Does Aspartame Cause Headaches?

If I wanted to prove that aspartame caused headaches, what experiment would I design to do this?

First off, I would find the most susceptible population to do the experment on: I would only use subjects that are certain that they get headaches from consuming aspartame. These people consist of a tiny fraction of 1% of all aspartame users, and so an experiment would be the worst case scenerio and my best chance at showing that aspartame is harmful.

I would contact the leading anti-aspartame doctors, who claim to have patients who have headaches they believe are caused by aspartame. I would get the names of all these patients and contact them. If they agreed to participate in my experiment, I would fly them into an independent medical research center for a week and run a double-blind placebo control experiment.

Hopefully I could get 40-50 participants. I would give each person a capsule that either contained aspartame or a placebo and monitor their condition. Then, three days later, I would re-run the trial, this time giving each person who got the placebo the aspartame capsule, or vis versa. Again, I would monitor their health condition both subjective (their feelings) and objective (physiological measures).

The dosage of aspartame I would use would be relatively large, much more than an average person would use.

If aspartame is the cause of their headaches, the patients would have many more headaches when given aspartame, and much fewer headaches when given the placebo. This would be strong evidence that aspartame causes headaches for some people.

So here's the punch line of this hypothetical experiment: It was done in 1987, and it concluded that aspartame was NOT the cause of the headaches these people reported.

In 1987 NutraSweet tried to put to rest the suspicion that aspartame was the cause of headaches once and for all. At that time, a number of physicians were actively against the FDA approval of NutraSweet. These physicians told stories of patients who had a verified reaction to aspartame. The most common reaction was headaches.

NutraSweet attempted to dispell rumors that aspartame caused headaches by funding an experiment designed and run by Dr. Schiffman at Duke University. 40 patients were given 30 mg/kg of aspartame in a single dosage (equivelent to about 10 diet soft drinks).

But instead of having more headaches when given aspartame, the subjects complained more when given the placebo. The results proved their headaches were not due to aspartame.

Researchers contacted the three most notorious of the anti-aspartame physicians and asked for a list of patients to participant in this experiment. They contacted H.J. Roberts, Woodrow Monte, R.G. Walton, along with other physicians. They also contacted people who filed complaints with the FDA.

Anti-Aspartame Rebuttal Unconvincing

Mark Gold reviews this experiment and criticizes it on a number of points:

He states that this experiment gives aspartame only once, and the toxic effects of aspartame are probably cumulative.

Then why did the majority of the people in the experiment report before the experiment was conducted that they got headaches with a single use of aspartame?

In most of the reports on the internet and that I've seen, people react to aspartame with a single use... and often it is a very small amount that triggers the reaction, ie a single packet of Equal or a single soft drink. The participants in the Schiffman experiment were given a dosage of 30 mg/kg: this is the equivelent to about 10 diet soft drinks in a single dose for someone who weighs about 150 pounds (70 kg).

Either the aspartame critics should respect the credibility of the people who believe they have reactions to aspartame, or they should ignore all these personal accounts.

It may be that aspartame does require long-term usage to cause problems, but the researchers that are critical of aspartame speak of the long-term effects being the possibility that aspartame causes cancer, not headaches.

The second point Mark Gold states is that the aspartame was given in capsule form, not within actual food products. He doesn't bother with the obvious conflict this has: this is a blinded exeperiment. The subjects must not know whether they are given aspartame or a placebo. Putting the aspartame in a capsule is the only way to achieve this. Although there are well-documented differences in the way aspartame is metabolized in food versus capsules, the dosage used in the Schiffman study is large enough to satisfy any reasonable difference in metabolism.

I've read the entire text of the Schiffman experiment, and it's very convincing. The criticisms that Mark Gold don't negate the results, which are worth repeating: this group of people who were sure that aspartame gave them headaches reported more headaches when given a placebo than when they were given aspartame.

Another Explanation

This study is so pivotal because it is so convincing. I have a much more radical theory about this study. My conclusion is there are only two logical possibilities:

1) This study uses falsified data and is a NutraSweet funded hoax, or

2) Aspartame does not cause headaches.

Is it possible that this study is based on falsified data? Yes. However unlikely, however risky for the researchers, it's possible. Think about the financial consequences for the NutraSweet corporation if this study found aspartame to cause headaches. It would be worth millions upon millions of dollars for this study to show that aspartame did not cause headaches. And so this gives NutraSweet a sufficient motive to bribe the researchers with a sufficient amount of money for the researchers to change the data to fit NutraSweets needs.

The thing about double-blind experiments is that even the research assistants running the experiment do not know what capsules contain the aspartame. Only a small number of people (or even a single person doing the statistics) have access to all the data which shows which persons were given aspartame and what their response was.

Corporations cheat and lie all the time in the name of profit.

Think about it: NutraSweet asks an indepedent researcher to conduct this experiment. That in itself shows that either NutraSweet scientists were convinced that these reports of headaches were completely groundless, or, alternately, NutraSweet knew that aspartame probably did cause headaches, and they needed to create a bogus study in order to counter this fact.

The question is what safeguards are there in conducting scientific research to prevent large-scale data manipulation. I have personally worked as a research assistant. I have conducted experiments at a University research center. I don't make this accusation in ignorance of the process.

My accusation that this study is falsified is completely hypothetical. I have no evidence. I'm just saying that there are no other logical alternatives. I'm saying that this study is very thorough and is almost undisputable.

I'm bothered because I've read so many personal accounts of aspartame causing short-term problems such as headaches and dizziness, etc. So maybe this is the long-term effect of reading anti-aspartame propaganda for years. In any case, I believe that the truth about this study is the truth about aspartame. Either it's safe, or research data has been falsified in a very major way. We're not talking about minor procedural or statistical favoritism here, as Mark Gold suggests.

I'm undecided. I just don't know.

Other Studies

Note that there have been two other studies on aspartame and headaches that have shown that aspartame does cause some people to have headaches. But note that the population of the subjects was NOT people who have reported to have reactions to aspartame, and so the results were quite astounding. The subjects were people who had reoccuring migraine headaches (Koehler, 1988)
(to be continued 6/13/2000 AR)