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Sir John Krebs, Food Standards Agency, criticized for industry bias: Richard
Girling, UK Sunday Times Magazine: Murray 3.28.4 rmforall

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---
"The World Health Organization laughs at it. Consumer organisations rail at
it. Environmentalists despair over it. MPs ridicule it. Even the Women's
Institute is unhappy."

Probably the best (and certainly the longest!) article ever written on Sir
John Krebs and the Food Standards agency which he heads
---
Gluttons for punishment
By Richard Girling The Sunday Times Magazine March 28, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1044017,00.html

Its findings smell fishy, its dietary advice is confusing and doesn't amount
to a hill of beans. It's had to eat humble pie and runs around like a
headless chicken. Is Britain's food watchdog dressed mutton as lamb?

The World Health Organization laughs at it. Consumer organisations rail at
it. Environmentalists despair over it. MPs ridicule it. Even the Women's
Institute is unhappy.

In the eyes of many who ought to be its allies, the Food Standards Agency
(FSA) has been worse than a disappointment. To people who care about what
they eat, and who believe that the UK's official food monitor should have a
wider duty than to certify the harmlessness of chemical additives, it has
been the kind of friend that makes enemies unnecessary. It loves GM. Hates
organics. Exalts science to the position once occupied by gods. Pays no more
account to public opinion than it might to the clucking of a hen.

It was not supposed to be like this. When the FSA was set up four years ago,
its aim was "to be trusted as the most reliable source of advice and
information about food". To the pressure groups that had been campaigning
for it, April 2000 looked like the end of an anti-consumer Dark Age. Until
then, food had been the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food (Maff) - the very same outfit that was responsible for
the protection of farmers. Was Maff ever going to uphold the interests of
consumers against the industry? You've only got to look at the degradation
of the farmed landscape to see the answer to that, never mind cast your mind
back to salmonella, foot and mouth, and BSE. Its scientists were forever
telling us that everything was hunky-dory when we all could see that it
wasn't.

The FSA, then, strode into the breach like a toqued crusader. Here was our
champion! It had a meaty annual budget (last year it rose to GBP95m for
England alone), with more than 600 staff at its London headquarters and
another 107 at its outstations in Cardiff, Aberdeen and Belfast.
Agribusiness and food manufacturers had better watch out. Chemically
inflated yields, water-injected meat, fraudulent food labelling, filthy
restaurants and pesticide-riddled greengrocery were yesterday's story.
Tomorrow's was all about the consumer.

The toqued crusader, alas, had feet of pastry. Following a far from
laudatory report by the National Audit Office last year, the agency was
savaged by a plainly exasperated House of Commons public accounts committee
(PAC). Crudely summarised, the PAC's conclusions were that the FSA had
failed to give a public lead on food safety issues; was an incompetent
communicator with a next-to-zero public profile; was unclear about its own
responsibilities, powerless to make local authorities meet their inspection
targets for restaurants and other food outlets, and a political minnow when
set against food-manufacturing giants, the EU and other government
departments with different agendas.

Nothing better illustrates the muddle it has got itself into than the issue
of farmed salmon. It first got snarled up with this in January 2001, when
BBC television screened a controversial documentary suggesting that farmed
fish were being contaminated through the food chain with carcinogenic
dioxins and PCBs. Trouble arose when the presenter, Julian Pettifer, asked
an FSA scientist whether he was happy for children to eat more than a single
portion of farmed salmon a week. Viewers then saw the scientist, Dr Nigel
Harrison, flounder and fail to answer, and an FSA press officer step in to
halt the interview.

The agency compounded this public-relations disaster by complaining to the
Broadcasting Standards Commission. Dr Harrison, it claimed, had been
subjected to an unnecessarily aggressive interview; the programme had
portrayed the FSA as "secretive, heavy-handed and censorial"; it had
unfairly implied that the press officer had ended the interview prematurely,
and that, by filming her intervention, the programme makers had infringed
her privacy. It even complained about criticism of its website. The BSC,
having watched the film, rejected the complaint in its entirety.

Most organisations would have found such humiliation salutary. Lessons would
have been learnt; the website cleaned up; straightforward answers given to
straightforward questions. How, then, did the FSA respond in January this
year when the American peer-reviewed journal Science dropped another toxic
bombshell? Researchers from the University of Albany in New York state had
tested seven tonnes of farmed and wild salmon collected from around the
world. As everyone now knows, the results were devastating. Concentrations
of carcinogenic chemicals in Scottish farmed fish were so high, the
scientists said, that consumers should eat no more than one portion of it
every four months.

As always, the FSA invoked the highest authority: "The World Health
Organization," it said, "set safety levels for dioxins and PCBs in 2001
based exclusively on public health protection. These form the basis of
safety levels set for consumers who eat fish sold in shops."

To check the truth of this, I call the WHO headquarters in Geneva. A
scientist in the chemical-safety department agrees to check the FSA website,
and a few hours later calls back with the verdict. The FSA's assertions, he
says, are not justified by the science it has published. The presentation of
evidence is misleading. The WHO disapproves of the way the FSA has presented
its assessment of risk.

The agency is right about one thing. The WHO does set recommended safe
limits for PCBs, but it does so on the basis of total diet, not on
individual foods. There is no specific recommendation for "fish sold in
shops" (or any commodity, for that matter). Yet the FSA's reassurance had
gone further: "The known benefits of eating oily fish," it said, "outweigh
any possible risks". For it to be a problem you would need to eat more than
our recommendations every week throughout your lifetime."

This makes the man in Geneva laugh out loud. "You can't justify or deny it,"
he says. "They haven't presented data on the website to defend it. We don't
like to see risk assessments presented like this. Consuming above the
recommended level may not cause problems, but it might. There are a lot of
uncertainties involved in picking that level." This is not a new concern for
the WHO. In 2001 it became so worried by what was being said in its name
that it issued a corrective statement: "WHO's recommendation concerns
maximum daily intake of dioxins, not salmon [our italics]."

This time round, the FSA beefed up its response with two scientific papers
of its own, linked from the website in early January. The first of these
uses data collected in 1996, measured against even older WHO recommendations
that have long been superseded. Interesting the paper may be, but it's about
as relevant as last year's weather forecast. WHO scientist's verdict:

"I don't know why it's there." The second paper is about "dioxins and
dioxin-like PCBs in the UK diet". Again it concerns the overall diet, not
specific foods. The survey did include fish, but they were of various kinds,
collected from 24 different places in the UK and "composited into a single
sample for analysis".

Asked how this might help a consumer decide how much salmon is safe to eat,
the WHO expert is unequivocal: "It doesn't." There is nothing wrong with the
science as such <ETH> the problem lies with the way it has been used. "It is
presented very poorly because it's the first thing you're directed to. It
was certainly very confusing to me."

His confusion is widely shared. Sue Davies, the principal policy adviser of
the Consumers' Association, is one of many who return to the question that
won't go away. "The FSA," she says, "should be clearer about whether
consumers should avoid eating more than a single portion of salmon a week."

The problem is that the FSA literally has no answer. It knows that an
"average" balanced diet, containing one portion of oily fish a week, should
do more good than harm. Beyond that, as the WHO expert testifies, it really
has no idea. But the WHO is not the only authority on toxicology. The US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also publishes guidelines for dioxins
and PCBs and, unlike the WHO's, these do relate specifically to fish. It was
for this reason that the Albany group decided to measure their results
against the EPA's guidelines rather than the WHO's.

Dr Paul Johnston, principal scientist in the Greenpeace research laboratory
at the University of Exeter, has no doubt about which ones to trust. "All
WHO says is that you should eat a balanced diet. Assertions that salmon, or
anything else, conforms to WHO guidelines, are untrue. Averages are very
dangerous because they don't take account of individual behaviour. Some
people may eat salmon three times a week, and no advice is given about
that."

He does not believe the FSA under its present leadership is capable of
reform, particularly as so many of its staff were hired from the ranks of
Maff and still carry the echo of that weary old drone's anti-consumerist
dogma. "What's needed," says Johnston, "is root-and-branch reform of the
FSA. Given its various pronouncements on GM and organics, the man at the top
ought to consider his position very, very carefully."

The man at the top is the agency's chairman, Sir John Krebs, a distinguished
zoologist with a specialism in bird behaviour. He is above all a man of
science, whose opinion of GM protesters, organic-food producers and their
customers is like that of a medieval pope for the Muslim hordes. Contempt by
comparison would be an expression of high regard. Criticism of GM food, he
said, was "shrill, often ill-informed and dogma-driven". Organic food was an
"image-led fad".

In appearing to align the FSA with the biotechnology industry, and in
opposing European legislation on the labelling of GM foods, the FSA under
Krebs's leadership bizarrely set itself up in opposition to its own core
supporters. In an otherwise generous appraisal of the agency's work in its
first three years, the Consumers' Association awarded it one mark out of 10
for its performance on GM. In March last year, together with the National
Consumer Council and Sustain, it wrote to Sir John Krebs in terms that left
little room for misunderstanding. The FSA's stance on GM, it said, "while
claiming to be impartial, is anti-consumer and biased in favour of GM
technology".

"Our main criticism is of the FSA's website, entitled 'GM public debate'.
The content is biased, failing to address issues currently facing UK
consumers and selective with the information chosen to be included. In many
cases, what are set out as 'basic facts' give a one-sided view. The FSA's
decision to take a prejudicial view towards GM will affect its credibility
and undo the good work it has done in other areas. The information appears
to have little to do with the desire to have a meaningful debate; rather, it
is a defence of the government's approach".

Nor was this the only stinger in Sir John's postbag. Only a week earlier,
another group of signatories, including the National Federation of Women's
Institutes, the Food Commission, Soil Association, Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace and the health union, Unison, had blazed away in very similar
terms. "There is a strong consensus amongst consumer and environment
organisations that the published views and statements of the FSA and its
Chair are indistinguishable from those of the pro-GM lobby and do not
properly represent public health and consumer interests." Most bruising of
all for a man of science, the WI group attacked not just the perceived
prejudice of the website but the validity of its research. It deplored the
agency's "willingness to rely on unpublished or confidential corporate data
that is neither independent, nor peer-reviewed nor available to the public".

They might as well have saved their ink. Over a long weekend the very next
month, an FSA "citizens' jury" heard witnesses from interested parties -
environment and consumer groups, scientists, GM companies, food
manufacturers and supermarkets - and delivered its verdict. GM crops, it
said, should not be grown in Britain. The following day, the FSA issued a
press release: "FSA citizens' jury says GM foods should be available to buy
in the UK." This was true: a nine-strong majority of the 15 "jurors" had
decided British shoppers should be able to buy imported GM foods if they
wanted them; but all 15 were unanimous that the crops should not be grown
here. Not only was this not thought worthy of a headline, it was not even
mentioned in the text.

It left Sue Dibb, senior policy officer of the National Consumer Council and
herself a member of the FSA consumer committee, bemused at the FSA's
continuing inability to grasp what was being said to it. "I think it
regrettable that UK government policy did not reflect what consumers were
very clearly saying they wanted. Safety is not the only issue that concerns
many people about GM."

The FSA was out of step not only with British public opinion but also with
the rest of the EU. Alone among European nations, the UK argued against the
European commission's proposal for compulsory labelling of GM
"derivatives" - ie, ingredients such as soya oil, whose provenance is not
detectable in manufactured products. Alone, too, it wanted the entire thrust
of labelling policy reversed - for GM products to count as the norm, and for
the rest to be labelled "GM free". It lost the argument, but only after it
had spent vast amounts of time and energy justifying its position (it
insisted that the law would be unenforceable). It is this that frustrates
people who support the FSA's ultimate aims and objectives, but who find
themselves forced into opposition. "Time spent arguing that extended
labelling can't work," says Sue Dibb, "could have been spent making it
work."

In the end, the agency just looked out of touch. UK food manufacturers and
retailers, being more sensitive to the public mood, are careful to keep GM
ingredients off the shelves; and the labelling of GM derivatives will be a
legal requirement from April 18. The UK government, meanwhile, doggedly
trundles forward in its determination to impose GM crops, come environmental
hell or the high water of public hostility.

If anything exceeds Krebs's enthusiasm for GM, it is his loathing of
organics - another area in which the scientific high ground is claimed by
"conventional" (ie, chemically dependent) agriculture. Krebs is very fond of
the scientific high ground, and scathing of the media bias he descries on
the lower slopes. In the autumn of 2000, he was one of a number of
scientists invited by the Royal Institution and the Social Issues Research
Centre (SIRC) to draw up new guidelines for journalists reporting on science
and health. "As chair of the Food Standards Agency," he said at the time, "I
feel that people in our society should have access to accurate and balanced
information about food safety and nutrition in order to make sensible
decisions about what they eat. I very much hope that with these guidelines
we will reduce the distortions and sensationalism which so often are
associated with stories about what we should or should not eat."

The guidelines themselves were largely unexceptionable, though the irony of
that "balanced information" was not lost on aficionados of the FSA website.
The odd eyebrow was raised, too, at the involvement of the SIRC, whose
website appears even more violently anti-organic than the FSA's own.

"It was inevitable," it says, "that when Sir John Krebs first punctured the
myths surrounding organic food, he would become a target for both personal
abuse and zealous attempts to prove him wrong." Oddly, this is the first
sentence of a piece which itself is larded with personal abuse, and which
zealously attempts to prove wrong the author of a Soil Association report on
the nutritional value of organics. "No journalist," it complains, "seems to
have explored the credentials of [the author] Shane Heaton. If they had
bothered to do so they might have been more concerned about his so-called
'results'." And the damning evidence from Heaton's background? That he
trained with the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, whose "founding patron was
Linus Pauling - the man responsible for the now discredited idea that
massive doses of vitamin C are effective in preventing colds and other
ailments, and even cancer".

What it neglects to add is that Pauling was a double Nobel laureate
(Chemistry, 1954; Peace, 1962) and an unlikely vehicle for a "guilt by
association" smear. This leaves the SIRC and, by association, Sir John
Krebs, ducking the ricochets. Is this the standard of scientific objectivity
it wants to impress upon the media? If even a Nobel laureate can be wrong,
then how can scientists continue so arrogantly to proclaim their own
infallibility? And if people are to be judged by the company they keep, what
about the SIRC's own food-industry funding, and its association with a
commercial market-research company? What about the FSA's warm embrace of
officials who thought it good practice for animal protein to be fed to
cattle? If this is scientific objectivity, then you might as well hand
editorial control of Nature to the editor of the Daily Mail.

Half-truths abound. Krebs says people who buy organic food are "not getting
value for money". Well, they are and they aren't. Unlike customers for
"conventional" foods, they are indeed paying the real price for what they
eat, without much in the way of subsidy. The true cost of supermarket food
can be seen in the degradation of the farmed landscape, from which every
kind of agricultural pollutant floods into groundwater and streams, with
devastating effects on wildlife. The Department for Environment, Food and
Rural Affairs (Defra) calculates that the total annual cost to the water
industry of scrubbing agricultural pollutants from the public supply is
£225m. Find this on the FSA website if you can. You will look in vain, too,
for any acknowledgment that the health of inland waterways is as much an
issue for consumers as the price of carrots. Krebs himself insists that, far
from having a coherent argument on its side, the organic industry "relies on
image", and that there is no advantage to be had from eating food free from
pesticide residues. Indeed, he told the Guild of Food Writers in October
2001 that pesticides had passed the scrutiny of an expert committee and were
therefore preferable to the many natural toxins in fruit and vegetables that
did not have the benefit of official approval.

The irony here is that Defra itself has published an action plan encouraging
organic food. In an enthusiastic foreword, the secretary of state, Margaret
Beckett, commends organics for offering "real benefits for the environment".
Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association and a former Labour
environment minister, is both encouraged and dismayed. "There is a huge
shift in government thinking on sustainable food policy," he says. "New
science is coming out all the time to show environmental, food quality and
health benefits - and it's in the latter area that the FSA is still
resistant.

"It's a real pain for us because it affects what the organic sector can say
to its customers. For example, organic food contains less of the
hormone-disrupting chemicals that may be implicated in the reduction of
men's sperm counts. This is serious science, but the Advertising Standards
Authority, which follows the FSA's lead, won't allow us to mention it.
Neither can we mention that pesticides are particularly dangerous for the
very old and the very young, and especially to the unborn foetus. The reason
given is that it would cause undue alarm, but scientifically it's not
controversial." It's the same with meat. "Beef from cattle fed on grass has
lower levels of saturated fat and higher levels of unsaturated fat, which is
healthier. Again this is not controversial as science, but you'll be in
trouble with the ASA if you want to say that organic meat is better for
you."

There have been other examples of what he calls "crass behaviour" by the
FSA. One of these was its attempt to design simple tests to check the
authenticity of claims on food labels. "Because they didn't understand that
organics was a process - involving the way you look after your soil and the
way you treat your animals, all laid down in a very precise and demanding
set of standards - they treated it as if it were just another claim on a
label, like 'free range' or 'no added sugar'. In any other market sector
they would have talked to the industry, but they never said a word to us
about what they were doing. They spent hundreds of thousands of pounds
trying to devise tests to show whether artificial nitrogen had been applied
to crops or not; but it's useless. It means that if you were a conventional
farmer and didn't apply nitrogen, you could sell your crop as organic."

Even so, he still doesn't see this as anti-organic mendacity. "It's not a
conspiracy. It's a cockup." The same explanation might fit some of the other
shortcomings catalogued by the public accounts committee. Its principal
complaint - that after four years the agency "has not yet demonstrated
convincingly that it is able to lead on issues of food safety and standards,
and is an authoritative and trusted voice where there is public doubt" - is
devastating. Astonishingly, only 3% of the public said they would turn to it
for advice. There remains confusion, too, about division of responsibilities
between the FSA and other arms of government (Defra on meat imports, for
example, and the Department of Health on nutrition).

Successes? There have been a few. The agency recently saved us from
donkey-meat salami. It fingered wholesalers and retailers who mis-sold
"varietal" potatoes (35% of King Edwards in its survey were wrongly
labelled). And it honoured a promise, given by its chief executive, Jon
Bell, to the public accounts committee, that it would do more to "name and
shame" the guilty. It has tested sausages for salt, fat and nutritional
content; and tested bread and a range of ready meals for salt, which it is
keen for us all to eat less of. Pizzas, canned spaghetti, baked beans and
soups are next. It is also taking a close interest in Coca-Cola's use of the
word "pure" in its marketing of the processed Sidcup tap water, Dasani.

Meanwhile the giants of the food industry still get away with the kind of
labelling that allows products with a 16% fat content to be sold as "Lite",
and those with 10% fat as "90% fat free". Local authorities continue to fail
in their statutory duty to inspect restaurants, butchers' shops and other
food outlets, and the public stomach continues to heave. In 2001, 5.5m
people said they'd suffered food poisoning in the previous year, and 4.2m of
these blamed restaurants or other caterers. The FSA does have power to move
in on negligent local authorities but - although many are failing
abysmally - it has yet to do so. Instead, it is relying on education. If it
is to realise its ambition of a 20% reduction in food poisoning within four
years, the learning curve will need to be steep. The PAC heard that half of
all catering staff do not wash their hands before preparing food, and that a
third don't wash after using the lavatory.

Response to criticism is not the FSA's strong point. As ever, salmon is the
classic example.

Question: "Could you answer the criticism that you wrongly imply that the
WHO has set specific safe limits for dioxins and PCBs in 'fish sold in
shops'?"

Answer: "We did not say that WHO had set safe limits."

Truth: Remember the website? "The levels of dioxins found in farmed salmon
are below the safety levels set by the World Health Organization. The WHO
set safety levels for dioxins and PCBs in 2001 based exclusively on public
health protection. These form the basis of safety levels set for consumers
who eat fish sold in shops."

It may be possible, by close textual analysis, to reconcile these apparently
conflicting statements, but there is no doubting the inference that most
ordinary readers may be expected to draw: the WHO does set specific limits
for farmed fish, and Scottish salmon falls within the margin of safety. As
we now know, this is simply not true. At every turn, the route to clarity is
blocked by theoretical concepts of "average" or "balanced" diets. Already
three years have passed since doubts about the safety of salmon first
emerged in public - three years that the FSA has spent in issuing denials
and reassurances. Only now, three years since it pulled the plug on the BBC,
has the agency appointed a panel of experts to advise on the "risks and
benefits" of eating more than one portion of salmon a week. You'll get the
answers in the autumn.

On other issues it is no less evasive. Asked to justify its attack on the
scientific competence of the EPA, it merely reiterates its faith in the WHO,
and other official bodies in the UK and US, whose findings it prefers. There
is no engagement with the issue. On questions of organics it remains simply
bewildering. "The agency has always made it clear," it declares, "that it
would not be appropriate for it to make statements supporting any particular
food production scheme." Yet at the same time it has "consulted on a
proposal" to compare the nutrient content and pesticide residues in organic
and conventionally grown fruit and vegetables. By implication, if such a
study goes ahead and demonstrates a clear advantage of one side over the
other, then it must debar itself from making any recommendation based upon
the result.

This February it found itself in deep trouble with another group of MPs, the
House of Commons select committee on environment, food and rural affairs.
This time the whipping was for its costly mishandling of the shellfish
industry, after flawed toxin monitoring had caused prolonged closure of
cockle beds in England and Wales. The FSA, it said, "had not lived up to its
core value of being open and accessible". Its standards of communication and
co-operation had been so poor that they had led to "an atmosphere of
distrust and, at times, hostility".

The science had been a shambles, and the FSA had been slow to accept the
possibility that its methodology could be at fault. "It is both astonishing
and unacceptable," said the committee, "that the three laboratories
conducting statutory toxin monitoring used different methods, and more
importantly, did not appear to have a common standard for determining
whether a result was positive or negative."

But there is no sign that anything is about to change. An FSA spokesman
immediately popped up in a BBC studio to declare that the agency had done
nothing wrong. His excuse, which cannot have been better designed to cause
mirth in anybody who had followed the salmon saga, was this: for the sake of
public safety, it had been essential to adopt a "precautionary approach in
the face of scientific uncertainty".

One portion a week, anyone?
******************************************************************


Rich Murray, MA Room For All rmforall@...
1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 USA 505-986-9103

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/927
Donald Rumsfeld, 1977 head of Searle Corp., got aspartame FDA approval:
Turner: Murray 12.23.2 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1039
three-page review: aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde) toxicity:
Murray 11.22.3 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1026
brief aspartame review: formaldehyde toxicity: Murray 9.11.3 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/989 On 4.10.2003
the European Union Parliament voted 440 to 20 to approve sucralose,
limit cyclamates & reevaluate aspartame & stevia: Murray 4.12.3 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1065
politicians and celebrities hooked on diet sodas (aspartame): Murray 3.24.4
rmforall

http://google.com gives 221,000 websites for "aspartame" , with the top
9 of 10 listings being anti-aspartame, while
http://groups.google.com finds on 700 MB of posts from 20 years of
Usenet groups, 83,800 posts, the top 10 being anti-aspartame.
http://news.google.com 28 recent aspartame items from 4500 sources.
http://www.AllTheWeb.com gives 291,700, the top 7 of 10 being
leading and very well informed volunteer anti-aspartame sites.
http://teoma.com/index.asp gives 85,700 websites, top 8 of 10 anti.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed lists 751 aspartame items.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1025
aspartame & formaldehyde toxicity: Murray 9.9.3 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/messages
for 1068 posts in a public searchable archive 120 members

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartame/messages 772 with 16,688 posts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1047
Avoiding Hangover Hell 12.31.3 Mark Sherman, AP writer: Robert Swift, MD:
[formaldehyde from methanol in aspartame]: Murray 1.16.4 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1048
hangovers from formaldehyde from methanol (aspartame?):
Schwarcz: Linsley: Murray 1.18.4

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1052
DMDC: Dimethyl dicarbonate 200mg/L in drinks adds methanol 98 mg/L
( becomes formaldehyde in body ): EU Scientific Committee on Foods 7.12.1:
Murray 1.22.4 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1024
aspartame review: methanol, formaldehyde, formic acid toxicity:
Murray 9.5.3 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/910
formaldehyde & formic acid from methanol in aspartame:
Murray: 12.9.2 rmforall

It is certain that high levels of aspartame use, above 2 liters daily
for months and years, must lead to chronic formaldehyde-formic acid
toxicity, since 11% of aspartame (1,120 mg in 2L diet soda, 5.6 12-oz
cans) is 123 mg methanol (wood alcohol), immediately released into the
body after drinking (unlike the large levels of methanol locked up in
molecules inside many fruits), then quickly transformed into
formaldehyde, which in turn becomes formic acid, both of which in
time are partially eliminated as carbon dioxide and water.

However, about 30% of the methanol remains in the body as cumulative
durable toxic metabolites of formaldehyde and formic acid-- 37 mg daily,
a gram every month. [Metabolism of aspartame in monkeys.
Oppermann JA, Muldoon E, Ranney RE.
J. Nutrition 1973 Oct; 103(10): 1454-1459.]
If 10% of the methanol is retained as formaldehyde, that would give 12
mg daily formaldehyde accumulation, about 60 times more than the 0.2 mg
from 10% retention of the 2 mg EPA daily limit for formaldehyde in water.

Bear in mind that the EPA limit for formaldehyde in drinking water is
1 ppm, or 2 mg daily for a typical daily consumption of 2 L of water.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/835
RTM: ATSDR: EPA limit 1 ppm formaldehyde in drinking water July 1999
5.30.2 rmforall

This long-term low-level chronic toxic exposure leads to typical
patterns of increasingly severe complex symptoms, starting with
headache, fatigue, joint pain, irritability, memory loss, and
leading to vision and eye problems, and even seizures. In many cases
there is addiction. Probably there are immune system disorders, with a
hypersensitivity to these toxins and other chemicals.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/872
immune system reactions due to formaldehyde from the 11% methanol in
aspartame: Thrasher: Tephly: Monte: Murray 9.27.2 rmforall

J. Nutrition 1973 Oct; 103(10): 1454-1459.
Metabolism of aspartame in monkeys.
Oppermann JA, Muldoon E, Ranney RE.
Dept. of Biochemistry, Searle Laboratories,
Division of G.D. Searle and Co. Box 5110, Chicago, IL 60680
They found that about 70% of the radioactive methanol in aspartame put
into the stomachs of 3 to 7 kg monkeys was eliminated within 8 hours,
with little additional elimination, as carbon dioxide in exhaled air
and as water in the urine. They did not mention
that this meant that about 30% of the methanol must transform
into formaldehyde and then into formic acid, both of which must remain
as toxic products in all parts of the body. They did not report any
studies on the distribution of radioactivity in body tissues, except
that blood plasma proteins after 4 days held 4% of the initial
methanol. This study did not monitor long-term use of aspartame.

The low oral dose of aspartame and for methanol was 0.068 mmol/kg,
about 1 part per million [ppm] of the acute toxicity level of 2,000
mg/kg, 67,000 mmol/kg, used by McMartin (1979). Two L daily use of
diet soda provides 123 mg methanol, 2 mg/kg for a 60 kg person, a dose
of 67 mmole/kg, a thousand times more than the dose in this study.
By eight hours excretion of the dose in air and urine had leveled off
at 67.1 +-2.1% as CO2 in the exhaled air and 1.57+-0.32% in the urine,
so 68.7 % was excreted, and 31.3% was retained. [This data is the
average of 4 monkeys.]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/915
formaldehyde toxicity: Thrasher & Kilburn: Shaham: EPA: Gold: Murray:
Wilson: CIIN: 12.12.2 rmforall

Thrasher (2001): "The major difference is that the Japanese demonstrated
the incorporation of FA and its metabolites into the placenta and fetus.
The quantity of radioactivity remaining in maternal and fetal tissues
at 48 hours was 26.9% of the administered dose." [Ref. 14-16]

Arch Environ Health 2001 Jul-Aug; 56(4): 300-11.
Embryo toxicity and teratogenicity of formaldehyde. [100 references]
Thrasher JD, Kilburn KH.
Sam-1 Trust, Alto, New Mexico, USA.
http://www.drthrasher.org/formaldehyde_embryo_toxicity.html full text

http://www.drthrasher.org/formaldehyde_1990.html full text Jack Dwayne
Thrasher, Alan Broughton, Roberta Madison. Immune activation and
autoantibodies in humans with long-term inhalation exposure to formaldehyde.
Archives of Environmental Health. 1990; 45: 217-223. "Immune activation,
autoantibodies, and anti-HCHO-HSA antibodies are associated with long-term
formaldehyde inhalation." PMID: 2400243

Confirming evidence and a general theory are given by Pall (2002):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/909
testable theory of MCS type diseases, vicious cycle of nitric oxide &
peroxynitrite: MSG: formaldehyde-methanol-aspartame:
Martin L. Pall: Murray: 12.9.2 rmforall

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1055
hormesis: possible benefits of low-level aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde)
use: Calabrese: Soffritti: Murray 3.11.4

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1056
disorders of NMDA glutamate receptors in brain range from high activity
(MCS, CF, PTSD, FM, from carbon monoxide or formaldehyde (methanol,
aspartame)-- Pall)
to low activity (schizophrenia-- Coyle, Goff, Javitts):
Murray 3.13.4 rmforall
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