Evidence That the FDA Does Not Care About You

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"What the F.D.A. is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day."
Dr. Herbert E. Ley, former FDA Commissioner

When the health of the general public conflicts with multi-billion dollar companies, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will almost always side with the companies and completely ignore the safety of the public.

In the 1970's, the drug company, G.D. Searle (later to be owned by Monsanto) was making a mockery of scientific research. See link below. They claimed to be performing pre-approval research for various drugs and the artificial sweetener, aspartame. Aspartame had the capability of becoming a billion dollar industry. After Donald Rumsfeld became the head of G.D. Searle, it did not matter how bad the research was. The FDA was going to approve their products. Here is just one tiny sampling of the G.D. Searle research. In addition to what you can see in that link, G.D. Searle removed tumors from animals, let tissue decay before analysis, hired an "expert" in fetal damage (teratology) who only had experience working on population dynamics of cotton tail rabbits, etc. By the early 1980's, the FDA was determined to ignore all of the scientific fraud and approve aspartame and other products based on this research. Since then, aspartame had more serious adverse reaction reports to the FDA than any other food additive and independent research has shown damaging formaldehyde adducts accumulating in the body upon ingestion of aspartame.
There were two major concerns with the food additive, monosodium glutamate (MSG).
- In the 1970's, independent researchers found that MSG given to animals at doses equivalent to what infants and young children might ingest caused irreversible damage to the hypothalamus. The effects of this damage was not seen in the animals until they reached puberty. This forced the food industry to remove MSG from infant formula. (Although infants and young children could still get enough MSG to cause this damage from other sources such as soups.) Some of the history of what went on at the time can be found in this Science publication. The MSG industry with the help of the FDA was not about to let their product get banned. They flooded research journals with flawed experiments. In some cases, animals were given brain-protecting chemicals. In some cases, animals threw up the test substance. In one case, one image of the wrong area of the brain was used to show "evidence of safety" in one species of animals and then re-cropped and used again to show "evidence of safety" in a different species. The FDA accepts this type of research and touts it as evidence of safety when it involves a billion dollar industry.
- The other area of concern regarding MSG was that many individuals were experiencing acute reactions within 24 hours of ingesting it. When independent double-blind studies showed this to be the case, the MSG industry was not about to let this go unchallenged. They funded and published many studies from 1978 through 1991 purporting to show that no increase in adverse reactions was seen in their double-blind studies. What was not discovered until 1991 was that the MSG industry was hiding aspartame in the drink mixtures given to both the experiment and placebo groups but not disclosing this information in their research publications. Not only had aspartame cause more adverse reactions than any other food additive, but 40% of aspartame is an excitoxin, similar to MSG (something the industry and FDA was aware of). The FDA did nothing about this research other than touting it as evidence of safety.

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