Victoria Innes-Brown has done us all a great favor by publishing the findings of her private experiments. Over a two and a half-year period, she performed a set of meticulous and detailed animal experiments, documenting the horrific effects of using aspartame liquid comparable to diet soda.

I believe her work adds to the bulk of data already available, confirming and reinforcing the true health dangers of this popular artificial sweetener.

Concerns for Her Family Set Her on a Most Unusual Path

What motivated her to take on such a task?

In short, concern for family members who were consuming large amounts of aspartame—particularly diet sodas. She also wanted to provide visual documentation, if there were any, to help the anti-aspartame community get the additive removed from the market.

"I had already become aware of possible adverse effects of aspartame," she says. "I was doing further research on it and I came across the Bressler report. I noticed he was talking about sizeable tumors reported from the use of DKP (diketopiperazine) which is a breakdown component of aspartame.

I thought that if I did my own experiment, I might be able to actually see some tumors and I could take photos of them and then provide an additional resource for people to use to try to get it off the market, and to try to convince family members to stop using it."

The photographs are indeed one of the most startling aspects of her book. As is usually the case, a picture speaks a thousand words, and her photos tell a horrific story about the detrimental health effects of aspartame.

Study Design Details

Victoria first raised a total of 108 rats. Sixty of them, 30 males and 30 females, were used as the experimental group. The remaining 48 rats, 24 males and 24 females, were used as controls.

Since she's not a food manufacturer, she wasn't able to purchase pure aspartame, which is typically what researchers would use for their studies. Instead, she put NutraSweet directly into the water of the aspartame group. This may in fact be part of the reason why her results were so shocking.

"One of the things I have discovered from my own research when writing my book… was that the liquid form of aspartame is much more potent than any other form—solid or capsule form—which is used in most of the other experiments," she says.

"The other issue with NutraSweet is that the other components, dextrose and maltodextrin, aren't necessarily inert. They can have their own side effects. So that might be one reason why I got such amazing results."

What's so interesting about her experiment is that it's a relatively easy experiment that anyone sufficiently motivated could easily reproduce, to double check the results. It's also worth noting that she did not have any financial incentives to skew the findings in one way or another. She funded the research herself, and her only agenda was to find the truth.

Although she had no previous experience within the medical field, her experience as a technical writer gave her the confidence that she could not only learn what she needed to learn in order to successfully do the project, but also the perseverance to see it through to the end.

"I don't really think it was that hard," she says. "There were a lot of things you had to do, but it was mostly taking care of the animals and then videotaping the results... It wasn't that hard of a project. It was just time consuming and involved some physical labor."

As for dose, she gave the rats a daily dose of NutraSweet comparable to 14 cans of diet soda per day for the females, and 13 cans for the males.

Although that sounds like an awful lot, this amount is within the acceptable daily intake (ADI), which was set at 50 mg per kilogram by the FDA. It's also within the range of what some people actually consume daily.

Study Findings

So, after feeding the rats NutraSweet daily for 30 months, what did she observe?

"I was pretty awestruck by the results I got," she says. "I kept kind of thinking, 'Did I do something wrong?' As I mentioned earlier, I believe there are other factors in my experiment that contributed to the huge range of adverse effects, plus the phenomenal quantity of tumors and the enormity of the tumors, especially on the females."

A whopping 67 percent of the female rats developed tumors the size of golf balls or larger! Some of the tumors were the size of the palm of her hand.

Twenty-one percent of the males on aspartame developed tumors.

Continue Reading Article at Mercola.com