NYT Strikes Again
The New York Times continues their scaremongering with this new wonderful piece of work, "The Safety of Aspartame."
The editorial starts off by stating that the study is "controversial" and "inconclusive." So if it is inconclusive, why bother writing an editorial about it? I'm just dissapointed that no writer attached their name to the piece, instead hiding behind the mysterious "Editorial" moniker.

Aspartame has been proven safe time and time again at the doses that most people would use it( like 18 diet cokes a day), so why is this study any different? Well according to the New York Times editorial board, the fact that they used over 1,000 rats makes it a good study....Along with different dosage levels(like 10,000 diet cokes a day).

"The study has definite strengths that add to its credence. It used a much larger number of laboratory rats — 1,900 in all — than any previous study, and it administered a wider range of doses, making it more likely that effects would be seen."

This is a ludicrous claim, just because there's more rats does not make it a good study.
Buried in the fifth paragraph, they glance over what makes this study completely worthless.

"There was an abnormally low incidence of cancers in a key control group, which could have made the cancer rate in rats fed aspartame look worse than it really was. And there was only a very weak relationship between the doses of aspartame administered and the cancer rate, which makes it hard to be sure that aspartame was causing the tumors"

A) Any person that knows anything about science knows that you must compare a control group to a group that has the variable you wish to study changed. The fact that there was only a weak relationship between dose and cancer means that it's not good data, and the control groups had "less than average rates of cancer" so even if the aspartame fed rats had normal rates of cancer, the data would appear to show that, Aspartame causes cancer!!
B)They fed rats until they died of natural causes, and then assesed the rats for cancer. This throws out most of your data in comparing the two contemporary groups, at least the significance of, due to the additional number of variables included in the data due to age differences.
C) The NYT glosses over the fact that even if they had good statistical evidence of a difference in cancer between the two groups it merely means that there might be a correlation, not anywhere close to causation, which almost every other study has not come close to showing.