Marti Oakley Barb Peterson with Mary Nash Stoddard

http://www.aspartamesafety.com/mary_nash_stoddard.htm I grew up in a small rice farming community near the Gulf Coast of Texas. In 1956, while a senior at Eagle Lake High School, I was chosen from thousands of students, based on scholarship and community service achievements, to represent the Texas Rice Growers Association as their spokesperson for the year. Food and Farming have played a big role in my life. Even more so after my youngest child suffered a grand mal seizure in Nov. 1985, just nine months after her 42 year old father died with brain cancer. I had joined Weight Watchers to lose some weight, following his devastating illness and death, where I dutifully obeyed their instructions to switch to artificial sweetened foods and drinks containing aspartame. I gradually became more and more ill, culminating in a disturbing diagnosis of the life threatening blood disorder, Eosinophilia Myalgia, the deadly form of Fibromyalgia. On a hunch, with my doctor's blessing, I got off aspartame and took Crystal Light out of my child's diet and we got well. I was encouraged to start a campaign to inform an unsuspecting public about aspartame adverse reactions, which I did, prior to going to the Senate Hearing in Washington, Nov. 3, 1987 to present our story to the Senate Committee, chaired by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum. Since that time, I have qualified in courtroom proceedings as an Expert Medical Witness and served on the President's Select Committee on Food Safety, alongside representatives of the FDA, EPA, USDA and others. My co-founder, James Turner, Esq., and I have met many times with FDA and FAA officials in Washington. I have used my own limited funds to travel around the country and to As a voting member of the Texas Radio Hall of Fame and a broadcaster for many years [I was the first female Announcer in Dallas Radio in 1964], and as a spokesperson for the aspartame/Neotame awareness campaign.