What should be the standards of proof before products are deemed toxic or dangerous?
Your book resurfaces some battles I thought had been fought and resolved, say, for example, Aspartame. A recent Aspartame study should give us all cause for alarm. As you may be aware, the typical animal study takes two years, after which animals in both the experimental and control groups are sacrificed and examined for tumors. SP: By animals you mean mice? Davis: Rodents—rats or mice. SP: How long do they usually live? Davis: Their natural life is three years. But in most studies we sacrifice them at two years. Soffritti and his colleagues in the Ramazzini Foundation in Bologna, Italy exposed thousands of rodents to Aspartame prenatally and throughout their lifetime. He let them live to three years, which is equivalent to humans getting into our 70s, 80s, and 90s. Twice as many exposed animals developed tumors. Yet none of the tumors started to appear until that third year of animal life, corresponding to the last third of human life today. Two hundred million people in the United St
