[graeme]

Your claims about aspartame's safety are not correct, and do not lend confidence to your argument about GMOs.

A quick search on google scholar found dozens of articles like this that suggest problems linked to aspartame use:

http://m.ajcn.nutrition.org/content/96/6/1249.full

The jury is still out, but it's not correct to say that aspartame has been proven conclusively safe.

[gambiter]

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. A quick google search does you no good because of all of the misinformation about it. Read the real information... Wikipedia has a great summary with plenty of references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame#Safety_and_health_eff...

I would also like to point out the conclusion in the article you linked:

> These 3 studies add to a growing body of evidence on the adverse health effects of soft drinks; however, given the limited and conflicting data available, these findings can at the present time be considered only suggestive, not conclusive, but they warrant further investigation in other prospective studies with data on long-term intake of soft drinks, diet soft drinks, and aspartame

Take that along with the extensive references in the Wikipedia article and you can see why I say the public is asking the food industry to prove a negative. The closest they can come is, "something that contains aspartame seems to be a bit unhealthy, but not always, but sometimes," yet those same people (like you) will say that aspartame itself is the issue. It's just silly.

[graeme]

Have you read the studies linking aspartame to changes in gut biome? For instance this one:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25313461/

You may be right about aspartame. I'm not an expert. Perhaps that study was also disproven.

But my larger point is that it's really, really hard to prove a negative to an acceptable standard. Particularly across all categories we care about, not just cancer and heart disease.

Have the biome effects been disproven too?