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NutraSweet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The NutraSweet Company
Logo-NutraSweet Company.png
Type
Private (subsidiary of J.W. Childs Associates)
Predecessor G. D. Searle & Company
Founded 1985, as a division of Monsanto
Headquarters Chicago, Illinois, USA
Key people
William L. DeFer, CEO[1]
Products Aspartame and neotame
Website www.nutrasweet.com
The NutraSweet Company is an American nutrient company that produces and markets NutraSweet, their trademarked brand name for the artificial sweeteners aspartame and neotame.
The NutraSweet Company states that its product is used in more than 5,000 products and consumed by some 250 million people worldwide.[2]
Aspartame was invented by chemists at G. D. Searle & Company in 1965.[2] Searle was bought by Monsanto in 1985.[3] In March 2000, Monsanto, which was then a subsidiary of the Pharmacia corporation, sold NutraSweet to the private equity firm J.W. Childs Associates.[2]
Aspartame was discovered at GD Searle, a Chicago drug company, in the 1960s. The FDA first approved it in 1974, but an FDA scientist at the time, Adrian Gross, discovered that there were serious shortcomings in all 15 long-term studies that Searle submitted for review. For example, some rats in the studies died but were not autopsied after to discern the cause; in other cases, the aspartame was not mixed well enough into the feed and the rats were eating around it. There was also evidence of brain tumors in the rats in several studies.
Gross's findings, along with pressure from other scientists, resulted in a public board of inquiry in early 1980 consisting of three independent scientists who reviewed the data and voted to withhold approval because they "did not believe Searle's studies conclusively showed aspartame did not cause brain tumors."
At the time, Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of Searle. He was also on the transition team for Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated in 1981. After the inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval, at which point Reagan fired the FDA commissioner and replaced him with Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., who re-approved aspartame for dry products.
Aspartame quickly flooded the market, and two years later was also approved for use in liquids. Soon after, Hull left the FDA and took a job with Burson Marsteller, the PR firm for Searle. Meanwhile, Searle (which Monsanto purchased in 1985) made billions and Rumsfeld, of course, later became the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush. (For more on this history, check out the 60 Minutes segment from 1996 and the Times article from 2006.)
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