please tell me why you think their is no link here is something taken from wikipedia that supports what i believe
National Cancer Institute
In 2006, the US National Cancer Institute concluded in a study of over 470,000 men and women aged 50 to 69 that there was no statistically significant link between aspartame consumption and leukemias, lymphomas or brain tumors.[66] The study compared how much of 4 types of aspartame-sweetened beverages the subjects said they had drunk in 1995 or 1996 to how likely they were to have developed these cancers during the following five years.[67] This conclusion was questioned in letters to the editors[68][69] which pointed out that the study did not consider non-beverage consumption of aspartame, did not estimate the subjects' long-term use of aspartame, and did not include any subjects who had consumed aspartame since childhood (as the subjects were all over 49 and aspartame beverages had only been on the market for 15 years). The letters concluded that the study design was inappropriate to test the stated hypothesis.
and here is the link i got it from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
please read the whole thing and do more research before you jump on what i believe
I am not sure I see a logical argument here.
You have no proof backing up what you state, no actual reason to believe what you apparently really want to believe, and instead you show is a link that shows that there have been studies to even contradict your claims, but that they didn't measure all possible parameters, so they they might be inconclusive.
Now first of all, letters to the editor are a good tool for continued point-counterpoint between scientists, but the mere fact that another scientist points out strengths and weaknesses of a study (especially studies that look for correlations and statistics, or lack of correlation as in this case)
doesn't automatically mean the opposite claim must be true. The studies in question are all epidemiological to begin with, i.e., you look at statistics after the fact and try to draw some correlations. Those are always just more of a "let's look if there';s something there" type of study that could never fully prove or disprove conclusively anything anyways, but it makes a valid point especially in the absence of an effect.
What would be conclusive
evidence for a cancer-causing hypothesis
would be a specific, repeatable, dose-dependent effect with a known mechanism. There are plenty of things like that (for example stuff like
Benzopyrene ) which WILL always cause cancer at high enough doses in the lab, basically -every time-, and have a very specific and clear mechanism for actually doing so, like binding directly to DNA and introducing mutation errors at each binding site every time cells divide and attempt to copy DNA.
That's of course absolutely
not the case for Aspartame. It doesn't have any known chemical reason why it should ever cause cancer, and you certainly can't give it to any animal in any way to cause 100% cancer formation like you could for other real well-known carcinogens.
The only study that suggested there could be a problem really is extremely weak scientifically. If you are not familiar with analyzing science you can see the explanation of why it's very poor science and inconclusive in the discussion of wiki, but if you can analyze the paper yourself look at the actual
paper and you can see why it is at best inconclusive even ignoring the other problems like the fact that nobody has been able to replicate it (despite the fact that being able to prove such a claim would obviously make any lab or researcher famous). The survival curves of figure 1 are statistically the same for any dose including no dose at all, and are all over the place in terms of increasing dose not having increased effect.
You can see again the same problem in table2 and again look at the % of rats that had tumors, their data has again no trend, from their data you are actually LESS likely to have tumors if you eat aspartame at 3 of the 6 concentrations of aspartame than with no aspartame at all (so you would have as much/little right to say that aspartame prevents cancer as you would to say that it causes it, i.e., it's inconclusive), and again they are just random values and not dose dependent (btw, those rats are genetically predisposed to get tumors and cancer spontaneously at high rates, that's why the 35% of rats with tumors even without doing anything that causes cancer. If you used real rats from the wild you would be lucky to get even 1%).
To put it in
simpler terms, let me give you an
analogy to show you the disconnect in logic in your argument, with an analogy to something you might be less likely to just believe for no reason:
1) person B claims "Parkour or running in general causes cancer in small animals'
2) There is no evidence that running causes cancer, and no known reason or mechanism of why it should, but studies that actually show running -doesn't- cause cancer don't consider all the possible running situations in humans and can't completely disprove it... (after all a lot of people who got cancer did run at least once in their life...)
3) Therefore, running must cause cancer!
Hopefully you can see why point 3 doesn't follow from points 1 and 2.
And the conclusion you can draw from the wiki page on
"aspartame controversy" is that there is no scientific reason to believe that aspartame has any negative health consequences, especially not cancer.
In terms of "people wanting to hide the truth" and similar arguments based on conspiracy or presumed ulterior motives of people, you should keep in mind that every side of a scientific question can have people that want you to believe one side regardless of the truth. The honey and sugar corporations have their own significant economic interests to protect just as much as the nutrasweet/aspartame or splenda producers do. That's why it's even more important that you don't just believe any claim that has no real basis in science and reality and avoid using these other considerations to draw conclusions (e.g., phrases like "what bigPharmaX or AppealToRebellionTargetY doesn't want you to know and therefore must be true" should be red flags that you need to really look carefully for evidence and science make sure they were really correctly interpreted) .... .
