Mike: I'm here with Dr. Russell Blaylock, and I'd like to 
				explore some of the more advanced aspects of some of the things 
				you are working on. Dr. Blaylock, I think readers know the 
				basics of both MSG and aspartame, but can you review what you've 
				already written about 
				
				excitotoxins?
 
				
				Dr. Russell Blaylock: I have 
				three books. The first one is the excitotoxin book, "Excitotoxins 
				- The Taste That Kills," and the latest one is and updated 
				paperback reprint of "Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save 
				Your Life." 
				
				 
				
				The third one is "Natural Strategies for Cancer 
				Patients," which is directed at nutritional treatments 
				
				for 
				cancer. It contains some material about aspartame and
				
				MSG.
				
				
				
				Excitotoxins have been found to dramatically promote cancer 
				growth and metastasis. In fact, one excitotoxin researcher 
				noticed that, when cancer cells were exposed to glutamate, 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 pseudopodia 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.
 
				 
				
				Mike: Wasn't there some research 
				that came out recently that supports all this by establishing a 
				correlation between leukemia and aspartame?
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Yes. 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, which is of interest because 
				H.J. Roberts had written an article saying that there was a 
				significant increase in the primary lymphoma of the brain.
				
				When you look it up in the neurosurgical literature, there is a 
				rather significant rise in the incidence 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 that we've got 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 Trocho 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 
				multiply very rapidly.
 
				 
				
				Mike: Given all this evidence, how 
				has the industry managed to suppress this information and keep 
				this chemical legal in the food supply?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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 division. 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, like the fluoride thing and the milk 
				industry.
				
				
				You're not going to criticize milk, or these other food-based 
				problems 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 Journal of the American College 
				of 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: It's the unholy alliance between the scientific community 
				and big business.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Right. 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 the pancreas 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 and dyspepsia, 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 
				coronary artery spasm. 
				
				 
				
				Both of which can be produced by 
				glutamate.
 
				
				
				Mike: Of course, that death certificate doesn't say they died 
				from MSG.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: No, and it's not going to, because the admitting 
				physician doesn'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 are 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.
 
				 
				
				Mike: It's absolutely astounding. 
				Now, didn't baby food manufacturers voluntarily remove this 
				ingredient in the '70s?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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 a number of toddler foods, 
				many have caseinate, hydrolyzed protein, soy extracts, broth, all 
				a significant source of glutamate.
 
				
				
				Mike: We're destroying the nervous systems of these babies.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Exactly. Now, one of the things we're hearing a 
				lot about is childhood obesity. One early observation with 
				exitotoxicity is it makes animals grossly obese.
 
				
				
				Mike: If they banned MSG, the drug companies would lose 
				billions. Think about how much money they make treating all of 
				these symptoms.
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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 state of 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.
 
				 
				
				Mike: Is there any hope, in your 
				view, that the world may wake up to this, and some day these 
				ingredients may be banned?
				 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: It's possible, but you know, it's only going to be 
				by public exposure, through the blogs and sites like yours. 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."
 
				
				
				Mike: I find a lot of the vegetarian foods, or so-called health 
				foods, use yeast extracts.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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, such as with the soy protein isolates. 
				The glutamate levels are higher than a lot of what you'll find 
				in other MSG-containing 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 of their brain. 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 is toxic 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: In this whole debate of soy versus cow's milk, we find 
				misinformation in both camps.
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: I wouldn't recommend 
				either one. 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.
				
 
				
				Mike: Have you taken a lot of heat 
				from NutraSweet or any of these other companies? I mean, have 
				you been threatened with lawsuits or anything for going public 
				with this information?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: No, they leave 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 the subject every kind of way you can research it 
				and proved 
				
				the toxicity of glutamate. They know I know that, 
				because I had exchanged letters with 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.
				
 
				
				Mike: They don't want this 
				information going on the public record.
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: No, they don't want 
				that. 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: Now you find these receptors outside the brain.
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Right. Now, see, I 
				proved it can enter the brain and that all that nonsense about 
				the brain being protected from glutamate by the blood-brain 
				barrier was a lie. 
				
				 
				
				What researchers have 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 the conditions under which the barrier 
				is broken. 
				
				 
				
				For instance, as you get older, your barrier becomes 
				less competent. Almost all Alzheimer's patients have incompetent 
				barriers. Heat stroke, seizures, autoimmune disorders and 
				multiple sclerosis are all associated with an incompetent blood 
				brain barrier.
				
				You're talking about tens of millions of people affected by 
				barrier disruption, 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.
				
 
				
				Mike: It's not profitable to teach 
				people how to avoid these ingredients.
 
				
				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.
				
 
				
				Mike: Are they talking about it in 
				the food or just as a chemical?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: They won't mention food, but they talk about the 
				glutamate receptor and what happens when you activate it.
 
				 
				
				Mike: What about the argument from 
				food companies? 
				
				 
				
				I actually got into a debate with a veggie 
				burger manufacturer, because I wrote an article that said their 
				product had yeast extract in it, and yet the front label said, 
				
					
					"100 percent all-natural ingredients." They said, "Well, 
				glutamate appears naturally in other foods, like tomatoes and 
				seaweed." 
				
				
				What's your answer to that kind of defense?
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Sure, but you see, all 
				of these types of glutamate are bound. They're in 
				
				oligopeptides, 
				
				polypeptides. They are bound in amino acids groupings. They're 
				not free amino acids. If you have it as a complex protein, you 
				absorb it slowly 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. Our bodies were never intended to have free 
				amino acids in such high concentrations.
				
				Well, when you hydrolyze these proteins - 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: I do find that many manufacturers claim to be natural 
				health companies, or health food companies, as a cover. They 
				don't really follow that philosophy, because they'll use these 
				ingredients.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Sure, and they use all kinds of backhanded ways.
 
				
				
				Mike: Here's a practical question that's actually been burning 
				in my head for about eight years: Is there anything that a 
				person can take to block the absorption of MSG or glutamate as a 
				defensive supplement?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Well, not necessarily to block it. 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: Which aminos would those be?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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 receptor blockers. 
				
				 
				
				You know, like silymarin, 
				curcumin and ginkgo biloba. These things are known to directly 
				block glutamate receptors and reduce excitotoxicity. Curcumin is 
				very potent. Most of your flavonoids reduce excitotoxicity.
				
				Magnesium is particularly important, because magnesium can block 
				the NMDA 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.
 
				 
				
				Mike: Let's talk about restaurants. 
				I can't even eat at restaurants anymore at all, even those 
				natural restaurants. They don't know they have MSG, because it's 
				in one of the sauces or something.
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: I talked to them, and 
				they said, 
				
					
					"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 ourselves."
					
				
				
				Their white 
				sauces are particularly high, as are their salad dressings, 
				especially the ones that are creamy, but not the ones that are 
				pure oil.
 
				 
				
				Mike: Gravy mixes almost always have 
				it, right?
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Yes, they'll put 
				hydrolyzed protein in it. They're selling taste. I mean, 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.
 
				 
				
				Mike: Could this explain some sudden 
				infant deaths as well, you think?
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Oh yeah. I mean, 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.
				 
				
				 
				
				Mike: At Wal-Mart, I saw bottled water with added sodium 
				fluoride. It's fluoride water.
				 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Oh yes, it's for babies. They have a picture of a 
				baby on it.
 
				 
				
				Mike: So, is there a website or a 
				newsletter that people can visit or sign-up for?
 
				
				Dr. Blaylock: My website is 
				
				www.russellblaylockmd.com. I also have a newsletter. It's at 
				
				www.BlaylockReport.com. It's by subscription, but you can buy 
				individual newsletters as well. 
				
				 
				
				You don't have to get the whole 
				year. It's issued monthly, for $3.98 a piece. It covers 
				everything to do with health, not just MSG.
				
				
				I try to cover a lot of common subjects and bring people up to 
				date on the new thinking and research. I go through all the 
				medical research. Usually I'll go through everything that 
				conventional medicine has to offer. A lot of times they have 
				good physiology, a good 
				
				pathophysiology, but then, they switch 
				over and start talking about drugs. 
				
				 
				
				I'll go through all the good pathophysiology material they have, and then I'll look up all 
				the nutritional research that's been done that can correct those 
				problems.
 
				
				
				Mike: I see. Here's an off-the-wall question: If MSG and all its 
				different versions, as well as aspartame, were outlawed 
				tomorrow, what changes would we see in the next five years in 
				terms of public health?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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 
				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 products that are excitotoxic...
				
				This is what no one's been able to explain. You look at one 
				person's research 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: What about the American Diabetes Association? Given that 
				aspartame actually promotes obesity, based a lot of the work 
				you've uncovered, I find it curious that the ADA so strongly 
				supports aspartame.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: I don't, considering they receive huge amounts of 
				money from the makers of aspartame. They fund their walk-a-thon 
				and all that kind of stuff, so they get tremendous amounts of 
				money from the makers of aspartame, and money talks.
				
				Whether they're just deluding themselves and choosing not to 
				believe it's toxic, refusing to look at the evidence, or they're 
				just concerned about the money and could care less, I don't 
				know, but 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.
				
				
 
				 
				
				Mike: What about other popular 
				chemical sweeteners like 
				
				sucralose in  
				
				Splenda?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: There's really not a lot of research in those 
				areas. They have some basic research, like with Splenda, showing 
				thymus suppression. If that holds up in other research, it's a 
				major concern. 
				
				 
				
				If you're suppressing the thymus gland in a 
				child, that's affecting the future of their immune function. You 
				can increase everything from autoimmunity to producing 
				immune-related diseases, to infections and cancers. The 
				implications of thymus gland suppression are enormous.
				
				There have been reports of miscarriages associated with Splenda 
				in experimental animals. The problem is, we don't have a lot of 
				well-conducted studies on Splenda to ferret these things out, 
				and they're not going to do them. The best way to protect your 
				product is to never test it, or just to set up some phony tests 
				and report it in a journal that's friendly to your point of 
				view.
				
				That's what they did with certain vaccines. They did thousands 
				of phony studies and waved them around, claiming nothing was 
				found. 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: We've got government health officials telling us mercury 
				is safe and we've got big business telling us both aspartame and 
				MSG are safe. It sounds like every poison in the food supply or 
				in organized medicine is perfectly safe.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: We did that with lead. When they first started 
				questioning the safety of lead, the levels they said were safe 
				were just enormously high, and then a mere 10 years later, 
				suddenly we're finding out that lead is toxic at 10 
				micrograms/L. In the '60s, they were fighting over the same 
				thing. 
				
				 
				
				The defenders of gasoline-added lead were saying lead 
				wasn't toxic, except in extremely high doses. Then neuroscience 
				literature was contradicting them, but nobody would listen. 
				Finally, the weight of the evidence was so overwhelming that 
				they found extremely low concentrations of lead were toxic and 
				accumulate in the brain.
				
				It's the same thing with mercury. Mercury is even more poisonous 
				than lead. An infant is getting 150 times the dose of mercury 
				than the EPA safety limits. A hundred times higher than the FDA 
				safety limits. 
				
				 
				
				Here's a little baby that's getting 150 times 
				higher a dose than the EPA says is safe for an adult.
 
				
				
				Mike: What are the big points readers to take away? What do you 
				think they need to remember in order to protect themselves?
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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, neurodegenerative diseases 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 can produce changes in the brain that are irreversible, 
				depending on when it is stopped. 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: Well, hopefully the weight of this evidence will someday 
				become overwhelming, and government regulators will listen to 
				you.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: The pressure on researchers is so enormous. Dr. 
				Trocho came out with his research about the DNA damage by 
				aspartame. Then his career was assaulted 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.
 
				
				
				Mike: So there's blatant scientific censorship at work here.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: 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 such negative research come to a 
				stop.
				
				The biochemical editor of the Chemical Abstracts Service, Dr. 
				John Yiamounuyiannis, 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. 
				
				 
				
				His supervisor said, 
				
					
					"We'll lose our grant if 
				you don't get quiet about fluoride." 
				
				
				He wouldn't, and they fired 
				him. Researchers know this.
 
				
				
				Mike: I want to commend you for being willing to stand up and 
				tell the truth about all of this. I think you're doing a great, 
				positive service to public-health.
				
				
				Dr. Blaylock: You're the one doing the service, because you're 
				putting the word out there. Without you, I would just be sitting 
				in a room fussing at the walls. It's people like you that get 
				this word out and let people know what's going on in the world.
 
				
				
				Mike: I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to pass a bill to 
				outlaw health talk on the internet.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: They're trying to do it. You know, 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 is coming over the internet on health issues, and we 
				need to regulate it.
 
				
				
				Mike: Well, I want to thank you very much for all your time.
				
				Dr. Blaylock: Thank you. I appreciate you giving me this 
				opportunity.