Tom Sanders

Prof Tom Sanders is Head of the Nutritional Sciences Research Division, King's College London.

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Sanders has made a name for himself defending the safety of the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame (sold as Nutrasweet) in the media. He said:

The key point is that we can help people to live healthier lives if they can reduce their calorie intake. Sweeteners (aspartame) have a valuable role to play in the fight against obesity.

In response to the view of the American Association of Neuropathologists that there was a link between aspartame and brain cancer, Sanders said:

There is simply no evidence to show aspartame causes cancer. It is probably the most stiffly tested substance we consume.

Sanders was the chief "top scientist" quoted in a press release from Nutrasweet dismissing a research paper by Dr John Olney of the Department of Psychiatry, Washington University Medical School, that suggested a link between brain tumours and aspartame. Sanders said Olney's paper was "preposterous", "seriously flawed" and "without merit". However, Sanders did not provide any arguments to back up his claims. Olney, in contrast, did back up his arguments, in his peer-reviewed research paper.

Though Sanders believes aspartame can help people live healthier lives (above), he is not so impressed by the health benefits of fresh fruit. In an article titled "The myths of fruit", Sanders was quoted as saying that drinking liquidised fresh fruit compared unfavourably to drinking Coke:

If you liquidise it into goo it's just like drinking ordinary Coke. Or worse, actually. It's still a sugary drink. A lot of people on diets don't realise that if they're drinking loads of apple juice or orange juice, it's got a lot of calories in. If you drink a litre of apple juice a day, it'll be 400 calories.

However, this claim only takes into consideration the one factor of calories - not vitamins and minerals, which are arguably a more important factor in choosing a drink. People on a diet still need their nutrients - one could say, more than those eating an unrestricted diet.

Affiliations and consultancies

An article in The Independent in 1996 described Sanders as "Nutrasweet's professional consultant". At this time, Nutrasweet was owned by Monsanto, which acquired G. D. Searle & Company, the company that owned the patent on aspartame, in 1985. Investment firm J.W. Childs Associates purchased Nutrasweet from Monsanto in 2000. Aspartame is commonly manufactured using genetically modified bacteria.

Food writer Felicity Lawrence, in a 2010 article that scathingly commented on the nutritional value of manufactured breakfast cereals, reported that the cereals manufacturing industry had

recruited Professor Tom Sanders, head of the nutrition department at King's College London, to defend 'breakfast cereals served with semi-skimmed milk' as 'low energy meals that provide about one fifth of the micronutrients of children'.

Criticism of study on GM potatoes

In 1998 researcher Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute in Scotland went public with his team's research showing that GM potatoes had harmful effects on rats (the research was later published in The Lancet).

In the subsequent media furore, a rapid rebuttal campaign swung into action. Sanders was quoted in a Scientific American article of 1999 as asserting that all that Pusztai's experiments "definitively proved was that eating raw potatoes, which are indigestible, is harmful to mammals -- something that has been known for many years."

In fact, in the research study, harmful effects were found from feeding cooked GM potatoes, too, but these harmful effects were not found in the rats fed the non-GM control potatoes, even when raw. In other words, Sanders's argument was completely spurious, though it went unchallenged in the media.

Sanders gave a second 'spoiler' quote to The Independent, also in 1999, in which he questioned the validity of Pusztai's findings on the basis that in the GM-fed rats, "differences in brain weight were reported, as brain weight is generally not influenced by diet in adult rats."

By Sanders's logic, only scientific findings that Sanders had heard about before and was expecting, were acceptable, and no unexpected results from GM food (in this case, shrinkage of the brain) could possibly be valid.

Sanders also claimed in his interview with The Independent that the ill effects seen in the rats were due to protein deprivation, when in fact the treatment and control diets had the same amount of protein (were isoproteinic) and all diets met government standards for experimental rodent diets.

Sanders seemingly did not disclose (or the publications did not report) when he gave his 'spoiler' quotes in 1999 to Scientific American and The Independent that he was either currently or in the recent past (1996) a consultant to Nutrasweet, a Monsanto-owned company. Indeed, The Independent should have known this, as a 1996 article in the same newspaper identified him as a consultant to Nutrasweet (see Affiliations and consultancies).

Criticism of study on GM maize

In September 2012 a study was published showing that the commercialised GM maize NK603 caused massive tumours, organ damage, and premature death in rats fed the maize over a lifetime. Similar effects were seen in rats fed tiny amounts of the herbicide Roundup, which NK603 is engineered to tolerate, below levels permitted in food, feed and drinking water.

On the same day the study was released, the Science Media Centre in the UK rushed out a collection of spoiler quotes from "experts" refuting the study.

Sanders provided one quote, which was cited in a Reuters report on the study.

Sanders said:

Most toxicology studies are terminated at normal lifespan i.e. 2 years. Immortality is not an alternative. No food intake data is provided or growth data. This strain of rat is very prone to mammary tumours particularly when food intake is not restricted.

There is a lack of information on the composition of the diet. One concern is whether there were mycotoxins in the maize meal because of improper storage. Zearalanone is a well know phytoestrogen produced by filamentous fungi that grow on maize.

The statistical methods are unconventional, there is no clearly defined data analysis plan and probabilities are not adjusted for multiple comparisons.

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