Over at A Western Heart, things are sweet, where John Ray [1] says…
Coming as I do from a big sugar-producing area (Far North Queensland), I always read carefully the little sachets that one gets with one’s coffee in coffee lounges. I make sure that I am putting real sugar in my coffee and not some substitute junk. So I should be in sympathy with the campaign against aspartame, right? Wrong! As far as I can see, the campaign is founded on little more than the usual self-glorifying belief that if something is popular it must be bad.
There is a list here [2] of 13 recent anti-aspartame studies and, unless I have missed something, there is not one study of the type that would be decisive: A double-blind study in humans. There are plenty of in vitro (“test tube”) and in vivo (rats and mice) studies but that’s about it.
And even some of the studies listed there admit that some of the potentially bad byproducts of aspartame metabolism can be broken down rapidly by other food components or metabolites. So showing that rats on a rat diet cannot handle aspartame well tells us nothing about humans. What is needed are studies of humans on a human diet as it seems probable that the human metabolism CAN safely break down aspartame. One has to look at the bottom line, not intermediate processes in isolation.
Since a double blind study in humans should not pose any great difficulty, I think it is the absence of such a study which is most telling.
Therein, I think, lies the point of much of the “research” that we’ve been subject to lately, both on that topic and many others, including “global warming”. When humans don’t know what they’re talking about, they tend to lean towards anecdotal information, as in the global warming scare. And clearly, the question of global climate and our understanding of it is an open one… as it is with so many issues that the left has tied it’s star to, of late.
And John’s first point about it being popular, therefore it must be bad, certainly seems to apply to the global warming myth… our transportation system as such is popular in that everybody uses it. Most people in this country on automobiles. Therefore it must be bad. Or, so goes the non thought.