Fellini's #9 hosts pre-opening for Martin Phillips' "Jazz Seen: Celebrating Jazz through Photography"

Most of these comments seem the irrational musings perhaps by a believer of conspiracy theories. But most assuredly these comments have come from someone with no competence whatsoever on the issues of drug pharmacology, chemical toxicology and their associated safety. There is no absolute safety from anything; all risk is relative, be it from drugs or walking across a highway. Consequently "swim in lakes, not chlorinated pools" ignores the entire bacterial, viral, and parasitic infection issue, which kill far more people yearly than the wildest dreams about pool chlorine exposures. While pure bisphenol A (BPA) can be harmful to test animals if injected or provided directly on tissues (the only way any harm can be demonstrated), the trace amounts of bisphenol A from plastic bottles is ingested orally (the only real route of exposure). This route of exposure and its vanishingly small doses constitute no risk whatsoever, because at these doses it is totally conjugated to a glucuronide that has no biological activity and which is excreted in urine without any effect. There has never been any ill effort from this substance even in babies. This same scenario has long been demonstrated for the simplest phenol carbolic acid, which has numerous medical applications.

Lastly let’s deal with your false comments about aspartame. Aspartame is perfectly safe used as directed in healthy people (see: http://www.officialscienceaspartame.com/?gclid=CJSYo_bnsZcCFQ8QagodL1nKjw). In 2008 I have shown that all scientific papers, including the early FDA stuff, even suggesting any safety issue from aspartame have either been designed and conduced so badly that they give false positive results or they reached unjustified conclusions, because they failed to complete their analysis. Most errant studies induced in their animals a folate (vitamin) deficiency that led to uncontrolled tumor development in rats. But folate deficiency is responsible for dozens upon dozens of cancers in people, particularly breast cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma. Folate deficiency is abundant in the population, particularly in women and this not aspartame underlies much human cancer.

I could go on and on disproving all this non-sense, but fortunately ignorance is easy to demonstrate with less than 500 words.

John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)
(FYI, I have absolutely no financial or biasing connection for any of my comments including the BPA, aspartame, the soft drink or their related industries. However, I am just tired of extremists, who have no understanding of the sciences of pharmacology and toxicology, trying to pass judgment and create widely believed but false hearsay on something about which they know nothing.)

Hi:

Thanks for asking. Russell Blaylock and the other aspartame conspiracy theorists are NOT credible on this subject. Blaylock is perhaps even a good neurosurgeon. But he is elderly and has questionable experience in issues of pharmacology and toxicology. Realize that most MD's (and there are many exceptions) are trained as surgeons and/or clinicians to deal with patients and patient's specific medical problems. Most have had a course in one or both subjects once upon a time, but most, especially older MDs are simply inadequately trained in matters of chemical and drug safety.

More to the point, most antiaspartame MD's don't seem to have any understanding whatsoever of the vital role of the folate vitamin system in metabolizing methanol from all sources, be it from aspartame, from fruit juices, or from many other natural sources. It is like they never even heard of this vitamin. They don't seem to realize the widespread deficiency of folate especially in women and its continuing consequences, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/117/4/1418 . Is that a surprise? No. Most MD's had and still have little nutrition training. Moreover, most of their antiaspartame arguments are from the 1970's-1980's (when folate deficiency was widespread and before the first grain product fortification in 1998) and at a time when it was unrealized even by FDA that animal studies were badly designed. These same experimental design and conduct errors (mentioned before) are abundant even today, because it has not yet become clear that special experimental designs requiring supplemental folate are required. Antiaspartame MDs simply ignore vital facts like those mentioned above and others that are well-established-- see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1997785?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSyst... .

John E. Garst, Ph.D. (Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Nutrition)