Efsa on Aspartame January 2013 a Lost, but Not the Last, Opportunity Executive Summary Efsa on Aspartame January 2013 a Lost, but Not the Last, Opportunity

Re. DRAFT Scientific Opinion on the re-evaluation of aspartame (E 951) as a food additive Further to my telephone conversations and email exchange with Christophe Wolff on 12 th and 13 th February, I am now sending you this letter as my detailed response to the EFSA Panel's DRAFT Scientific Opinion on the re-evaluation of aspartame (E 951) as a food additive, which was issued on 8 th January 2013. I would be pleased to travel to EFSA in Parma to discuss the issues raised in my response, or to meet EFSA colleagues at a suitable agreed location, such as in Brussels. I look forward to receiving a detailed response to these comments, especially in the light of the failure of the January draft to address the issues raised by the dossier of 30 documents that I delivered to EFSA in Autumn 2011, in response to an explicit request from EFSA. The draft report on the safety of aspartame, issued by the European Food Safety Authority's ANS panel on 8 January 2013, is deeply flawed. There are at least two main types of flaws: those arising from the criteria by which 'evidence' has been selected, and those arising from the criteria by which those studies are interpreted. The criteria of inclusion have been overly narrow, and have in particular excluded vital documents that bear directly on the scientific competence with which some pivotal studies were conducting and on the accuracy with which they were reported. Such documentary evidence is directly relevant to the reliability of the reported data, and on the truth of the claims based on those studies. The implicit criteria of interpretation of the studies that have been included are perverse and biased. The panel could only have reached its conclusion that aspartame is safe by implicitly assuming that almost all studies indicating no adverse effects are entirely reliable, even though they have numerous weaknesses and were almost all commercially funded, while all the studies indicating that aspartame may be unsafe are deemed unreliable, even though they sometimes have particular methodological strengths and even though they have all been funded independently of vested commercial interests. On each of the 80 occasions when the panel discusses a study that indicated no apparent risks from aspartame those studies are taken at face value and typically assumed to be reliable. However, on each of the 27 occasions when the panel discusses …