Response to Indonesian government's action to consider banning aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. Statement for Jakarta Post and Jakarta Indy Media, useful to readers in the UK concerned about health, survival, and consumer protection!

Encouragement that the relevant and responsible medical and judicial authorities make this ban permanent, based on sound medical evidence that aspartame causes neurodegenerative illnesses like brain tumors and multiple sclerosis, and even worse illnesses.

What brilliant news, that the Indonesian Drug and Food Monitoring Agency is strongly moving towards considering banning aspartame!

Physicians and legislators could recommend to the Health and Justice Ministers of Indonesia that this ban must be made permanent, because of the long list of neurodegenerative illnesses caused by Aspartame/Methanol/Formaldehyde/Diketopiperazine, all proven brain tumor causal factors.

Aspartame was forced through the United States Food and Drug Administration in 1981 by G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical corporation that owned the patent. Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, made FDA Commissioner in exchange for his cooperation, and Samuel Knox Skinner, the attorney hired by the FDA to prosecute Searle for fraud, who then hired on with Searle's public relations firm at $1000 a day: these also assisted in forcing the approval for Aspartame.

Up till 1995, the FDA kept a continually growing list of consumer complaints about aspartame, and the fact that it caused brain tumors, headaches, memory loss, cardiac arrythmia, sudden death, a total of 92 symptoms, For mysterious reasons, FDA quit compiling this list, but it is still there.

Physicians like H.J. Roberts, Internist, author of Aspartame Disease, An FDA approved Epidemic, and Russell Blaylock, Neurosurgeon, Author of Excitotoxins: the Taste that Kills, and What to do if you have used Aspartame, a regimen for aspartame poisoning victims, Dr. Betty Martini, Founder of Mission Possible International, dedicated to banning aspartame in every nation, and many other activists and even families of those who have died from aspartame poisoning: we are all rejoicing that this is taking place in Indonesia!

We all sincerely hope that your government, whether Health and Justice Ministers or the Indonesian People's Consultative Assembly, many of whom I have emailed on this subject, as well as having sent a digital video disc on the subject of Aspartame's medical damages to President Yudhoyono as well as your United Nations Ambassador: that Indonesia must make this ban on Aspartame PERMANENT.

This will do several things: it will extend the life span in your nation; it will lessen the spike and upsurge in neurodegenerative illnesses and cancers in Indonesia; it will clarify that the job will get done, whether the impetus comes from the top epidemiologists and internal physicians in yours and many other nations, most of which have ignored the huge epidemiological implications of adding a chemical to manufactured food products that is metabolized as methanol and formaldehyde, with proven ghastly and even more unpredictable medical results in hundreds of millions of people, and most important, it will shine like the torch of medical imperative all over South Asia, Africa, and South America, to all of the non-alligned, non-nuclear, and less developed nations of the world, that they must stand up squarely to the ostensible superiority of corporations pushing genocidal chemicals down their throat!

There is sound evidence to warrant such a permanent ban, particularly coming from the Ramazzini Foundation for European Oncology Research, a three year study by Dr. Morando Soffriti, that aspartame, as well as sodium arsenite, and Coca Cola, all cause cancer.

Write to Health Minister Siti Fadila Supari and to Justice Minister Hamid Awaluddin, to ask them to make this ban permanent, and to file punitive and exemplary suits against the aspartame manufacturers and corporate endusers, to recover the costs necessary to treat victims of aspartame poisoning in your nation!

I am author of legislation in the New Mexico Legislature to ban aspartame in our state. State Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino is the sponsor of this legislation, which will be introduced as early as January 17, 2007, in the coming 60 day session, and we expect the usual phalanx of corporate
lobbyists, soothsayers, and liers, saying that aspartame/methanol/formaldehyde/diketopiperazine is "harmless as mother's milk."

I am author of a United Nations Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, which I ask Indonesia to cosponsor in the 2007 United Nations General Assembly. This might be possible, with the Foreign Minister of Tanzania, Asha Rose Migiro, having
just been appointed last week by the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, as Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations.

In short, you can see how a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection might actually work: to bring real truth about the medical effects of such chemicals to member nations, completely free from corporate manipulation and on going perfidy and lies about the obvious medical harm done by their products.

If I can be of further help to Indonesia or any of the other 188 nations in which we find victims of aspartame poisoning, please let me know at this email address below.

Respectfully,

Stephen Fox
 stephen@santafefineart.com


[217 W. Water St.
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 USA
505 983-2002]

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This is a very recent news story from the South African newspaper, The Star:

'Actually, it doesn't taste just like sugar' January 08, 2007 Edition 1

Most of us laugh off grossly misleading advertising claims as a fact of life.

But why should companies merrily get away with mass consumer deception, year after year?

I've got huge admiration for the few consumers who take the time to write to our Advertising Standards Authority to complain that the face cream didn't reduce their wrinkles as promised; the pills didn't make them lose weight; and, in Paul Hammann's case, that the aspartame-containing artificial sweetener didn't taste just like sugar.

Hammann lodged a complaint against Canderel's packaging claims that the product "tastes just like sugar" and had "no after-taste".

In his personal experience, he said, these claims were not true.

Initially Merisant SA (trading as Canderel) submitted documents to support the claims, but later advised the ASA that both claims would be withdrawn "on a global scale" during the course of this year.

The company requested that instead of being given the usual three months to remove existing stock from the shelves, that they be given eight months to comply.

At the December 14 hearing, the ASA Directorate settled on a compromise of five months.

So by the end of May no pack of South Africa's leading brand of sweetener - featuring those familiar claims - should be on sale in this country.

Canderel's SA website is already devoid of the claims, and now states a watereddown: "Canderel is low in calories and delicious to taste." Interestingly, the brand's UK website still carries the original claims - for now.

Last year the UK media website telegraph.co.uk posted the results of a panel's taste test of several sweetener brands.

The verdict on Canderel? "One teaspoon gave a good sweetness to a cup of tea, but it didn't taste like sugar."

Hammann is clearly not alone.