Some important history that might cast an unusual light on this. In the 70s GD Searle company had a patent on a sweetener called saccrine. It was in everything like Tab and other things. Then their patent ran out. Suddenly other people could produce this as an extremely inexpensive sweetener. In fact today it's the pink stuff and it's dirt cheap. Well what was GD Searle to do when their main product that they have made so much money from suddenly was free for everybody else to make and they could undercut their price? Well what GD Searle did was they took a substance called aspartame which they had accidentally discovered in a laboratory that tasted sweet and they decided to try to get it approved for human consumption. But at that time the FDA was actually a responsible organization and they wouldn't approve it because of its negative effects which are very numerous and outlined other places. What were they to do? Well it turns out they were an even number of FDA commissioners in charge of this kind of thing and when Ronald Reagan became president what he did after intensive lobbying by the GD Searle lawyer was to approve the addition of one more person on the FDA board. and guess what? With the fourth vote out of seven aspartame was approved! But still there was this problem with saccharin which was their former product that now was off patent that was undercutting their new product that they wanted to put in every non sugar sweetened thing out there. So what did they do? Well they commissioned a study that stuffed mice full of saccharine and another ingredient and this is key another ingredient and they showed that if you did that these rats could get bladder cancer. And then they got the FDA to put a warning notice on every saccharin packet that saccharin had been shown to cause cancer and this virtually eliminated saccharine as competition to aspartame. Now yours later the saccharine producers who are still selling sacchrine and like the product discovered that the study that said saccharin was cancer causing actually wasn't legitimate because it had another ingredient and that was what was actually causing the cancer in the mice. And it had been sort of odd because the one thing about sacchrine that's interesting is it just goes in your body and out of your body without being metabolized in any way. so it's pretty hard for something to cause cancer or be have a lot of unknown effects if your body doesn't even react to it. So after much time they got the false cancer warnings on saccharin removed which is why when you go by a little packet of the pink stuff now you no longer see a cancer warning on it. But the damage was done and if you ask a bunch of people today they will tell you saccharine causes cancer because they just remember the initial information that was false. So when I see suddenly the aspartame may cause cancer I think that the company has the patent on aspartame must have had that patent run out and they must have some other sugar substitute that they want to start putting into sodas and things and so they need to get people off of aspartame. Oh and by the way you want to know who the lawyer was for the GD circle company Who convinced the Reagan administration to add another person to get the FDA to approve aspartame for human consumption? It was Donald Rumsfeld. Yes the Donald runs felt who was Secretary of defense under the Bush administration