Diet Soda? Bad! Sloppy Activist Journalism? Worse!

I've been spending a lot of time reading the Michael Pollan-endorsed Grist lately. It's a (mostly) great activist blog with heaps of eye-opening commentary on our screwed-up food industry, among other things. Unfortunately, it also has a few problems getting the facts right.

Before I get into this, let's be clear: I'm a hardcore food activist. The way we eat and the way The Man feeds us are both ludicrous. If positive change came about, if we ate less chemicals and meat, if we ate more organics and local foods, I sincerely believe it would save the planet and end world hunger - or at least we'd all look a little better in our Speedos. That being said, I'm also a firm believer in "The Truth," a sticky, little annoyance that's so often overlooked by both side of every issue, from Glenn Beck to Michael Moore to Rush Limbaugh to, in this case, Grist Senior Writer Tom Phillpott.

Lately, Tom has gone to task on diet sodas. In this February 10 post, he explained the dodgy circumstances under which aspartame, the sweetener in most diet sodas, was made legal. It was an ugly business involving two of my favorite whipping boys, Monsanto and the FDA, so I was amped.

In the early 1980s, a company called Searle owned the patent on aspartame, already known, paradoxically, as Nutrasweet. (I get the sweet part, but nutra?) Searle's CEO was the well-connected Rumsfeld -- who took the Searle job not long after serving as secretary of defense for the previous Republican president, Gerald Ford.

In 1981, President Reagan appointed a man named Arthur Hull Hayes as his FDA chair. Soon after taking the post, Hayes approved aspartame over the objections of an FDA-assembled panel made up of independent scientists. That panel had voted to reject clearence of aspartame, on the grounds that one of Searle's own studies had shown that rats that consumed the chemical showed an increase in brain tumors.

Rummy, of course, would go on to greater things, but not before engineering the sale of Searle and its suddenly quite valuable Nutrasweet division to Monsanto in 1985. Under Monsanto's ownership, aspartame conquered the diet soft-drink market.

But my titillation quickly faded when it took me about five minutes of googling to realize that Tom left a few facts out. First off, the US Government Accountability Office reviewed the FDA's actions in 1987 and found them justified:

In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition's (CFSAN) process for approving aspartame, specifically its: (1) review of the scientific issues raised concerning the aspartame studies; and (2) monitoring of current safety concerns.

GAO found that the: (1) firm that developed aspartame submitted nearly 170 studies supporting its safety; and (2) studies that CFSAN considered crucial for approval met FDA requirements. GAO also found that CFSAN: (1) adequately followed its food additive approval process by reviewing all of the manufacturer's aspartame studies, holding a public board of inquiry to discuss safety issues, and forming an advisory panel; (2) had an outside group of pathologists review the crucial studies; and (3) used the studies to establish a safe level for long-term consumption before approving aspartame for marketing, etc...

Admittedly, asking the government to spot-check the ethics of a different branch, all under the same administration, is a little like asking a school of hammerheads to investigate the ethics of the way Great White Sharks kill seals, but it's an important fact and the summary I linked to above includes some important, hard information worth considering.

Tom also draws attention to a 2006 Ramazzini Institute study (referred to as "recent," which is a favor trick of crusading journalists to sidestep when something is actually five-years-old) showing that aspartame may cause cancer in rats.

Italian researchers recently added to a long-standing and growing body of literature pointing to aspartame's possible role as a carcinogen. Their conclusion, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, was stark: "The results of this mega-experiment indicate that [aspartame] is a multipotential carcinogenic agent, even at a daily dose of 20 mg/kg body weight, much less than the current acceptable daily intake."

Tom backs up everything I've highlighted above with a 2006 New York Times article that discusses it all in much more detail. That's great and all - indeed, it's an excellent article. The only problem is, the aforementioned Italian study was largely discredited in 2008 for a multitude of reasons, including...

• The Ramazzini Institute has not submitted its findings to independent review by other scientists before making its allegations public.
• The laboratory at which the Ramazzini work is conducted does not follow internationally recognised Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) procedures. The rat colony is inbred and is not germ-free.
• The Ramazzini Institute does not reveal the source of its funding.
• The Ramazzini Institute refuses to provide government regulators with full access to its results. For example, only 70 pathology slides were provided to EFSA following the first Ramazzini rat study on aspartame in 2005. This compares with approximately 39,000 slides from carcinogenicity studies on aspartame that were independently reviewed before aspartame was first approved.
• The quality of work at the Ramazzini Institute has been criticised by the United Kingdom Department of Health Committee on Carcinogenicity, by the French food safety agency (L'Agence Francaise de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments), by the European Food Safety Authority, and by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Of course, the Times article doesn't mention this, but that's probably because it would have had to look two years into the future to do that. Tom's blog post was written three years after the fact. No excuse there. (For the record, that link is to a pro-aspartame website, so I'm sure it's probably spun a little, but the case is overwhelming, as you'll see Tom admit shortly)

Finally, Tom refers to a recent (this time, for real - 2011!) study out of New York pointing to diet soda as the possible cause of strokes. This research is so ridiculously vague that I don't even feel I need to comment on it, but I do love the sound of my own writing, so I'll point out that it doesn't account for other foods in the subjects' diets. Generally, people who drink soda tend to eat junkier in general, so...

I'm not the only person to notice the many wobbles in Tom's research, so on February 14, he felt compelled to defend himself on a follow-up post. That was pretty weak too. You can read it yourself, but here's my favorite part.

Were the results invalid, as the FDA claims? Maybe, but if so, where are the long-term, large-scale, independently funded animal studies showing that aspartame is safe?

There are a few of these "maybe" moments in this rebuttal. Tom, that's not good enough. You're a journalist. Make sure your facts are solid before you write and don't leave obvious stuff out. And if you're caught or you're wrong, admit it. I've been wrong on this blog a few times and I've admitted it.

You have the truth on your side. WE have the truth on OUR side. You're right in that the FDA is a pack of douche-bags, as their approval of the Lap-Band for ostensibly healthy-weight people yesterday shows. You're also right that aspartame is a creepy substance that needs more research. But bad science and conspiracy theories on either topic only make us look like a bunch of loonies.

We can do better.