Read Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked for Free Online

exactly how much fruit they ate and might inflate the number of apples they report. Ultimately, if you like apples, eat more of them! If you are not an apple fan, do what you can to increase the amount of fruits and vegetables you eat in a day. Other fruits and vegetables and other healthy diet choices might help to keep the doctor away. Onion anyone?

Artificial Sweeteners
    Artificial sweeteners will give you cancer
    This one will undoubtedly inspire a lot of hate mail. It’s one of those myths that has left the realm of science and entered the realm of faith. We take on this chapter knowing that for many of you, no matter what we say, you are going to remain convinced that artificial sweeteners are linked to cancer. However, as we mentioned in the introduction, we do not want you to waste time being needlessly worried about things that are harmless.
    Not all artificial sweeteners are the same. Saccharin is one of the oldest. There have been more than fifty studies about the effect of saccharin on rats. About twenty of them involved rats consuming saccharin for at least one and a half years. Nineteen of these studies found no relationship between saccharin and cancer. One study found an increased rate of bladder cancer, but it was in a type of rat that easily gets infected with a bladder parasite that can leave it more susceptible to disease.
    Scientists then moved on to see if giving two generations of rats saccharin would do anything. They fed rats, and then their children, lots of saccharin. They found that male rats in the second generation got more bladder cancer. As a result, some countries banned saccharin, and others—like the U.S.—started labeling products with warnings. There was one problem: the link between saccharin and cancer couldn’t be found in humans. Later work found that often cancer induced in rats doesn’t equal cancer in humans. For instance, if you give rats vitamin C in the same doses as they used for saccharin in the other studies, vitamin C causes bladder cancer in rats too. Yet no one is attempting to ban vitamin C.
    Cyclamate is another kind of artificial sweetener that was approved by the FDA for use in the United States in 1950. Almost twenty years later, a landmark study found that cyclamate also increased the rate of bladder cancer in rats. This led to cyclamate being banned in a number of countries. Later, the ban was lifted pretty much everywhere but in the United States. In one of those studies you can’t believe they actually did, some scientists fed thirty-seven monkeys either no cyclamate, 100 mg/kg of cyclamate, or 500 mg/kg a cyclamate every day for twenty-four years. Twenty-four years! By the way, 500 mg/kg is like drinking thirty cans of diet soda a day. That’s a lot of cyclamate! At the end of the study, they killed the monkeys who had not yet died and autopsied all of them. Three animals that had been given cyclamate had cancers, but they were different types of cancer in different parts of the body, and they were common cancers in monkeys. The conclusion from this long research study was that there was no apparent increased risk of developing cancer—even after consuming that much cyclamate.
    Which brings us to aspartame. Approved for use in 1981, it wasn’t until 1996 when folks started worrying about aspartame containing carcinogens. In that year, a paper was published that got a lot of attention. This paper discussed the fact that there had been a recent increase in the incidence of brain tumors and questioned whether this could be linked to aspartame. As usually happens with these kinds of things, the media had a field day and people began to panic. But here’s the clincher: further investigations of National Cancer Institute statistics showed that the increase in brain tumors began in 1973, eight years before aspartame was introduced. Also, most of the increases in tumors were seen in people over seventy, who actually had the least exposure to aspartame. There is