[Sailor Steve]

I don't drink diet soda either, because I hate the taste. I do drink a lot of hot and iced tea, and I use aspartame almost exclusively, mainly because sucralose (Splenda) is so expensive. But wait, someone is also claiming that sucralose is dangerous! Saccharin? Hate the stuff. It has a terrible aftertaste. So what to do? Learn to like unsweetened stuff? Not gonna happen. Use sugar? Not exactly good for the diabetes, though I do still help myself to the occasional Doctor Pepper.

The article sites over 200 studies since 1965. Sure, you can ask who funded them, but the same shoe fits on the other foot. What exactly is the motive behind the claims of serious dangers? They don't exactly provide solid evidence; more like scare tactics.

There was a big saccharin scare decades ago. It caused cancer in lab rats. Then someone tried to dismiss the results by pointing out that the doses given the rats equalled drinking approximately 500 cans of diet soda per day. Silly, but of course you could take saccharin tablets equaling that amount. The bottom line came when real studies ended up showing that human and rat urinary tracts were quite different, and in the 133 years since saccharin came into use not one bladder cancer death could be directly attributed to saccharin consumption.

The real question is how many studies have shown that aspartame is a truly serious health threat? I've read a lot of the articles, pro and con, and so far it seems that the ones who claim it is are the ones with the agendas.

As to the topic at hand, I think that it's very difficult to test for this kind of thing. One batch of canteloupes were infested, and that was one batch that weren't tested. It's impossible to test everything that grows, and sometimes something slips through. I'm not sure this is anybody's fault. It may be, but not necessarily.