, educate, educate.
    It is frightening, isn’t it? This is my mission, too, with having everyone be aware of what they are putting into their bodies.

    We are being very misled by many organizations, and even doctors and nutritionists, who either do not know better, or choose not to know better!

    I would encourage ALL pregnant moms to stop Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Splenda, Aspartame, diet yogurt, diet gum - IMMEDIATELY - and everyone else too of course.

    Thanks for your comment, Melissa, and just wait until you hear the remaining segments of this awesome interview I did.

    I hope it will be a HUGE wake-up call for many people.
    Diana

  3. Melissa Ingold on August 11th, 2008 9:58 pm

    This is crazy! I was seeing doctors and nutritionists for this, and because I couldn’t have regular sugar, from what they told me, I thought it was safe to eat and drink all those things with aspartame. And I did this from 28 wks. to the end, scary!

    I’ll be watching for the rest of the interview :-)

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