Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (6 page)

“You need to familiarize yourself with the works of the experts,” she said.

I only had time to skim the rambling fifty-page document assembled by Dr. Schwab. While she and Leslie crunched away on their salad, I learned about a neurosurgeon named Dr. Russell Blaylock and the books of a diabetes specialist named Dr. H. J. Roberts.

Dr. Blaylock is a crusader against aspartame in food and fluoride in drinking water. He maintains a monthly health and wellness column on the rightwing News Max website and has appeared repeatedly on
The 700 Club
. His book,
Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills
, takes aim at aspartame and monosodium glutamate or MSG.

His colleague Dr. Roberts penned a supposedly authoritative book on the dangers of aspartame titled
Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic
. Aspartame disease is the name given to a multi-symptom illness that experts like Dr. Roberts believe is caused by aspartame toxicity. His book on the subject is over a thousand pages in length and joins other books by Roberts on artificial sweeteners as well as books on the dangers of vitamin E supplements and vasectomies.

I was initially suspicious of someone who seemed to be making a career out of finding deadly toxins in everyday items. I decided to trust Dr. Roberts as a source of information once I learned he also wrote a book about a 1985 visit by Princess Diana to Palm Beach, California.
Princess Diana: The House of Windsor and Palm Beach
includes “inside information” garnered by Dr. Roberts because “his wife, Carol, was the mayor of Palm Beach at the time.”

I was curious why a crusader against aspartame would be so concerned with a brief visit by Princess Diana to the United States that he would write a book about it.

My questions were answered by Dr. Schwab’s summary, “Dr. Roberts includes information relating to Diana’s problems (mood, bolemia[sic] and more) that may have been caused (or made worse) by the substance called aspartame.”

I looked up and re-clipped the stack of papers.

“You couldn’t have read all that,” Leslie said.

“You believe aspartame killed Princess Diana?” I asked.

“She died in a car accident, don’t be ridiculous,” Dr. Schwab scolded.

“She could have died from aspartame eventually,” Leslie added.

It took prodding to get Dr. Schwab to answer my original question about the dangerous effects of aspartame. She finally caved when Vic stopped by the table and asked if I needed another Diet Coke. I waved away the question, but Dr. Schwab was incensed.

“You know,” she began with an imperious tone, “that Diet Coke you love so much is more toxic than paint.”

“Acrylic or oil?”

“Wall paint, stupid,” Leslie interjected. “Don’t be stupid.”

I doubted I could survive drinking a can of paint, but I was pretty sure I could endure the same volume of Diet Coke. I said as much and Dr. Schwab shook her head.

“You would vomit from drinking that much paint; your body knows it’s poison and gets rid of it. Your body thinks Diet Coke is something good. It processes it as something good. But it isn’t.”

“It isn’t good?”

“No!” She slapped her palms on the table. “Aspartame is a poison. They use it to kill ants just like they’re using it to kill you.”

“So what does it do? How is it killing me? What are the ill effects of aspartame?”

“Death,” Dr. Schwab said. “Death if you’re lucky. Death eventually. Before you die though it rots your whole body. Diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure; it turns to formaldehyde in the eyeballs and causes blindness, headaches, cancer—they have found tumors of aspartame in people’s brains. Phenylalanine causes tumors. Multiple sclerosis, lupus—”

“Lupus?” I interrupted.

“Yes,” Dr. Schwab said. “Memory loss, seizures, chronic joint pain, birth defects, Gulf War disease.”

“I thought depleted uranium caused Gulf War disease,” I said, indicating the popular rumor about the mysterious illness.

“Those soldiers drank Diet Cokes and Diet Pepsis all day long in Iraq and it gets very hot. All of the symptoms they describe fit in perfectly. Thousands of them. Monsanto knew about this; they know it will break down into methanol in the heat and that it’s a poison and they continued to ship it overseas.”

“They made Agent Orange,” Leslie interjected. “Look at how that worked.”

“Why isn’t there a Gulf War syndrome for the current Iraq war?” I asked. “They’ve got to be drinking tons of Diet Coke over in Iraq now, and it’s been going on for years.”

“There will be,” Leslie interjected. “There will be a Gulf War syndrome. We already see it. I got an e-mail from a woman whose son is in Iraq and she said he gets these painful headaches and can’t sleep every night.”

“He’s in a war zone,” I said.

“Exactly,” Leslie said. “Exactly. He is in a war zone with Diet Coke.”

“There is no enemy more deadly than artificial sweetener,” Dr. Schwab agreed.

“What about the Nazis?”

“There has been more than one Holocaust,” Dr. Schwab said. “One Holocaust is going on right now from aspartame.”

She had just doubled down and upgraded aspartame’s crimes from mass murder to genocide.

“How many people have actually died from aspartame?”

“Countless,” replied Dr. Schwab.

I pressed her for an estimate.

“Ten million,” she said. “Maybe more or less by a million. It’s incredible. There are thousands dying all over the world from it and doctors won’t even acknowledge it. They assume it’s natural causes or other things.”

“Like depleted uranium,” I suggested.

“Other things. Whatever. Environmental factors. The symptoms resemble a variety of serious illnesses. Or they’re covering it up for payouts.”

“So we need to stop using it?”

“Stop, but be careful,” Dr. Schwab said. “You have to wean yourself off, because your body stops producing natural enzymes. You can have seizures or even go into a coma like a diabetic if you just quit cold turkey.”

I was a little surprised by this aspect. I had read about many of the supposed health risks relating to aspartame, but I had no idea that quitting it could be like quitting a serious drug.

“How is that possible?” I asked. “If not drinking Diet Cokes could cause you to have seizures and lapse into a coma, wouldn’t there be an epidemic of these sorts of problems? There are millions of Americans who drink diet sodas. What if they switched to water?”

“Aspartame is in water,” Leslie said.

“Trace amounts,” Dr. Schwab amended. “Enough to prevent withdrawal. Enough to be toxic.”

“Don’t they have to list that on the label?”

“You pee it out and then they bottle it,” Leslie pronounced with no further explanation.

“Aspartame is in over seven thousand products,” Dr. Schwab said. “Often it’s so far down on the list of ingredients you wouldn’t even notice it. It’s in medicines and foods. You have to be very careful to avoid aspartame.”

“So how do you avoid it if it’s in water and all this other stuff?”

“You educate yourself and…”

Dr. Schwab held up her thermos.

“Make your own water.”

I left Ed Debevic’s with two things certain in my mind: I was going to drink the first cold diet cola I could get my hands on and I was never going back to Ed Debevic’s. My thirst for diet cola wasn’t some outrageous need to show up Dr. Schwab. I needed something with aspartame because I believe that old cowboy wisdom that when your horse throws you in the dirt you better get right back on before it decides you don’t belong in the saddle.

If I didn’t act quickly my natural paranoia would take over and I’d fall into the horrible spiral of aspartame fears. If that happened my nightmares were sure to become a twisted,
Grease
-themed, aspartame apocalypse. Rizzos dead in the street from Gulf War syndrome. The Scorpions thrashing like epileptics in pools of Diet Dr Pepper.

I stopped at a gas station a few blocks away and made haste for the cooler in the back. I grabbed a Diet Coke, paid for it, and popped it open the moment I was back outside. It tasted crisp and jagged. It was refreshingly unlike something that should prominently feature skull and crossbones on the label and be kept out of reach of small children.

As I savored the deadly beverage, my mind snapped back to the parting comments from Dr. Schwab. We were standing just outside the door at Ed Debevic’s. I was eyeing my car, the thick stack of papers tucked under my arm. She was clinging to my bicep with a small hand, urgently telling me about Donald Rumsfeld.

“It may be a joke to you, but this is a deadly game to him. He was on Reagan’s transition team when he took office. He helped pick the FDA commissioner who approved aspartame. His former company, Searle, makes aspartame. They created it!”

I nodded, wanting to get away from Dr. Schwab and her huge doom-saying friend.

“Listen,” she said. “Listen. You know, ‘Beware the military-industrial complex.’ No, no, it’s, ‘Beware the pharmacological-food industrial complex.’ If you hear only one thing from me, if you only put one thing in your book, put that in there. These guys are putting their drugs in everything you eat and drink.”

Something in the sad desperation of that moment overwhelmed my cynicism. It wasn’t that I believed all the books claiming every food and drug and new sweetener causes every imaginable ailment, it was that I believed that she believed them.

There are those in the anti-aspartame groups cynically trying to make a profit from junk science and fearmongering. Even Princess Diana knew that. But many are honestly attracted to the topic by a need to believe that an evil force is manipulating the world, that a malign intellect is responsible for their woes.

I recognized the same desperation in dozens of other anti-aspartame devotees on the Internet. Some of them were conspiracy theory kooks, but many of them were people suffering from real problems who turned to the aspartame groups to explain the unexplainable. The case against aspartame was sold on peer pressure combined with a bewildering amount of allegedly scientific information.

Even I found it difficult to sort through which doctors were credible and which were just claiming credibility to line their pockets or empower themselves. It was easy to sympathize with people struggling with mystery illnesses, easy to understand how they could be made into believers.

It is the case with many of the subcultures born or nurtured on the Internet that devotion to the subculture can spread like a disease into the real world. There are hundreds of accounts of well-meaning anti-aspartame activists evangelizing to relatives and even strangers with serious illnesses. It’s one of the favorite subjects on forums devoted to the dangers of aspartame.

The results of this evangelizing can be mixed.

“I recognized the signs right away,” wrote one Internet poster. “Her daughter looked very sickly and was complaining of joint pain and weakness. Her mom said she had lymphoma and I saw she was drinking a Diet Sprite. Believe me I tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen. No matter what I said about the phenyl she wouldn’t listen. The stewardess asked me to calm down and I told her what was happening, and she gave me a look like she knew but there was nothing she could do. I had to sit there and watch them poison their child on the plane. It was an unpleasant flight.”

When confronted with contradictory findings from reputable sources, the anti-aspartame activist hardens his or her position and decries the sources as tainted by connections to “Big Aspartame.” On the Internet they retreat to their topic-specific forums, where the rare opposing viewpoints are offered by easily dismissed newcomers or those curious about aspartame who dare to question the one-sided research.

The attitudes set up a members-only mind-set. Those who understand that aspartame is a real danger are the insiders, and those who don’t understand are either ignorant or part of the aspartame conspiracy.

“We live in a world of sweet lies,” Dr. Schwab said as she followed me to my car. “Deadly lies. But if you see the lie, you can beat the lie.”

I didn’t know how to answer, so I just waved good-bye.

Congratulations, You Are Special and Horrible

Dr. Schwab, Leslie, and the Internet’s anti-aspartame movement convinced me they are suffering from Internet hypochondria, but they have as much in common with conspiracy theorists. I wanted real hypochondriacs and all these ladies were giving me were some convoluted stories involving Donald Rumsfeld and creepy medical testing.

The stack of papers Dr. Schwab gave me didn’t convince me any better than the anti-aspartame websites. There were no believable links between aspartame and the hundreds of physical ailments reported by supposed victims. The multilayered aspartame conspiracy became more improbable and convoluted the more I read.

I was waiting for a poisoned spy dart straight out of a Robert Ludlum book to shoot through a window and hit me in the neck. No doubt some shadowy aspartame agency taking me out for knowing too much.

Only, I didn’t know too much. I felt like I knew less than when I started. Figures, dubious data points about brain cancer, maybe, but I wasn’t any closer to the Internet hypochondriac.

I needed classic hypochondriacs, not people talking about the Trilateral Commission and the New World Order. I needed people with no ailments who believed they had a real medical condition. I needed to talk to people drowning in the fathomless ocean of medical information available at the deep end of a Google search.

Among hypochondriacs on the Internet there is a singular ailment that seems to be self-diagnosed more frequently than any other. It afflicts millions who had lived their lives knowing they were different, knowing they were special, but not fully understanding why. It is a self-diagnosis so insufferably egotistical that you might feel yourself hating someone for claiming the illness.

And yet, when you read the symptoms, you might just realize you too are suffering from…
Self-Diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome!