From the March 2003 Idaho Observer:

Government attack on ephedra cover for aspartame poisoning

by The Idaho Observer

Before you knowingly eat or drink a product sweetened with aspartame, read the article below. If you still aren't convinced of aspartame's lethality, go to the Mission Possible website at www.dorway.com and follow your investigative senses. If you still aren't convinced that aspartame is an FDA-approved poison, then it must be your fate to become sick and eventually succumb to a painful death after suffering from a variety of chronic illnesses. Of course, you may luck out and be spared years of ill-health by suddenly, mercifully dropping dead from aspartame in the prime of your life. Pardon the harsh comments but there is a war going on and the battle is being waged in our bodies. Good soldiers don't eat and drink the enemies' weapons.

When 23-year-old Baltimore Oriole's pitcher, Steve Bechler, died on February 17, 2003 in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida hospital, a bottle of weight loss supplements containing ephedra was found in his locker. Rather than doing a thorough investigation into what this man's dietary habits are, the government immediately began its attack on ephedra as contributing to this young man's sudden collapse and death.

Without any evidence that ephedra alone could cause death, tough new labeling laws for dietary supplements containing ephedra were proposed by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on February 28 to warn consumers that it could cause heart attack, stroke or death.

In a March 1, 2003 New York Times article it states that a Florida medical examiner claimed that the dietary supplement containing ephedra might have contributed to Bechler's death. When Dr. Roberts spoke to Broward county medical examiner Dr. Joshua Perper, he was told the cause of death was hyperthermia which caused multiple organ failure. Bechler's temperature had reached a high of 108 degrees. When Dr. Perper was asked how many diet drinks Bechler drank a day, he returned a blank stare indicating he was unaware of the fact that aspartame containing diet and sports drinks could have caused this man's untimely death.

The FDA's attack on ephedra appeared to ominously coincide with the blatant attempt by New York Times reporter Robert Pear to connect Bechler's death with a weight loss supplement containing ephedrine found in his locker. What Pear and the FDA refuse to look at is the dietary habits of the increasing number of athletes who are dying suddenly.

Director of Mission Possible, Betty Martini, has spent the last ten years of her life warning the world about the dangers of aspartame. People regularly email her from her excellent comprehensive website www.dorway.com. It is on this website that many people find the documentation for their ill health being caused by their consumption of aspartame containing products. Following is one such query from a young female athlete:

Hi, ...I am a 26-year-old female athlete. In order to keep in shape and maximize my training, I have been taking a lot of sport supplements, protein powders and consuming various other foods containing a high level of aspartame.

I would estimate that I consume approximately 860 mg. of aspartame each day. Over the past year I have stopped menstruating completely. I am at a healthy weight of 150 lbs and maintain a healthy percentage of body fat. Other symptoms include fatigue, weight gain, depression, mood swings, personality changes and amenorrhea.

Could Aspartame be responsible for me losing my period and experiencing the other related symptoms?  Please help me.

Due to several recent articles about sudden death and the numerous reports of athletes dropping dead who probably are using diet drinks, proteins drinks, etc. laced with aspartame, Dr. Bowen has written an in-depth report on aspartame and sudden death.

The full text of this report is on our website at www.dorway.com. We hope everyone can help by sending this report to cardiologists, athletic organizations, neurologists, the media and mass mailing lists to get this information out to the general public.

Because of the length of this report, following is an excerpted version that deals only with aspartame and sudden death, and not the politics and influence that has caused what may be one of the largest plagues in world history, Aspartame Disease.  ~ Betty Martini, Founder, Mission Possible International

Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in those Exposed to Aspartame

by James Bowen, M.D.

The horrendous toxicity of aspartame has been well documented ever since its inception.

Sudden deaths logically arise from several of its many toxicities. For example, Christina Onassis, Patty Crane, and Carol Hamm are amongst those that I know of who were using aspartame and were addicted to it, and visibly deteriorating under its influence when they suddenly, and unexpectedly, died therefrom.

Patty Crane was found dead amongst a litter of diet Pepsi cans. Her mother, Betty Hayland, was exposing Patty's “Nutra Death” on TV. She came to me to learn the biochemical basis of its deadliness. After learning some of the biochemistry, she asked, “Dr Bowen, how could such a poisonous chemical ever be on the market?”

I answered “Betty! This is organized crime in our government.”

She became furious with me! “That I should suggest there is organized crime in the U.S. government! What a nut!”

A few days later they called and threatened her life. A couple days later two men tried to drag her into a car. She was able to make her escape by breaking free and running. A couple days later her husband Dave, who now has no question that organized crime runs our government, came home and found her shot dead in a puddle of blood on the floor.

Carol Hamm was a close friend, but not my patient so medical confidentiality does not prevent my discussing her tragedy. We played cards together a couple of times per week and she constantly had diet drinks in her hands while she played. She, over a short period of a few weeks use, visibly deteriorated physically right in front of my eyes, and mentally. Her card playing deteriorated as well.

She would defiantly look me right in the eye as she drank diet to let me know that she didn't care that I had warned her of what I knew about aspartame. She was going to satisfy her addiction, by damn! Come what may! What came was that, one night she didn't show for cards, and her daughter Debby called the police. When we arrived at her house she was lying dead in bed with bloody fluid running out of her mouth. In all three cases the autopsy report revealed only “unexplained pulmonary edema.”

This is the difference between death from aspartame metabolism and regular alcoholism: You can't smell it on the breath, and medical politics forbids attributing anything evil to “Nutra Sweet.”

Jim Krossik was an employee at Searle's first aspartame plant in Phoenix. He developed neural toxicity from breathing the aspartame dust in the air in the plant and passed out on the plant floor. When he recovered and returned to work, he found that all employees were required to wear a facemask lest they breathe the deadly Nutra Sweet dust.

He complied, but absorbed enough through his skin that he passed out on the floor dead. The autopsy report revealed a “severe alcoholic cardiomyopathy” as its only finding. Jim used no alcoholic beverages.

I have published extensively on www.dorway.com. My articles such as “Sperm Warfare,” “Aspartame and methanol revisited,” etc., enlarge upon the unique methanol toxicity from aspartame. It metabolizes in a toxic axis of aspartame to methanol, to formaldehyde, to formic acid, to carbon monoxide. Aspartame, to a striking degree, carries toxic heavy metals into the body, as well as generating toxic super-oxide free radicals in the metabolic channels that are poisoned by it. A good overview of the aspartame problem is my book “Billions of Victims” which is available as free advice at many educational/informational sites on the net. Since it educates about Chemical Hypersensitivity, (CHz), it is essential reading for a full understanding of the issue of sudden deaths from aspartame.

The heart muscle is very sensitive to alcohol poisonings. Such alcoholic cardiomyopathies frequently terminate in sudden death. The Aspartame molecule is an alcohol poison about 20,000 times as toxic a poison as ethanol, (regular old sipping or beverage alcohol) on a per weight basis. Moreover, the myocardium (heart muscle) never gets to rest except between heart beats, so the methanol from Aspartame that becomes more or progressively toxic upon metabolism is especially damaging to muscles. The myocardium is especially rich in mitochondria to serve this metabolic need. The mitochondria and their DNA (Mt DNA) are especially subject to these damages, and Mt DNA lacks the repair mechanisms of nuclear DNA, so damage to it is cumulative, even being passed onto the fetus by the mother. The Cardiac Conduction System is a specialized kind of tissue that is a hybrid of neuronal and muscle tissues, which is even richer in mitochondria, and it never gets to rest. It is the metabolic clock that generates and effectively coordinates heartbeats, heart rhythms and contractions. Many various malfunctions of it precipitate sudden death. The heart's extreme mitochondrial concentration, and its dependence upon mitochondrial metabolism for its unresting labors make it a site intensely generative of aspartame's poisonous byproducts and extremely subject to their resultant chemical, immune, mitochondrial and CHz damages.

When the methanol from aspartame is metabolized, it has an obligatory first-step metabolism to formaldehyde, the strongest organic base. This is a polymerizing agent which cross links sites on DNA so it can't reproduce or function to transmit genetic information nor essential metabolic instructions.

The next step in Aspartame's metabolism is to formic acid which is a chromosome-shattering agent (along with cyanide and fluoride, it is called a “blister poison” because it is so damaging that it leaves blisters of dead tissue behind).

Formate is also recognized as fire ant poison. The whole, entire toxic axes are severe sensitizing agents. A fire ant can, because of the sensitivity it engenders, kill a human being that outweighs it billions of times. Thus, the myocardium and conduction system are rendered highly subject to attack both from the direct actions of the aspartame poisons and their metabolic derangements along with the free radicals they generate via the impaired metabolic competence and are highly susceptible to other toxics and “sick environments” via CHz, (Chemical Hypersensitivity).

Damaged Mt DNA, its resultant mitochondrial dysfunction along with dysfunctions by and from immune and hypersensitivity reactions (CHz) are all associated with sudden deaths. Cardiomyopathies from damaged Mt DNA are also well known to be passed to the child from the mother.

Many other Mt DNA diseases are inherited from mothers who have damaged Mt DNA. Because the Mt DNA is not in the nucleus but rather is located in the mitochondria of the cell, its transmission in the case of a given ovum is haphazard and random, so that infants from such mothers usually display varied, random, and often dissimilar disease patterns. One may be diabetic, another may have a cardiomyopathy, another pervasive developmental disorders such as autism, another, metabolically generated diseases like steato-hepatitis, hypotonic obesity, etc.(see my article on www.dorway.com “Steato Hepatitis”.)

Another related area is the damage done to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Repeated poisonous assaults, such as CHz, cause the activation of the anti-shock mechanisms of the adrenal glands leading to either adrenal fatigue or a chronic turned-on status, both being conducive to sudden death, especially in response to toxic or other shock inducing states such as the CHz response.

The hypothalamus, along with many other brain structures is severely damaged by the dicarboxylic amino acid neuroexcitoxin component of the aspartame poisoning. This alone can cause adrenal insufficiency and resultant sudden death. The phenylalanine isolate poisoning from aspartame also leads to serotonin and dopamine depletion in some areas of the brain, and elevation of serotonin in others, leading to neuro-endocrine disruptions contributing to all of the above, as well as depression and schizophrenic episodes often leading to aspartame-related suicides.

Aspartame is a potent epileptogenic agent, causing seizures directly from its toxic effect, as well as when in withdrawal from same, along with seizures induced by the CHz when the patient is exposed to even minute amounts of sensitizing agents such as chemical contaminants. Some of these contaminants are sulfites from pulp mills (or the universally practiced new world order environmental abuse of illegally burning high sulfur coal in power plants), pollens, fungal blooms, and other “sick” environments, and food chemicals. Such seizures can result in sudden death, especially if the subject is alone and suffering from the other aforementioned Aspartame risk factors.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution recently published an article about sudden death referring to Science magazine. It reported that 450,000 people drop dead each year and discussed consumers with an irregular heart rhythm. Aspartame notoriously triggers an irregular heart rhythm. Frankly, this is probably an understatement as to deaths. On Dec 16, 2001, the Sunday Telegraph in the UK wrote an article on sudden death and epilepsy. Aspartame is also a seizure triggering drug as proven on a pivotal study that approved it, a 52 week oral toxicity study where seven infant monkeys were fed the toxin. Five had grand mal seizures and one died. The FDA report of 92 symptoms lists four types of seizures triggered by this neurotoxin. To make matters worse, aspartame interacts with anti-seizure medication such as Dilantin and similar drugs.

Additional passages from the article above said “...many people, including doctors, have little idea that a disturbing number of patients, many of them young and in good health, die unexpectedly, often in their sleep.” Further it states that “The unpredictable death syndrome has become known as Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy or “Sudep.” In 1996, there were 969 epilepsy related deaths, twice as many as from sudden infant or 'cot' syndrome, which is the subject of widespread inquiry.”

Dr. James Bowen wrote at the time, “Sudden death during seizures is almost always due to cardiac standstill due to cardiac arrhythmias. There are several ways that this is due to aspartame damage. Aspartame and methyl alcohol poisoning are noted for damaging myocardium and the specialized form of myocardium called the cardiac conduction system. This kind of damage leads to susceptibility to arrhythmias. The aspartame and methyl alcohol poisoning cause immense damage to the mitochondria and to Mt DNA which perpetuates the mitochondria damage. The myocardium and cardiac conduction system never get to rest. They are constantly at work pumping blood, therefore they are very highly concentrated in mitochondria to accommodate the metabolic needs of this tremendous work load. So mitochondrial damage is more highly reflected in the heart. Damaged mitochondria produce increased amounts of free radicals and other abnormal metabolites that produce arrhythmias.”

Dr. Bowen continues about the unusual demands on the cardio-respiratory system and notes that seizures due to NutraSweet occur more frequently and in spite of otherwise adequate anti-seizure medication.

Furthermore, aspartame interacts with pharmaceutical drugs and anti-seizure medication creating yet another unknown toxic byproduct. He says it should be no surprise then that people are dropping dead from this aspect of aspartame toxicity.

On www.dorway.com you will see two reports about aspartame and sudden death:

Aspartame and cardiac and chest problems by H. J. Roberts, M.D.

Aspartame, MSG and Other Excitotoxins and the Hypothalamus by neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, M.D.

Both have written books that discuss sudden death syndrome:

Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic by H. J. Roberts, M.D., www.aspartameispoison.com or www.sunsentpress.com or 800-814-9800.

Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills by neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, M.D., www.amazon.com

Mission Possible is currently seeking case histories for class action on aspartame-triggered seizures, brain tumors, eye deterioration and blindness. For more information, contact:

Mission Possible International, 9270 River Club Parkway, Duluth, Georgia 30097, 770-242-2599 www.dorway.com

Some common products that contain aspartame are Gatorade, all diet soft drinks, sugar-free gum, Celestial Seasonings herbal teas (under natural flavorings -- thanks to the FDA).