June 8, 2018
Did you know that artificial sweeteners are common in food products that we use every day including, drinks, gum, protein powders, toothpaste, and packaged foods? But are they safe? Dr. Hotze is joined by author and the world’s foremost expert on artificial sweeteners, Dr. Janet Hull, for an in-depth discussion on the history and health consequences of common sweeteners including: Splenda, NutraSweet, Equal, Sweet’N Low, etc.
Watch as Dr Hotze. and Dr. Janet Hull reveal the dangerous side effects of aspartame and sucralose. You won’t ever want to use aspartame or Splenda again!
Stacey B.: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. We have such a great show for you today, but first if you haven’t already done so, you know where to download our podcasts, it is HotzePodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E Podcast.com. Great show for you today, we have Dr. Janet Hull on tap, and what is she going to talk about? She’s going to talk about the dangers of artificial sugars. I think a long, long time ago we were introduced to artificial sugars as a way to combat natural sugar, as something that would be better for us. Don’t know why, because as more and more studies come out, it really isn’t the best way to go. And so this is going to be quite the fascinating show, isn’t Dr. Hotze?
Dr. Hotze: It sure is. We’re pleased to have with us today Dr. Janet Starr Hull, who is a graduate, University of Texas, and did her undergrad work there, received a masters from A&M. So as she says, she’s conflicted. Aren’t you glad A&M and Texas don’t play anymore? You don’t have to be conflicted, you can cheer for them both, you don’t have to cheer against them.
So in her background, her undergraduate and Master’s studies were in environmental toxicology. She went on to get a Ph.D. in holistic nutrition from a naturopathic college in Birmingham, Alabama, that would be Clayton College. So she has, in her academic degree, she has the background of geology, international geography, environmental science, fitness training, and nutrition. She’s an OSHA, that’s the Occupational Safety and Health Act, certified Environmental Hazardous Waste Emergency Response Specialist, and she’s a toxicologist. She also was a firefighter, interestingly enough. I don’t know if you did that paid, or whether you’re a volunteer firefighter. Which was it?
Dr. Janet Hull: It was a volunteer-
Dr. Hotze: Volunteer.
Dr. Janet Hull:… firehouse outside of Grapevine, Texas.
Dr. Hotze: So, Dr. Janet Hull, since the early 1990s, has been on a mission to expose the dangers of the artificial sweeteners, particularly aspartame and sucralose. Aspartame would be the NutraSweet or Equal products you see at the restaurants, and sucralose would be the Splenda that’s in the yellow little packages. You’ve got the blue, you got the pink, and you got the yellow, and these are artificial sweeteners. Because of a health condition that occurred in her body, an adverse health reaction she had, which she believes was caused by aspartame, she began to drill down and study these artificial sweetener products that are so ubiquitous.
They’re not just in the packages and bags. They’re in our toothpastes. They’re in our chewing gum. They’re in our soft drinks, packaged foods, cookies, cakes, everywhere. You can hardly go anywhere where they’re not using some form of artificial sweetener, trying to convince the public that this is the way that you can stay healthy, and you don’t get diabetes, or if you have diabetes you can eat this with impunity and not have any health problems. Dr. Hull is going to explain to us why this is not the case, why these are dangerous substances. So Dr. Hull, you’ve got the floor. Tell us about aspartame, and tell us about sucralose, Equal, NutraSweet, and Splenda.
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, I really want to thank you for having me on, because this issue has been around for decades, and what surprises me is that it hasn’t been adjudicated. It’s not taken off the market. People still don’t know this information. It just goes on, and on, and on. So I get real encouraged, Dr. Hotze, when this topic continues to stay in the forefront, it continues to be talked about, because I would assume just about everybody would know their toxic dangers, but because they’re not properly informed, because it’s not mainstream news, and because they make so many billions of dollars off of it, it just goes on. But this has been an issue since the 1960s, and the history-
Dr. Hotze: Let me interrupt you for one minute.
Dr. Janet Hull: Sure.
Dr. Hotze: You made a very good point. You said because there’s so much money to be made in these artificial sweeteners, that they’re still on the market, and when you hear Dr. Hull today explain the detrimental and adverse effects that these particularly artificial chemicals, which have a sweet flavor, the adverse effects they have on your entire body, you’re going to say, “Why in the world wouldn’t the FDA ban these, keep them from being on the market?” And I always like to say…my dad used to tell me, “Son, if something seems out of the ordinary and inexplicable, when you know another way it should have been done and somebody does it completely different than what should have been done, there’s always a money trail.”
And what we have found in our interaction with the FDA and studying the FDA, the FDA is largely controlled by the pharmaceutical companies, which make our pharmaceutical drugs, and these companies also make these artificial sweeteners that are used. And because they’re so incredibly profitable, there’s no way that these drug companies are going to let that happen. So they have certain ways, I’m not saying how…and I know how some of it works, and we could talk about that, and have a whole program about the way the pharmaceutical companies influence the FDA, but that’s the case. And you’re exactly right when you say it has to do with the money. So tell us the dangers of these various drugs. When did it start? First, how did you get interested in it? What in the world…why did you get interested in studying artificial sweeteners and their adverse effects?
Dr. Janet Hull: I guess you could say it was serendipity. Of course, that makes it sound good, but now that I can look back at my experience, it was a life-changing experience that hit me personally. And it was serendipitous, because what I was able to learn and put together and bring to the public is helping save people’s lives. So it all turned out in the long run, but I almost died from it. Back in the day-
Dr. Hotze: What did you have? What happened to you?
Dr. Janet Hull: I was diagnosed with an incurable case of Graves’ disease.
Dr. Hotze: Well now, explain that to me. Incurable Graves’ disease, ladies and gentlemen, is an autoimmune disease of the thyroid where the thyroid gland leaks out high levels of thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormones, as you know if you’ve listened to my programs, govern our body’s, our cell’s ability to produce and utilize energy. So, if you get too much thyroid in your system, your body is going to overreact. It’s going to be hyper. It’s going to be hyper reactive. Your temperature’s going to go up. Your weight’s going to go down. You’re going to be shaky, or jittery, sweating, and it’s caused by an autoimmune disease of the…it’s really autoimmune thyroiditis. Grave is just the name of the doctor that diagnosed it. On the other side, you can also have autoimmune thyroiditis with Hashimoto’s disease, and this is much more common to see people with low thyroid conditions than hyperthyroid conditions, because we’ve been treating…we’ve looked at somewhere around 31,000 people for thyroid conditions, and it’s just a handful that I’ve had come in here with hyperthyroid.
Now, somebody could take too much thyroid, and be temporarily hyperthyroid, you know, if you took too much thyroid. We tell patients as we adjust their dose, and get them on a higher dose, and move up, if you get shaky, jittery, your heart races, you’re on too much thyroid. You’re in a hyperthyroid state, but that can be easily corrected using a beta blocker one time, and then cutting your thyroid out and backing up to a previous dose. So many people have autoimmune thyroiditis known as Hashimoto’s. That’s another doctor that developed or wrote about these symptoms of hypothyroidism, and when there are autoimmune antibodies to the thyroid, and an individual has low thyroid symptoms and produces low levels of thyroid, he is known as hypothyroid or has Hashimoto’s syndrome.
On the other hand, Dr. Hull had Graves’ disease, which means she had antibodies to the thyroid gland and it got the thyroid so inflamed that it began to leach out high levels of thyroid hormone. Now, Dr. Hull, routinely you can use…that’s not an incurable disease. Well, I mean, it’s…the only way you can cure it is either take antithyroidal drugs like propylthiouracil or methimazole, or you have-
Dr. Janet Hull: Which they had me on, yeah.
Dr. Hotze: …or you have an ablation of the thyroid. Which did you have?
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, I had neither. Well they put me on the medication for a very short amount of time, and then they recommended irradiating my thyroid gland, but I knew enough that I had gained 30 pounds, and I’m like hyperthyroidism…now, you’re correct. My resting heart rate was at 170 beats a minute. My blood pressure was about to code. I had lost my hair. I broke out in cystic acne. The retina in my eyes had holes in them, skin lesions, I mean it was awful.
Dr. Hotze: Did you develop-
Dr. Janet Hull: I didn’t realize how horrible I looked. But I-
Dr. Hotze: Did you develop the bulging eyes?
Dr. Janet Hull: Yes. Yes, I had the bulging eyes. My contact lenses wouldn’t stay on my eyes anymore. But, I had gained 30 pounds.
Dr. Hotze: Which is odd.
Dr. Janet Hull: So when I asked-
Dr. Hotze: That’s odd.
Dr. Janet Hull: Yes. Yes, and so when I asked the doctor, “Well, wait a minute. Why have I gained 30 pounds?” I wish you had been my doctor. He said, “Oh, you women, always worried about your weight. Don’t worry about your weight right now. We’ll just fix your thyroid, and put you back to normal.” So I asked him the question, “Well, why is all of this happening?” None of this was making sense to me, because this happened within a year, just one year, of drinking Diet Dr Pepper. I was teaching at the University of North Texas in Denton, and every afternoon when I left the campus to go through Dallas traffic to go back home, I started grabbing a Diet DP. Never used this stuff before, but this is 1991, so back then we didn’t have the internet, so you couldn’t get on and Google stuff. So I started drinking that Diet Dr Pepper on the commute home. I taught aerobics. I was a personal trainer just to stay in shape. Started gaining weight, so I started exercising more.
I would run on my days off from teaching aerobics and weight training. Started gaining weight, my health symptoms were getting worse, and finally after a year, about four o’clock in the morning when my resting heart rate in bed was at 170 I said, “Okay something’s wrong.” So I drove myself to the hospital and checked myself into the emergency room. I didn’t…because I am an environmental toxicologist, if there’s a toxic spill in the environment you just don’t dig the environment out. You look to see what caused it? What is the toxic chemical? How can you remove it safely, and then how can you restore that environment? So I was just in the mode and the train of thinking that this is what you do. So when I asked him what caused it, and he said, “Well, we don’t know. We have no idea,” I knew something had caused it. Something triggered it. It didn’t fly out of nowhere, because I’d always been very healthy, always. So I stayed in the hospital for three days to get my heart rate stabilized. I was skipping every fifth to sixth beat-
Dr. Hotze: What did they stabilize it with, beta blockers or what? Inderal? What did they stabilize-
Dr. Janet Hull: Yes. Yes, they did. Yes, they did. And he sent me home with the threat, warning that, “Be very cautious,” because this could kill me. I could die, and I was 36 years old at the time. So I checked myself out of the hospital after three days and I went home thinking, “All right, I’m going to figure out what is going on here, what caused it.” So I started looking for it like a good engineer. What did I do differently over that last year? I started backing up month by month, day by day, week by week. The only thing I had done differently was grabbing that Diet DP, and the more weight I had started gaining over that one year period, the more I did start using more NutraSweet. And all that was available at that time was NutraSweet, Equal. So I was using more and more diet products, not…to address the weight gain. So once I discovered that aspartame, that Diet Dr Pepper, I started digging and doing my research.
Back in the early 90s, I was one of the original research scientists that dug out all of the research findings, met all the researchers, met all of the people working on this issue. We had Senate hearings. There have actually been Senate hearings with Senator Ted Kennedy, and Metzenbaum, Orrin Hatch, all of that group back then. And I met Dr. John Olney, whose laboratory research from Washington School of Medicine had proven in the 1970s that aspartame ate holes in the brains of his laboratory animals … lesions, formed lesions. Dr. Dow-Edwards from SUNY University has research results that it lowers the IQ of her laboratory pups, and caused cleft palates. So I gathered all of this research up, and I’m like, “Bingo. I found it,” and got off of the aspartame. It took me about three months to get all of this together, got off of the aspartame, and immediately my thyroid began to restore. I got off my medication. Didn’t tell my doctor. Went in for those weekly blood tests, and lo and behold in six weeks, Dr. Hotze, six weeks, my thyroid returned to normal.
Dr. Hotze: Wow.
Dr. Janet Hull: It took a little bit longer for the weight to come off, but the blood pressure stabilized, the heart rate went back down. Keep in mind, I was a fitness instructor, and so the heart rate…I was in good physical condition, so I was able to restore my health in six weeks. When I finally went back to the doctor after I knew I was stable, I knew I was right, I knew it was the aspartame that did this, I told him what had happened. He was an internist, and shared with him what I had discovered, what I had done, the vitamins I began to take, I detoxed, and he stood up in that office and he leaned across his desk and his face turned beet red and he goes, “You cannot cure Graves’ disease. You do not know what you’re doing. I’m the doctor. You’re not. It will come back. You will…you’re going to die if you don’t do something about this,” and that was in 1991. Well, here I am in perfect health, and everything’s been great ever since.
So I compiled all of this information into my book Sweet Poison. It was very difficult to get that book sold because people were not coming out and standing up against Monsanto, Donald Rumsfeld, you know the gang. But I got it published in 1997, and it’s what they call the book has long legs. It’s still going strong. It sold in Great Britain until they banned it and took it off the shelves.
Dr. Hotze: Tell me why they did that? What was the reasoning for doing that?
Dr. Janet Hull: They were threatened to be sued. Because the laws are different over in the UK, and so my publisher was afraid she was going to get sued, so they removed it from the shelves. It is in Japanese-
Dr. Hotze: They don’t have freedom of speech, believe it or not, in the UK.
Dr. Janet Hull: Right. Right.
Dr. Hotze: There’s no constitutional right to freedom of speech.
Dr. Janet Hull: But is has been published in Japan-
Dr. Hotze: They’re trying to ban. We’re fighting.
Dr. Janet Hull: Yes. Yeah.
Dr. Hotze: Okay, so that book, let’s talk about that. Sweet Poison: How the World’s Most Popular Artificial Sweetener is Killing Us, My Story by Dr. Janet Hull.
Dr. Janet Hull: Yeah.
Dr. Hotze: And you’ve also written Splenda: Is It Safe or Not? As well as you have a…you’ve written a book on cancer prevention diet, The Richardson Cancer Prevention Diet. We won’t have time to talk about that today. We’d like to hear that, I mean, we may segue into that right at the end, but so you’ve written two really definitive works on, one, aspartame, and one on Splenda. Aspartame, by the way folks, is a name for the sweetener that contains primarily three chemicals. One, phenylalanine, which is an amino acid. It’s not an essential amino acid. Aspartame, which is also an amino acid, aspartic acid, and methanol, and these break down…the aspartame into methanol, then…aspartame will break down into methanol. Methanol then breaks down into formaldehyde, and what in the world do we use formaldehyde for? We give it to people when they…we give it to the faithfully departed. We embalmed them in formaldehyde. So talk to us about aspartame, and talk to us about the effects of formaldehyde, what an adverse effect that has on your health.
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, you know Dr. John Olney was saying that he discovered that when you isolate the amino acids, and you use them to control a drug or a medicine, that they turn toxic and their toxicity…he believes that the phenylalanine was what was causing the lesions in the brains of his laboratory mice. The aspartic acid was causing hyperactivity, and of course we know that the methanol is for embalming fluid. So I suppose you could say maybe my thyroid was being embalmed, because you know the thyroid gland is going to absorb all of that.
Dr. Hotze: Right.
Dr. Janet Hull: But what’s interesting is that G.D. Searle first discovered aspartame as an ulcer medication back in 1965. They were doing research for a new ulcer drug, and as it always seems to happen, he dropped his papers on the floor, and licked his fingers to get the papers up and go through them to make sure they were in order, and realized his fingers were sweet. So they just put two and two together. They had already applied for the FDA approval for a new drug, all they did was switch the paperwork as a food additive. So in essence, and what we used to ring the bell about back in the early 90s, well the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s with aspartame, was that this is an ulcer medication. That’s all it was discovered for. When it lost its patent, it was free game so the Chinese have been producing aspartame.
They’re the largest producer of aspartame in the United States, or in the world, but they do make a form in Germany. We do manufacture some in the United States, but what they’ve done now to re-up their patent is all they’ve ..they’ve just added a fourth ingredient to that mix, and then they re-patented it. And they-
Dr. Hotze: Is that the Searle corporation?
Dr. Janet Hull: Monsanto.
Dr. Hotze: Monsanto is the producer.
Dr. Janet Hull: Yeah.
Dr. Hotze: And what do they have in their aspartame now?
Dr. Janet Hull: The fourth ingredient is another…it’s a third amino acid. So they just piggybacked another amino acid on it, just to rename it and re-patent it.
Dr. Hotze: Did they have to go through a drug approval, or some form of FDA approval for that?
Dr. Janet Hull: Their form, right. They went through whatever routine they do to push it through, you know. But, they’ve renamed it Neotame, and one thing that’s interesting about this is they lifted the FDA warning for phenylketonurics, for PKU. So when Neotame is added into a product now, it doesn’t have to be labeled sugar-free, and it does not have to carry the PKU warning.
Dr. Hotze: Why doesn’t it have to be labeled sugar-free?
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, I was emailing with Jennifer Johnson the other day, and what happened to Jennifer happens to so many people. They are getting protein bars. They’re getting chewing gum at the checkout at the grocery store. They’re purchasing ice creams and protein powders that they would never ever assume had artificial sweeteners in them, and nowhere on this packaging does it say, “Contains artificial sweeteners,” or “Sugar-free.” It’s not even a fat-free or low-fat, you know, they should be saying sugar-free or low sugar maybe.
But, it had three different types, this protein bar she was exposed to I believe had three different types of artificial sweeteners, and one was sucralose. And she was having horrible reactions to this until she finally realized, “Oh my gosh. I’m getting sucralose,” which is Splenda. So she was having reactions to it, and I believe people are having reactions to these products completely unaware that they are exposed to them, and that they’re getting into them. And they don’t have enough information in order to go back and track it, and follow it down like I did.
Stacey B.: Yeah. They’re switching the names around. So is Neotame something that people could see on a label that would clue them in as well, not just sucralose?
Dr. Janet Hull: It’s not labeled very much. It’s really actually hard to find a product that has the Neotame label on it, but it’s in there. And that’s the thing that’s so hard as a researcher to nail down, because they’ll have aspartame, they’ll have sucralose, they’ll have Ace K, saccharin, Stevia is being added. They’re all being added to the same products. So everybody’s got a little tiny piece of the pie. Everybody’s making a little bit of money, and they’re piling all of these different chemicals together so that they all react in different ways with different people, plus they react with one another. But it’s very unusual to find the label Neotame. When it first came out I could find it. Now, I’m having a very difficult time finding Neotame labeled on anything.
Dr. Hotze: Listen, I want to-
Dr. Janet Hull: If it’s less than 2%, they don’t have to put it on there at all.
Dr. Hotze: Let’s just run down a list right here of what products, food products, that would contain or could contain aspartame. Of course the diet soda waters, sweetener packets that you have at the restaurants, breakfast cereal oftentimes will have these artificial sweeteners there, gum of course, many of the candies, gelatin, granola bars, protein bars. And you’re telling me in the protein bars, they don’t say that aspartame’s in it?
Dr. Janet Hull: No.
Dr. Hotze: Huh?
Dr. Janet Hull: No, they do not. They do not. They do not say…there’s no PKU warning on it. There’s no artificial sweetener added to it warning label at all. You have to go through…and you know a protein bar, the ingredient label is tiny.
Dr. Hotze: Right.
Dr. Janet Hull: You have to go through and read it all. Four, four different artificial sweeteners were in that one protein bar. Who’d guess?
Dr. Hotze: Pudding, low-fat yogurt, fruit cups, and some over-the-counter medications.
Dr. Janet Hull: Syrups.
Dr. Hotze: And syrups, of course. Let’s see if we have a list…and of course the sucralose can be in any of these products as well, and they may be combined, but usually they’re not. They use one or the other. So both these products are artificial. That means they don’t exist in this combination in nature. Now, they might argue on the one side those that promote and sell aspartame…and I’ve read the articles about that. They go, “Well, these occur in nature for crying out loud. I mean, phenylalanine and aspartame, they’re just amino acids, so that’s fine.” But they do contain methanol, and if I’m not incorrect that aspartame can be converted to methanol as well. Can’t it?
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, the methanol will break free at 86 degrees Fahrenheit, and so down here in Texas, as you well know, you’re going to get that in the transport truck.
Dr. Hotze: Right. And that the methanol gets converted to formaldehyde.
Dr. Janet Hull: Into the formic acid and the formaldehyde. That’s correct. So you’ve got this abundance of an isolated phenylalanine and an isolated aspartic acid, and the aspartic acid is probably what’s going to affect the eyes and the retina more than anything. The phenylalanine, again, Dr. John Olney had proven that that’s what ate the holes in the brain mass of his laboratory mice. And then you’ve got that they’re bonded together by the methanol, free methanol, white lightning, rotgut alcohol, and once that is released, then that again will metabolize into formic acid and formaldehyde.
Something interesting, people that are drug addicts or alcoholics, they’re addicted to aspartame because of its methanol. So the body is getting that signal. It’s getting hit with, “Okay there’s…you’re not drinking a whole lot, but we got a little bit of methanol in here.”So alcoholics have a tendency to drink two to four liters of diet drinks a day, and chew the gum, and they are addicted to it. So people need to really watch out for that if they have addictive tendencies, and drug addictions could be thrown into that as well, just because it triggers that memory in the brain.
Dr. Hotze: Sucralose is sucrose with a chlorinated…it’s a chlorinated hydrocarbon. They’ve added chlorine to the sucrose. Sucrose is a sugar molecule. It’s broken down in the body into glucose, so it’s a natural sugar. They took a natural sugar, sucrose, and they bound to it chlorine. Who makes sucralose?
Dr. Janet Hull: What was interesting is the information-
Dr. Hotze: Who makes-
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, Tate & Lyle discovered…the sugar company in the UK discovered sucralose, and they went after it. They were looking for a competitor to aspartame. So this wasn’t accidental at all. Johnson & Johnson markets it as Splenda, so they bought the rights to market it as Splenda. So McNeil Nutritionals is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, and I believe I’m correct on that golly gee. So what we’re looking at-
Dr. Hotze: Well anyway, what we’ve got here-
Dr. Janet Hull: Sorry?
Dr. Hotze: …you’ve got a chlorinated hydrocarbon, and chlorinated hydrocarbons are carcinogenic. Why in the world-
Dr. Janet Hull: They literally removed three-quarters of that sugar molecule and inserted chlorine, but in order…it’s in Splenda: Is it Safe or Not, it’s in the book. Because of my work with the aspartame and the NutraSweet industry, all of the researchers that were working on whether sucralose was safe or not, they sent me all of the original work. So I have the original research studies from Tate & Lyle, and in there in order to get that chlorine to lock in and stay, because you know chlorine just combines with anything.
Dr. Hotze: Right.
Dr. Janet Hull: And so in order to get it to stay in there with that one quarter sugar atom, they had to insert lithium chloride. They inserted ethanol and methanol. They inserted acetone. I mean, they used all kinds of crazy solvents to get that chlorine to stay locked in, and they claimed that it did not digest, but the Japanese did some super studies proving that at least 15% of that chlorine does digest. It will break free when you ingest it, hence you’re going to have GI problems, IBS, bladder infections, kidney infections. You’re going to have every health symptom that’s going to mock drinking chlorine, and that’s what happens when you ingest Splenda. And it caused the laboratory mice to have paralysis in their hind legs, and it lowered fertility rates. Nasty stuff, huh?
Dr. Hotze: Well…So folks, what we’re talking about here are the dangerous, adverse, deleterious side effects of these artificial sweeteners. We used to have cyclamates in the old days. I think they took those off the market. They were proven to increase the risk of cancer, and some of them…What were the other artificial sugars besides cyclamates?
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, I will tell you acesulfame K, Ace K, has been proven to cause cancer. But, the history of saccharin is interesting. When I was doing my research on NutraSweet and Equal, because the Monsanto chemical company owned the original patent for saccharin, all of this information about saccharin was coming up for me. Now a lot of this information is really hard to find now, so I’ve got it all saved in lots of different places. But saccharin never caused cancer, never. That was a marketing ploy. Monsanto used it…Their first customer was the Coca-Cola company in 1902, so the original Coca-Cola had saccharin, but they never were able to get Fresca, and Tab, and any of the diet drinks off and going in the 1950s and 60s when they were trying to market that.
So they knew that saccharin wasn’t really doing much, had a bitter taste, and it just wasn’t very popular. So when G.D. Searle discovered NutraSweet, Equal, or aspartame, the Monsanto chemical company worked on them for quite a while to purchase that patent, and then they purchased G.D. Searle. So when they did that, they formed the NutraSweet company. They did this massive marketing campaign, pushed it through the FDA in the early 1970s, and then that was immediately rescinded because Dr. John Olney and several other research scientists went to Congress and said, “No, no, no, no, no. This stuff is not to be put on the market. It’s toxic.”
So they left saccharin available for the 10 year period, from the 70s to 1981-82, while they were building the Duke Research Center, while they were buying their research scientists, and while they were buying their politicians. They left saccharin safe until they finally got aspartame approved the second time in the 80s, then they slapped the cancer warning on the saccharin, but at that time they agreed to take the cancer warning off in 2001. The whole thing was a marketing set up, and it was very well organized and structured.
So saccharin never did cause cancer, never did. That was cyclamate they used in that study, and they lifted the cancer warning in 2002. It took them an extra year. Saccharin, in my opinion, is perfectly safe. If a diabetic, or if someone who is stubborn and is going to not listen to us, if they’re going to pick a pink, yellow, or blue packet, I always recommend to them to pick the pink, because it doesn’t spike your blood sugar if you’re diabetic. It doesn’t cause cancer, that…totally bogus. Isn’t that interesting?
Dr. Hotze: Right. So the pink artificial sweetener is what? In the pink package?
Stacey B.: Saccharin.
Dr. Janet Hull: That’s correct. Yep, that’s correct.
Dr. Hotze: Yeah, but what’s the name of it? What’s the trade name?
Dr. Janet Hull: Sweet’N Low.
Stacey B.: Oh, Sweet’N Low?
Dr. Hotze: Sweet’N Low. Okay.
Stacey B.: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s right.
Dr. Janet Hull: But see, what’s interesting is Monsanto owns the patent on both aspartame, NutraSweet, Equal, saccharine and Sweet’N Low. They owned both of the patents for decades. Isn’t that interesting?
Dr. Hotze: Okay. Tell me about Stevia. Tell me about stevia, natural sweetener stevia and erythritol.
Dr. Janet Hull: Okay. I call all of the itols, maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol, erythritol, those are gray areas sweeteners in my opinion. They are sort of like your corn syrup, or like you had said they were trying to market aspartame as being originally natural, because it comes from amino acids.
Dr. Hotze: Right.
Dr. Janet Hull: It’s manufactured, but yet it doesn’t have a whole bunch of toxic chemicals added to it in order to lock it in, and get it to digest slowly, and all that, but the sugar alcohols are so potent. They’ve been extracted from their fruit or vegetable sources. They have been altered in the lab. They have been manufactured slightly, and so by the time you ingest them, they are so potent, and so strong, they will spike blood sugar. They will cause IBS, lots of stomach aches, nausea, diarrhea.
So if you’re chewing, it’s a better choice for your gums, for chewing gums, but you have to be very, very careful. If your child is chewing gum for example, and then complains of a tummy ache, he’s telling you he’s got a stomach ache from the fruit alcohols that were in that gum, from the erythritol or the sorbitol. So it can cause stomach cramping, so that’s a real deal. That’s why it’s a gray area to me, and I tell people just to watch it.
Dr. Hotze: What about stevia?
Dr. Janet Hull: Stevia is fabulous. If you’ve traveled to Central America, you know that they have used that in Uruguay and Paraguay for over 1,500 years. It’s no different than chewing a basil leaf, or an oregano leaf, or a rosemary leaf. It’s a natural plant. It’s a natural leaf that grows in the rainforests there, and it’s extremely sweet, and people have been chewing that for gum health. It actually helps with gum and dental issues. Could you imagine if we put that in toothpastes?
So when that was brought into the United States back in the 80s, the FDA shut every attempt to bring it in down. Do you remember Oscar with the Stevita Company in Arlington, Texas?
Dr. Hotze: No, no.
Dr. Janet Hull: Do you remember that history?
Dr. Hotze: No, I don’t.
Dr. Janet Hull: He was the one that brought Stevia in originally in the United States. Well, I was there when the FDA raided his warehouses. They confiscated all of his Stevia, and they literally burned all of his Stevia cookbooks. It was it was surreal. It was absolutely surreal. So it’s taken a very long time for Stevia to make its way onto the American market, but that’s what they use in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore. All over the Far East, they’ve used Stevia for decades. They use it in Europe. They use it of course in South America.
So Stevia is a very natural, a very safe, a very healthy sweetener. Like anything else, you don’t want to overdo. Don’t use too much. Don’t use it for too long throughout the day, and always make sure to get a pure form. There’s a form, I don’t know if I should say their name or not, but it starts with a T, where they are marketing Stevia that’s a little bit Stevia and a whole lot of other stuff. A lot of preservatives in that. They, to make profits, they’ve stretched out that Stevia so it’s very little in that product. What you want to do is go to pure Stevia manufacturers. It’s fine in the powdered form, in the leaf form, and in the tablet form. So Stevia’s wonderful.
Dr. Hotze: We’ve got a liquid form we carry here at Hotze Vitamins. A liquid form, so you’re going to get it in a dropper. One drop is equal to, is equivalent to a teaspoon of sugar. So we use Stevia, and highly recommend that for the reasons that Dr. Hull has explained. Because it’s natural, it’s safe, and it has no unnatural chemicals in it, and so we highly recommend using Stevia extract. You can get it in a powder form, you can get it in a dropper form, either way, get it in packages or in a little bottle, and you’ll find that satisfy any…your sugar desires, your sugar cravings.
Now, let’s go back and just summarize this. First, people eliminate sugar, which is good. Sugar can be very bad for you. We’re talking about sucrose, glucose, fructose. Too much sugar, your body ends up burning sugar in your mitochondria. It’s a very inefficient way to burn. It burns up quickly. You find yourself frequently getting sugar highs, sugar lows, constantly hungry. So people want to eat not only sugar, but all the simple carbohydrates, the pizza, pasta, bread, cookies, cakes, cereals. All these things are made of grain products. Grain products are simply starches, and starches are simply sugar molecules hooked together, so as soon as you put them in your body, you begin to break them down, and you get elevated sugar levels.
So when our government has as their healthy diet…the FDA promotes and the health department promotes…they say, “Eat a lot of grains, and then a little greens, and then a little less meat, and a little bit of fat.” Well, we’d say that that pyramid is upside down. So we would recommend more of a ketogenic eating program. Burn fat rather than burn sugar. Now, does it mean you should never ever have a piece of bread, or never have any dessert at all? No, you can, but you got to get down to your right body weight, and you’ve got to go get it on a ketogenic eating program.
Sugar causes inflammation in the body. So people say, “Well, sugar’s not good for you. It gives me, you know, diabetes and all that, so I’m going to take these artificial sweeteners.” Well, the artificial sweeteners, it’s like going from the pot into the fire, the frying pan into the fire. You’re getting worse problems. Now you’re getting all the chemical problems that are associated with it, so you’re just exchanging one series of adverse problems for another, and so what we would recommend is that just go natural. How hard is this to figure out, you know?
Why should I put something unnatural into my body in an unnatural form? Why don’t I just use Stevia? And that’s what we recommend, and I’ve used that for years, and that will control…If you have diabetes, you can take that, and you can make all kinds of great cakes. You can make ice cream with Stevia. Stevia is just a great sugar substitute that’s natural, and it’s healthy, and it’s not going to cause you these severe and serious side effects that you get from taking aspartame and from taking Splenda or sucralose.
So Dr. Hull, I’m going to congratulate you on the outstanding research work you’ve done to expose, and I haven’t read your books, but I’ve known about this for years and we’ve always…in fact I heard Splenda at one time, and I saw it mentioned in one of your articles there that Splenda at one time had been used as an insecticide to kill ants when-
Dr. Janet Hull: Well, that was the aspartame. That was the aspartame.
Dr. Hotze: Was that the aspartame that was that?
Dr. Janet Hull: Yeah.
Dr. Hotze: Okay.
Dr. Janet Hull: Yeah.
Dr. Hotze: So anyway-
Dr. Janet Hull: You can put a diet cola can…and see we’re in Texas, right? So you can set outside in the sunshine a regular Coca-Cola can and a Diet Coca-Cola can. The ants will not touch the Diet Coca-Cola can. They’ll be all over the regular one. They won’t go to it.
Dr. Hotze: That ought to tell you something right there, folks. Just look at nature, with God’s nature, it’ll tell you what’s good for you and what’s bad for you. Dr. Hull, thank you so-
Dr. Janet Hull: I have a question. Can I ask you a quick question?
Dr. Hotze: Sure. Sure.
Dr. Janet Hull: One thing that I’ve always wondered about, when people go to the doctor, because they’re going to have all kinds of different reactions to these artificial sweeteners…again, it’s going to go where the weak link is, right? It’s going to affect their eyes, or maybe their hormones, or maybe their skin, or their blood pressure. When they go to the doctor, and they have these health symptoms, what I see out of the clients that I work with and counsel, the doctors will not find anything. And this happened to me. Except for my T3 and T4, there were no symptoms, you know, on blood tests and stuff.
Typically, people don’t…the doctors don’t see anything, so they send them home with this big question mark on, “Well, we don’t know what’s going on, but here’s this prescription.” They never once ask them if they’re using aspartame, sucralose, or you know…They’ll ask them if they’re on medicines, right? But they never ask them if they’re on aspartame. What can we do to encourage doctors to just ask that question, because when they remove the aspartame, 9 out of 10 of their health symptoms are going to go away.
Dr. Hotze: No, I think that is a very, very good point you make, and I don’t know why doctors don’t do that. I know that we’ve all …we encourage people get off…if it’s in a can, package, a box, just don’t use it. I ought to…and we talked…but this is really the first podcast I’ve done on the artificial sweeteners. Although we don’t use artificial sweeteners, and we promote Stevia, but we ourselves, and we’re big on natural approaches to health…that’s why we got you on the program today, because we need to be more proactive with all our guests.
And in this podcast, what I want are our guests and our listeners to do…hey folks, as Bob Newhart says…and go watch it on YouTube. Bob Newhart, its entitled Stop It. Here’s what Bob Newhart would say. If you’re having all these symptoms, and you’re using all these artificial…your drinks with artificial sweeteners in it, Bob Newhart would say, “What I want you to do is hear two words. Just two words, and no you don’t need to write it down. You ought to be able to remember two words.” And here’s what Bob Newhart would say, and this is what I would say, “If you’re taking…if you’re having a host of adverse medical symptoms that your doctor goes, “You know, I don’t know what in the world is going on here. I think we’re just going to give you an antidepressant, because you’re a depressed person.”” Well, if they tell you that, here’s what I want you to do, if you’re drinking all these artificial drinks and getting all these artificial sweeteners in your body, two words.
You ready? Stop it. Just stop it. No you don’t need to write it down. Oh, you’re wondering if I mean stop it? Yes, I mean stop it. It’s funny, people often ask me, “What do you mean by stop it?” It’s really not rocket science. S-T-O-P stop it, I-T. Quit doing it. Stop it. That’s all you have to do. If you want to be healthy and well, sometimes you’ve got to do a 180, and go in the exact opposite direction you’re going. So if you’re using these artificial sweeteners, stop it.
Stacey B.: And Dr. Hull-
Dr. Janet Hull: And expect withdrawal symptoms too, because it’s very addictive.
Stacey B.: That’s very true. So Dr. Hull your information today was both fascinating and terrifying. I’m sure people want to learn more about you, how they can find you. Is that JanetHull.com?
Dr. Janet Hull: It is, Stacey, and thank you very much. Yes.
Stacey B.: Yeah, so J-A-N-E-T-H-U-L-L.com, and then SweetPoison.com. That’s where they can find out more about one of your books.
Dr. Janet Hull: Right. I’ve got several different websites, because as Dr. Hotze was saying, I’ve worked with the cancer doctors that were in the 1930s, I’ve published their information. I’ve got lots of different stuff going on, but JanetHull.com is my mother ship, my landing page, and they can just find me everywhere from there. We’ll spiderweb out from that one.
Dr. Hotze: Janet, I just want to congratulate you on the outstanding work you’ve done. You haven’t quit. You’ve kept up the fight, and just talking to you today just reignites my interest in this whole topic of artificial sweeteners to make sure that with our guests here that we make sure that they know like even when we recommend Stevia, that means they need to be stopping all these artificial sweeteners that they’re taking in their diets and in their drinks. So thank you so much for your hard work, and we appreciate you, and congratulations on your success.
Stacey B.: Yes, thank you Dr. Hull.
Dr. Janet Hull: Thank y’all. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure talking to somebody with a similar accent.
Dr. Hotze: Well, God bless you. Thank each one of you all for listening to…
Stacey B.: Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. And as a reminder to all of our listeners, we do offer Stevia, the pure Stevia that Dr. Hull talked about. All you have to do is go to HotzeVitamins.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E vitamins.com, or you can give us call at 1-800-579-6545. That’s 1-800-579-6545. Always a pleasure having you join us here at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.
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Since 1989, Hotze Health & Wellness Center has helped over 33,000 patients get their lives back using bioidentical hormones that restore hormones to optimal levels, strengthen immune systems, and increase energy levels. Our treatment regimen addresses the root cause of hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies, and candida.
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I am one of those people who have the taste buds that stevia is extremely bitter with a licorice after taste which I cannot stand. What about Monk Fruit? I have tried that and can live with it. I was using Ideal sweetner because I thought it was natural xylitol, only to find out it had sucralose in it. My weight loss has completely stalled, despite doing keto for over a year.