A study by a team of Italian scientists reportedly concludes that there is a link between the sweetner aspartame, which is sold under the brand NutraSweet, and cancer. According to a report in the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, the study found that aparstame is “particularly potent when animals are exposed in utero and during development. The rats were exposed to the sweetener at levels above and below the recommended daily maximums for people.”

Results of the study were published this month in Environmental Health Perspectives, a U.S. government sponsored, peer-reviewed journal.

Studies linking aspartame and cancer are not new. In fact, a connection was detected in testing soon after the chemical additive was discovered by a chemist working for G.D. Searle & Company, in 1965. As a result of the early studies, the FDA refused to approve aspartame as a food additive throughout the 1970s.

That changed in 1981 when Ronald Reagan won the White House and his Republican appointees took control of the FDA:

The head of the FDA, Jere E. Goyan, who had not approved legalization of aspartame, due to the brain cancer in rats issue, was fired on the first day Ronald Reagan was president… Reagan hired Arthur Hayes MD [a former defense contractor], who legalized aspartame a year later.

According to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

[Aspartame] was approved in the early 1980s after intense lobbying efforts by Donald Rumsfeld when he worked as CEO for the pharmaceutical company GD Searle. Rumsfeld is said to have engineered the firing of [Jere Goyan] the FDA commissioner who had held up aspartame’s release following studies showing possible links to brain cancer.

This source says Hayes manipulated FDA findings on the additive:

The new commissioner of the FDA, a Reagan Rumsfeld appointee named Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr. [sic], named a five-person Scientific Committee to review the earlier findings. When the vote went 3-2 against approval of aspartame, Hayes did what any fair-minded citizen might do, and appointed a sixth committee member. The committee voted 3-3, leaving Hull to cast the deciding vote, approving aspartame for use in dry products. Aspartame was then approved for use in soft drinks in 1983.

Hayes was later rewarded for approving the drug with a job at Searle:

In November 1983 Hayes was under fire for accepting corporate gifts. He quit [and was appointed dean of the New York Medical College and then in 1986] joined Searle’s public-relations firm as senior medical advisor.

Before it was over Rumsfeld also took a bonus for his role in aspartame’s approval:

Searle lawyer Robert B. Shapiro, renamed aspartame NutraSweet. Monsanto purchased Searle. Rumsfeld received a $12 million bonus. Shapiro later became Monsanto president.

The fact that Donald Rumsfeld’s fingerprints are all over the approval of this chemical additive, may cause regular users — especially diabetics — to give it a second look.