Neurosurgeon/Author Dr. Russell Blaylock On Aspartame & MSG
Excitotoxins have been found to dramatically promote cancer growth and metastasis. In fact, one aspartame researcher noticed that, when cancer cells were exposed to aspartame, they became more mobile, and you see the same effect with MSG. It also causes a cancer cell to become more mobile, and that enhances metastasis, or spread. These MSG-exposed cancer cells developed all of these pseudopodians and started moving through tissues, which is one of the earlier observations from cancer.
When you increase the glutamate level, cancer just grows like wildfire, and then when you block glutamate, it dramatically slows the growth of the cancer. Researchers have done some experiments in which they looked at using glutamate blockers in combination with conventional drugs, like chemotherapy, and it worked very well. It significantly enhanced the effectiveness of these cancer drugs. Research that came out recently, supports all this by establishing a correlation between leukemia and aspartame. This Italian study was very well done. It was a lifetime study, which is very important with these toxins. They fed animals aspartame throughout their lives and let them die a natural death. They found a dramatic and statistically significant increase in the related cancers of lymphoma and leukemia, along with several histological types of lymphomas.
When you look it up in the neurosurgical literature, there is a rather significant rise in the incidents of what used to be a rare tumor. We're seeing a lot more of the primary lymphoma of the brain, which is a little different than lymphomas you see elsewhere. When you look back at the original studies done by the G.D. Searle company, they found lymphomas as well as primary brain tumors and tumors of multiple organs. All of this correlation shows we have a powerful carcinogenic substance here. It is either acting as a co-carcinogen or a primary carcinogen. Most likely, it's the formaldehyde breakdown product.
What the Italian study found is that if you take these same animals and expose them to formaldehyde in the same doses, they developed the same leukemias and lymphomas. If you look back at the Troker Study conducted in Spain a couple of years ago, what they found was when they radiolabeled the aspartame, they could actually see formaldehyde binding to the DNA, and it produced both single and double strand DNA breakage.
We know that when formaldehyde binds to DNA, it's very difficult to remove it. It will stay there for long periods of time. What that means is if you just drink a single diet cola today, or sweeten something with NutraSweet, you're accumulating damage every day. Eventually, you're going to produce this necessary pattern of DNA damage to initiate the cancer, and once you develop the cancer, the aspartic acid component of aspartame will make the cancer grow very rapidly. You've got a double effect; it's causing the cancer, and it's making the cancer move very rapidly. Donald Rumsfeld was the one who pushed a lot of this through, when he was in the chairmanship of the G.D. Searle company, NutraSweet. He got it approved through the regulatory process, but once it was approved, the government didn't want to admit that they had made a mistake. They just continued to cover it up.
You're not going to criticize milk in the media, because they are smart enough to advertise in newspapers, magazines, health magazines and journals. They have all the media outlets covered. The only place that they don't have covered is talk radio and the internet. The health blogs can tell the truth.
No matter how much a newspaper wants to tell the truth, they're not going to do it. This is the kind of pressure these people are under. Even if you have a good writer who wants to write the story, his editor is going to override him and prevent it or water it down considerably. You see this in journals like the Journal of Clinical Nutrition or College Nutrition. Look at who funds them: The Monsanto Company, and they used to be sponsored by G.D. Searle. They're not going to want to put articles in their journal that will infuriate their primary source of income. Even medical and nutrition journals are controlled by these people. Another big scandal concerning the research is something new we found. We discovered that outside of the brain, there are numerous glutamate receptors in all organs and tissues. The entire GI tract, from the esophagus to the colon, has numerous glutamate receptors. The entire electrical conducting system of a heart is replete with all sorts of glutamate receptors. The lungs, the ovaries, all the reproductive systems and sperm itself, adrenal glands, bones and even calcification are all controlled by glutamate receptors. They act and operate exactly like the glutamate receptors in the brain. So, when you're consuming MSG, the level of glutamate in the blood can rise as high as 20-fold. You get very high glutamate levels in the blood after eating a meal containing MSG. You're stimulating all of the glutamate receptors. That's why some people get explosive diarrhea, because it stimulates the receptors in the esophagus and small bowel. Others may develop irritable bowel, or if they have irritable bowel, it makes it a lot worse. If they have reflux, it makes that a lot worse. The thing about the cardiac conduction system glutamate receptors is this may explain the rise in sudden cardiac death.
What you see in almost all these cases is low magnesium. When the magnesium level is low, the glutamate receptors become hypersensitive, and so people -- athletes in particular, if they are not supplementing with magnesium -- are prone to sudden cardiac death, because of the glutamate receptors. If they eat a meal or something that contains glutamate or drink a diet cola before practice, it will produce such intense cardiac irritability, they'll die of sudden cardiac death. We know the sudden cardiac death is due to two things: Most commonly arrhythmia and cardio artery spasm. Both of which can be produced by glutamate. Admitting physicians don't know the first thing about any of this research. They've never heard of it. In fact, most cardiologists I've spoken with have never heard of this. They didn't know there were glutamate receptors throughout the electrical conduction system and in the heart muscle itself. You have a million patients in this country with arrhythmias that are life-threatening, and no one's telling them to avoid MSG and aspartame, yet it's a major source of cardiac irritability. They said they would, but they didn't. What they did is take out pure MSG and substitute it with hydrolyzed protein and caseinate. If you look at most toddler foods, they all have caseinate hydrolyzed protein broth, a significant source of glutamate. One of the things we're hearing a lot about is childhood obesity. One early observation with excitotoxicity is it makes animals grossly obese.
Here the government has all these big plans for controlling carbohydrate intake and controlling cereals and sugar and all that. Those things add to the problem, because what we find in MSG-exposed animals is that they prefer carbohydrates and sugars over protein-rich foods. That was one of the characteristics of this type of obesity. It's very difficult to exercise the weight off and almost impossible to diet it off. The appetite is out of control, but the metabolism is also out of control. They have metabolic syndrome on top of obesity, and so then you have a leptin insensitivity. In terms of obesity, they have a leptin insensitivity. It has been shown that you can produce leptin insensitivity very easily with MSG. Once the public gets wind of it and is convinced that this is real, then there'll be an uproar over it. There's just a deception. The average consumer looks at it and goes, "Well, it says that it contains no MSG, so it must be okay." I find a lot of the vegetarian foods, or so-called health foods, use yeast extracts. The worst of the things they're doing are the soy extracts. Soybeans, naturally, have one of the highest glutamate levels of any of the plant products. When you hydrolyze it, you release the glutamate, and the soy protein isolates. The glutamate levels are higher than a lot of what you'll find in MSG products, yet the vegetarians are just eating it like it's the healthiest thing in the world. There was a 25-year study done, which looked at people who consumed the most soy products, and they followed them for 25 years and did serial CT scans. They found out that the people who consumed the most soybean products had the greatest incidence of dementia and brain atrophy.
These people are destroying their nervous system, and I talked to a lot of them who complained of severe migraine headaches. I said, "Get off the soy," and they do, and that migraine headache goes away. In addition, you have very high manganese levels, which istoxic to the very same part of the brain that produces Parkinson's. You've got a mixture of toxins with soy products, and the people think they are eating a healthy, nutritious product. It's destroying their nervous system, as well as other organs. If you're obsessed with milk, use goat's milk. It's closer to human milk, but I wouldn't recommend cow's milk or soy milk. I think people ought to avoid soy products as if they were poison.
The Sweetener Industry leaves me alone. I know too much. They've never bothered me. When I wrote the book, George Schwartz warned me, "Are you sure you want to write this book? If you do, they're just going to hound you to death." I said, "Yes, I want to write the book." So, I wrote it with one thing in mind: that they would not be able to refute it.
I researched every kind of way you can research and proved the toxicity of glutamate. They know I know that, because I had exchanged this in writing letters to some of their biggest defenders. They all realized that they couldn't answer my arguments. So they leave me alone. They're afraid that if it comes to a big standoff between me and them, they're going to lose.
What they're doing is the old ploy of just ignoring and hoping it will go away. Of course, they put pressure on magazines, journals and newspapers not to interview me. They are trying to keep me in the shadows where they hope most people don't hear anything I have to say. It only works for so long.
Since I first wrote the book in 1995, proof supporting my viewpoint has increased enormously. The new material on peripheral glutamate receptors absolutely killed these people. They have no defense against that. The new information on the dramatic increase in cancer aggressiveness is something that they are terrified of. I proved it can enter the brain and that all that was a lie. What they've shown is that there are glutamate receptors on both sides of the blood brain barrier and that when you expose these receptors to glutamate, it opens up the blood brain barrier. So, the glutamate itself can open the barrier, and I list all these conditions. For instance, as you get older, your barrier becomes less competent. Almost all Alzheimer's patients have incompetent barriers. Heat stroke, seizures, autoimmune disorder and multiple sclerosis all are related with this active blood brain barrier.
You're talking about tens of millions of people, and they are out there gobbling up aspartame, MSG and other excitotoxins, and no one is telling them they are making their neurological conditions infinitely worse. I don't know how many seizure patients I've gotten off their medicines by just getting them off MSG and giving them magnesium. They quit having seizures. They were on maximum dosages of medications and still having seizures. Most neurologists and neurosurgeons that treat seizures are not aware of this.
Dr. Blaylock: If you look at the neuroscience literature, you can't pick up an article that's not about excitotoxicity. The hottest topic in neurosciences is glutamate receptors and excitotoxins.They won't mention food, but they talk about the glutamate receptor and what happens when you activate it. All these types of glutamate are bound. They're in oligosaccharides, polysaccharides. They are bound in amino acids groupings. They're not free amino acids. If you have it as a complex protein, you absorb it in your GI tract. In the GI tract, there are almost no free amino acids if you eat foods such as tomatoes. The level of free amino acids is nil; it's almost all absorbed as combined amino acids, and then it's only broken down in the liver, where it's released in very low concentrations that the body can deal with. It was never meant to have free amino acids in such high concentrations.
Well, when you hydrolyze them -- or you use yeast extract or enzymes to break down these various proteins into their free, released amino acids -- they're not natural any longer. What you've done is artificially release the amino acids in an unnatural way, and when they enter your GI tract, they are absorbed as free amino acids, then your blood level of that glutamic acid goes up significantly. As I said, it can go up as high as 20-fold, in some cases 40-fold. Your blood brain barrier is not constructed to handle such high levels of glutamate, because it doesn't naturally occur that way. It can handle the lower levels, but it can't handle these very high levels. So this argument, "Oh, it's natural," is just a lot of nonsense. You have other amino acids that can't compete for glutamic acid absorption. So that may be one way to help reduce the rate at which it would be absorbed. Those would include leucine, isoleucine and lysine. They would compete for the same carrier system, so that would slow down absorption. There are a lot of things that act as glutamate blockers. You know, like silimarin, curcumin and ginkgo biloba. These things are known to directly block glutamate receptors and reduce excitotoxicity. Curcumin is very potent. Most of your flavonoids. Magnesium is particularly important, because magnesium can block the MNDA glutamate type receptor. That's its natural function, so it significantly reduces toxicity. Vitamin E succinate is powerful at inhibiting excitotoxicity, as are all of your antioxidants. They found combinations of B vitamins also block excitotoxicity. Restaurants tell you, "We get our food in these big crates, so there's no ingredients listed." It's the same thing for hospitals. I talked to a hospital dietitian and she said, "We can't tell because it comes in a crate, and they won't put the ingredients on it. It just says Salisbury steak or whatever."
They don't know, so it's hard for them to come out and tell their customers, "It's free of MSG." What they mean when they do say that is, "We didn't put any in there." Their white sauces are particularly high, as are their salad dressings, especially the ones that are pure oil. They all contain MSG. Gravy mixes almost always have it. They'll put hydrolyzed protein in it. They're selling taste.That's why a person prefers one restaurant to another. The food tastes better. Then they go home and feel sick and don't understand why.
One of the things that has been noticed about sudden cardiac death is that most that have it, other than athletes, die after eating a meal in a restaurant. I suspect it's because these people have low magnesium. They eat the meal, the glutamate stimulates the glutamate receptor in the cardiac conduction system as well as the hypothalamus, and they have a sudden cardiac death.
I was in a bookstore in Oxford, Miss. This young guy was there, and he just dropped and died. We took him to the hospital and tried to resuscitate him, and we couldn't. He was only 26 years old, and he had just eaten a big bowl of soup at one of the restaurants. Well, I talked to the person that was there, and he said they use a lot of hydrolyzed protein and MSG. People will eat a meal, have a soup before the meal, get this huge dose of MSG, and drop dead from the arrhythmia. Look at the popularity of these soy infant formulas. Mothers are crazy to give their kids soy formula. There is a lot of concern about it. There's concern about the fluoride level, the manganese level, and the glutamate levels in these soy infant formulas.
een done that can correct those problems. If aspartame were banned tomorrow, I think you'd see a significant drop in obesity and metabolic syndrome. You'd see a tremendous drop in certain cancers. You would certainly see a tremendous drop in the neurodegenerative diseases, and all of these diseases that are increasing expeditiously.
The neurodegenerative diseases are just exploding. Things that used to be rare, we're seeing all the time now. It's just frightening. And when you look through the neurosciences literature, they have no explanation. They don't know why it's increasing so rapidly, but it's because we have such a large combination of toxins. For instance, we know that cellular neurodegenerative diseases are connected to mercury, aluminum, pesticides and herbicides, and the way they produce brain damage is through an excitotoxic mechanism.
So, we are all exposed to those toxins, and then when you add MSG and excitotoxins to the food, you tremendously accelerate this toxicity. That's why we're seeing this explosion in neurodegenerative diseases; Alzheimer's and autism and ADD and Parkinson's -- all these things are increasing so enormously because we are exposed to carcinogenic toxicity from all these different things and this huge exposure to excitotoxins, which is the central mechanism.
This is what no one's been able to claim. You look at one person's report and they'll say, "Alzheimer's is related to mercury exposure," and then another one says, "No, it's related to pesticides," and yet another one says it something else, but they're all operating through the same mechanism. All of these things operate by increasing brain immune activity, and that activates excitotoxicity. So that's why all of them seem to be related, because they're all doing the same thing to the brain. When you look at the pathophysiology of diabetes and the effect of aspartame, it's absolute nonsense for anybody who has diabetes to be on aspartame. Particularly in a neurological aspect, it's going to make it a lot worse. You can design any study to find whatever you want. Particularly, you can design it to have negative results. That's the easiest thing to do.You need to abstain from all of these things. Aspartame is not a necessary nutrient, and neither is MSG. The weight of the evidence is overwhelming. If you want to avoid obesity, metabolic syndrome and cancer, and if you don't want to make your cancer more aggressive, then you need to stay away from these products.
The damage affects pregnant women, unborn babies and newborns. It produces changes in the brain that are irreversible. What we've found is that it reprograms the wiring of the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, so it doesn't function normally. These children are abnormal for the rest of their lives in terms of their physiological function. The pressure on researchers is so enormous. Larry Troker came out with his research about the DNA damage by aspartame. Then his career was damaged by the makers of aspartame. He said he would never do another research project concerning aspartame. Well, a number of researchers have said the same thing. Once they published their results, the full weight of these companies come down on their head. NutraSweet will contribute millions to a university and threaten to pull their donations if someone isn't quieted. There's blatant, and then there's just understood. You have NutraSweet manufacturers donating several million dollars to your university. The director of that laboratory, or the president of the university, will just quietly let them know that they'd really like to see research come to a stop.
The editor-in-chief of The Chemical News went through that with fluoride. They fired him because he refused to be quiet about fluoride toxicity, and they had just received this huge grant from Colgate-Palmolive. They said, "We'll lose our grant if you don't get quiet about fluoride." He wouldn't, and they fired him. Researchers know this.
They passed a law at one time in several states that no one but dietitians could speak on the subject of nutrition. Several states had that law passed. This meant Ph.D. biochemists couldn't talk about health. It was ridiculous. I'm sure that one day they're going to have an internet bill saying there's just too much dangerous material coming over the internet on health issues, and we need to regulate it.
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Labels: Aspartame, MSG, Alzheimers, MS, FAA, Pilots, FDA Coverup of Food Safety Issue, Aspartame Timeline, Neuroexcitotoxins - Nerve Toxins, Isolated Amino Acids, Glutamic Acid, Aspartic Acid Dangers, Cancers, Seizures, Obesity, Heart Disease, Mental: Agressive/Bizarre Behavior, Mood Swings, Serotonin Blocker, Deaths
