Ajinomoto, a top manufacturer of aspartame, has announced that aspartame is completely safe. This conclusion was reached by a panel of industry-friendly "experts" hired by Ajinomoto, who did no new research but, instead, selectively reviewed previous studies on the safety of aspartame (many of which were funded by aspartame manufacturers in the first place).

The panel of experts was called together by the Burdock Group, a consulting firm that earns its money from food and grocery manufacturers like Ajinomoto. The Ajinomoto company was reportedly not allowed to actually choose which panel members would be part of the aspartame safety review, but industry critics like Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), responded by saying, "They say Ajinomoto paid for the study but researchers didn't know who paid. Well, they knew it was industry. And some of these people are longstanding industry consultants."

What we have here is a case of yet more pro-aspartame propaganga being paraded around as legitimate science. It's really more of a junk science fraud fest designed to prop up the aspartame industry a little longer even as new science keeps coming out showing the chemical sweetener to be potentially quite dangerous to health.

For the Ajinomoto company to fund a review by paying money to an industry-friendly consulting group that coincidentally happens to find aspartame to be perfectly safe strains credibility to such a degree that only a fool would put any weight in this announcement. It's like the R.J. Reynolds company announcing nicotine is not addictive, or Coca-Cola declaring that high fructose corn syrup does not promote obesity.

Of course aspartame is dangerous to human health. The chemicals it breaks down into (which includes small amounts of formaldehyde) are documented as nervous system toxins. In the natural health industry, aspartame is well known to be an "excitotoxin" -- a substance that harms and kills nerve cells. On top of that, there are literally hundreds of thousands of accounts of people suffering blindness, seizures, blurred vision, migraine headaches and other neurological problems associated with aspartame consumption. No other food or beverage ingredient has generated more consumer complaints to the FDA than aspartame.

People who stop drinking aspartame often experience astonishing improvements in vision, mental clarity and neurological function. It is, in fact, common knowledge among natural health practitioners that aspartame is a neurotoxic substance.

Trying to prop up a chemical that will soon be illegal