One-Woman Test With NutraSweet Offers Surprising Results

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, we're living in the age of the amateur. Wikipedia has replaced the encyclopedia, bloggers are breaking stories faster than paid journalists, and consumer reviews have edged out the salesman's expertise. It's all possible because millions of dabblers — ordinary folks motivated by passion, altruism or good old ego — are willing to do this work for no pay. Some spend long hours conducting rigorous product tests or even performing quasi-scientific experiments on themselves, exploring topics such as sleep deprivation or the digestibility of goat's milk. But all that amateur effort pales in comparison to the recent work of a San Diego woman who questioned the safety of aspartame. Victoria Inness-Brown, a soft-spoken 60-year-old grandmother with flowing silver hair, conducted her own two-and-a-half-year experiment at home, feeding NutraSweet to rats.

Inness-Brown is no scientist; she has a master's degree in math and works as a technical writer, penning instruction manuals for IT companies. Nor does she claim scientific objectivity: She launched the study hoping to persuade her family to stop guzzling Diet Pepsi. And she's hardly the first consumer to question aspartame. The low-calorie sweetener has attracted criticism ever since the FDA approved it in 1981. Folks are naturally suspicious of anything artificial, and it doesn't help that the long-delayed approval came only after the sweetener's manufacturer, G.D. Searle, hired a new CEO: former White House insider Donald Rumsfeld. (To a certain sort of person, the mere existence of a Rumsfeld connection is proof enough that there's evil afoot.) While the sweetener industry notes that more than 200 studies have proved aspartame's safety, activists blame the substance for such varied maladies as hives and Gulf War syndrome. Legislators tried to ban it in Hawaii and New Mexico; you can even buy books about "aspartame disease" and join an online Aspartame Victims Support Group.

All Inness-Brown wanted was visual evidence. To that end, she went to Petco and bought eight rats, a book on rodent care and a few boxes of Kaytee's Supreme Fortified Daily Blend for Rat & Mouse. Since rats are famously prolific, it wasn't long before she had more than 100 test subjects living in 10 wire cages, many sipping NutraSweet-laced water. She didn't mind the rodents ("I think I'm different from a lot of people," she says), but caring for them took hours every week and was emotionally draining; Inness-Brown grew fond of the creatures to the point of naming a pretty white-furred female Marilyn Monroe. The experiment was also a wallet buster: She spent an estimated $5,000 on food and supplies. But she got the results — and eye-popping photos — she wanted. While just 10 percent of her control group rats fell ill, 45 percent of the NutraSweet rats grew tumors. Huge tumors. Tumors the size of golf balls. (The doomed Marilyn Monroe was photographed using her chest tumor as a pillow.)

What does all this prove? Nothing definitive, says Marion Nestle, a professor of Nutrition and Public Health at New York University. In a valid double-blind experiment, the rats' tumors would have been cataloged by an impartial observer who didn't know which rodents got aspartame and which drank plain water. "Still," says Nestle, "it's an astonishing thing to have done."

Consumers agree. When Inness-Brown's preliminary study results were posted online earlier this year, the site got more than 185,000 hits; some wrote to say the photos persuaded them to swear off aspartame for life. It was a gratifying result for Inness-Brown, who's now planning to self-publish her 100-page study. Of course, her family is still drinking diet soda. While amateurs are gaining ground on the experts these days, it's still true that no one listens to their mother.