THE BITTER TRUTH ABOUT REGULATION
OF SUGAR SUBSTITUTES
Elissa Meininger
NewsWithViews.com
Those of us who champion pure,
unadulterated natural food, natural medicinal products, natural nutritional
supplements, products manufactured in a sanitary fashion, and accurate
information (pro and con) available about how to use these products to restore
and/or maximize our health, belong to what is known as the "health freedom
movement". This movement started at the beginning of the 20th Century in
reaction to a series of laws that were put into place to create an allopathic
monopoly bound and determined to suppress all natural medical and health
choices in favor of chemical, surgical, and high tech methods of addressing all
manner of human conditions.
One of the first great leaders that rose
to the challenge in our movement was none other than Harvey W. Wiley, MD, Chief
Chemist in the Bureau of Chemistry at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 29
years. Before he took his job at the USDA, Wiley had made a name for himself in
his tireless efforts back home in Indiana as the watchdog at the State Board of
Health analyzing the sugars and syrups sold in the state to make sure they were
free of adulterations such as glucose, which he believed damaged the quality of
natural sweeteners such as honey.
Once established in his post at the USDA,
Wiley successfully helped Congress in answering their questions about the
safety of food chemical preservatives. Then, in 1902, Wiley was granted $5,000
to actually study the health effects in humans when chemical preservatives,
food coloring and other substances were put into foods. A true champion of the
people's interest, Wiley enlisted the services of young, healthy volunteers,
mostly employees of the Department of Agriculture. They agreed to follow a
strict regime of natural foods, provided by the department, so that over a
period of a month, a particular additive could be added to the food for testing.
The idea was that if healthy young adult men had even the slightest adverse
reactions, then unhealthy people, the young and the elderly would be even more
vulnerable.
The criteria for these
human tests was meticulous. Feces and urine were measured daily, and
various other measurements were made along with noting if any physical or
behavioral changes occurred such as fatigue, headaches, lack of appetite,
indigestion and the like, at which time the subject would be put back on a pure
diet.
The participants in the tests were named
"the Poison Squad" and became the subject of national news stories as
the public became more and more interested in how adulterations in food might
affect their health. During this same period of time, interest in finally
passing a pure food law came to fruition thanks to the vigorous work of Wiley,
who wanted to see that the federal government had the authority to force
removal of all manner of chemical preservatives and other additives from
America's food supply.
Called The Pure
Food and Drug Act of 1906, (please note the emphasis on the word
"pure") this new law gave Wiley the authority he sought to start
cleaning up the food supply. His Poison Squad studies, some of which had been
published by the government printing office, had shown that many health
problems were caused by the presence of an array of chemical additives in food.
As the studies progressed, hearings were
held on each additive and disgruntled manufactures saw the handwriting on the
wall as certain additives proved to be problematic to health. Each sought an
exemption for their particular additives and in one rather amusing case, a
witness from
One such additive on the ropes was the
artificial sweetener, saccharin and herein lies the
incredible tale of how the Pure Food and Drug Act was sidetracked
from its original purpose by none other than the great "populist"
president, Teddy Roosevelt. As the story goes, some years earlier, two
chemists, Constantine Fahlberg and Ira Remsen, had
accidentally discovered saccharin during other chemical research. Fahlberg later patented the substance, then, later still,
John Queeny founded a company he named after his
wife's family, Monsanto, to manufacture the product.
It was well known that Wiley was opposed
to allowing saccharin to remain in the food supply. Going over Wiley's head,
immediately after the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, future Vice President
of the United States, James S. Sherman, then of the Sherman Brothers food
manufacturing firm, met with President Roosevelt to discuss the fact that his
firm had saved $4,000 the previous year using saccharin, rather than sugar in
the company's canned corn.
Wiley, who was present at the meeting,
explained to
The following day, Roosevelt undermined
Wiley and appointed Ira Remsen (who discovered saccharin), President of Johns
Hopkins University, to head up a Referee Board later to be known as the Remsen
Board to protect the interests of the chemical industry. The Remsen board
became very successful in blocking any authority Wiley had to remove
adulterants from the food supply. Then, over the next several years, bit by
bit, regardless of the law, the authority to police chemicals in food, was transferred out of the Bureau of Chemistry.
Finally, thoroughly disgusted, Wiley quit.
His departure was noted by the Rocky Mountain News, under the caption,
"The Borgias of Business."
"…For twenty years
at least, the food poisoners of the country have
waged warfare on Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, and since the passage of the Pure Food
Act in 1906 they have trebled efforts to have him discharged. These Borgias of business have won, for the circumstances
attending Dr. Wiley's recent resignation make it, in
practical effect, a dismissal…"
Fortunately, Wiley's saga didn't end
there. While giving up on any hope of honest oversight of food from government
agencies, in the true never-say-die tradition of real health freedom fighters,
Wiley set up the Good Housekeeping Bureau of Foods, Sanitation and Health,
where voluntary evaluations of consumer products were to be conducted. Even
today their findings are published in Good Housekeeping magazine. In addition,
in 1929, Wiley wrote a detailed account of the destruction of the purpose of
the Pure Food and Drug Act in a book he entitled, THE HISTORY OF A CRIME
AGAINST THE FOOD LAW - The Amazing Story of the National Food and Drugs Law
Intended to Protect the Health of the People Perverted to Protect Adulteration
of Food and Drugs.
Some years later the modern FDA was
created to oversee regulation of all foods and drugs and by 1970, a
fresh-out-of-law-school lawyer by the name of James S. Turner became the next
gladiator in the fight in an attempt to protect the public from unsafe food
additives. Turner, one of Ralph Nader's original
"Nader's Raiders", a cadre of young lawyers
out to make government work right, eventually published a book on the failings
of the FDA called, "The Chemical Feast: the Nader
Report on the Food and Drug Administration".
A short time later, Turner, largely at his
own expense, made every effort to keep aspartame off the market. And what a
fight it was.
As Turner described it, G.D. Searle, a
drug company whose scientists had discovered aspartame quite by accident and a
company with little experience in food regulation, made the motions of complying
with the law, but screwed up royally. Early tests showed aspartame produced
microscopic holes and tumors in the brains of experimental mice and epileptic
seizures in monkeys. Animal tests also showed that aspartame was converted to
dangerous substances such as formaldehyde.
Despite all this information, in 1974, the
FDA approved aspartame as a dry-foods additive. But in an unusual action, the
FDA made public the data supporting its decision, which prompted renowned brain
researcher John Olney of
The U.S. Attorney for
Meanwhile the federal investigations
ground on. In October of 1980, the Board of Inquiry appointed by the FDA,
blocked aspartame from being marketed until the tumor studies at issue could be
explained. Only the Commissioner of the FDA could overrule this decision.
In November 1980, Ronald Reagan was
elected President and Donald Rumsfeld (former
congressman from
In January of 1981, Rumsfeld
told a sales meeting that he would call in his chips to see that aspartame
would be approved by the end of the year. And the rest is history. The day
after Reagan was sworn in, he issued an executive
order to suspend the power of the current FDA Commissioner to act on any
matter. The next month Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes became Commissioner. By July,
Hayes, ignoring FDA advisors, made his first major decision in office and
approved the use of aspartame for dry foods.
Ironically, in November of 1983, Dr.
Hayes' last official decision was to approve aspartame for soft drinks. That
same month, under fire for accepting corporate gifts, he left the agency and
was welcomed with open arms by Searle's public relations firm as senior medical
advisor.
A short time after that, Monsanto, still
manufacturing saccharin, bought Searle and Rumsfeld,
still president of Searle, received a $12 million bonus.
However, the problems with aspartame
didn't stop. By 1995, thousands of reports had been filed detailing serious
problems, which Searle's scientists and the FDA's deputy commissioner said
posed no problem. Two years later, this same FDA official became vice president
of clinical research for Searle, and aspartame remains on the market to this
day.
A documentary called "Sweet Misery"
documents this entire affair and is available to the public for sale.
During much of the time the aspartame
scandal was in high gear, a little known natural sweetener, stevia,
was making its way into American markets. According to the American Herbal
Products Association in an affirmation petition submitted to the FDA in 1992,
"Stevia leaf is a natural product that has been
used for at least 400 years as a food product, principally as a sweetener or
other flavoring agent. None of this common usage in foods has indicated any
evidence of safety problem. There are no reports of any government
agency in any of the above countries indicating any public health concern whatsoever
in connection with the use of stevia in foods."
The Thomas J. Lipton Company, in a
petition to the FDA, cited over 120 articles about stevia
written before 1958 and over 900 articles as of 1995. The Ambassador to
Yet, despite glowing reports on stevia, products have been confiscated from stevia manufacturers; thousands of stevia
cookbooks have been burned by order of the FDA; and the industry is unable to
have stevia approved as a safe food additive. In the
convoluted logic of FDA officials only
In FDA parlance, "If Stevia is used in a dietary supplement for a technical
effect, such as use as a sweetener or flavoring agent, and is labeled as such, it is considered an UNSAFE FOOD ADDITIVE."
Millions of Americans in the health
freedom movement are grateful we can get our hands on stevia,
and use it as a sweetener. However, the stevia story
reinforces our skepticism of the longtime behavior of FDA officials in their
job to protect the public from unsafe food. Based on decades of this same
anti-natural products regulatory doublespeak and harsh enforcement activity, we
look at every bill introduced in Congress to ratchet up the FDA's authority to
"regulate" nutritional supplements (read remove from the market) as
yet another potential threat to our health.
Our question to every American, who upon
learning of 100 years of the sorry politics instead of honest regulation of
sugar substitutes is this, "Would you buy a used car from this
agency?"
If your answer is "no", we urge
you to contact your U.S. Representative immediately, and ask him or her to
reject H.R. 3156 "Dietary Supplement Access and Awareness Act". This
bill is loaded with draconian regulatory doublespeak all geared to grant
authority for government officials to remove supplements from the market, at
whim, without showing any evidence of harm. Current law (the Dietary Supplement
Health and Education Act of 1994) requires the FDA to have REAL evidence of
harm before removing dietary supplement products from the market.
Resources:
1, Sweet
Misery - Documentary
2, Aspartame Information Site
3, Stevia
Background
4, Aspartame/NutraSweet Fiasco
by James S. Turner
5, THE HISTORY OF A CRIME AGAINST THE FOOD LAW – The
Amazing Story of the National Food and Drugs Law Intended to Protect the Health
of the People Perverted to Protect Adulteration of Food and Drugs.
ACT FOR HEALTH FREEDOM NOW:
Go to www.friendsoffreedominternational.org
and click on your elected representatives and tell them to Say NO to CAFTA and Don't
Touch DSHEA in Any Way! Purchase "Death by Modern
Medicine" and view and purchase the new movie on Codex and Free Trade
called "We Become Silent" by Kevin Miller. Proceeds from the sale of
these products are crucial to help fund our health freedom action.
© 2005
Carolyn Dean - All Rights Reserved
Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor,
naturopathic doctor, herbalist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, as well as a
powerful health activist fighting for health freedom as president of Friends of
Freedom International. Dr. Dean is the author of over a dozen health books, the
latest of which is "Death By Modern
Medicine".
Elissa Meininger, is Vice
President of Friends of Freedom International and co-founder of the Health Freedom
Action Network, a grassroots citizens' political action group. She is also a
health freedom political analyst and can be heard on the natural health radio
show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station WKY (SuperTalk AM 930) in
Website: www.deathbymodernmedicine.com
Website: www.carolyndean.com
E-Mail: holeopharm@pol.net