Aspertame is the most-tested food additive ever. There has never been proven any causal link to cancer, not in the decades anyone has tried, and there still hasn’t— not even in this year-old article.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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I feel like this is a difficult subject, since there's two sides that are willing to pour money into research that's biased one way or the other (Big sugar vs the artificial sweeteners).
The article is perhaps advocating for an overly cautious position. Traditionally, I've been pro-artificial sweeteners, and considered aspartame quite safe, but specifically, this part in the article:
the IARC is more selective in its use of unpublished, confidential commercial data, and it takes greater care to exclude people with conflicts of interest from contributing to its evaluations.
A few years ago, Millstone and a co-author looked closely at how the European Food Safety Authority had weighed the 154 studies on aspartame safety when it looked to assess the product in 2013. About half of the studies favored aspartame’s safety and about half indicated it might do harm.
The agency had judged all of the harm-suggesting studies — but only a quarter of the safety-affirming studies — to be “unreliable,” wrote the authors. And the agency had applied looser quality standards to the studies suggesting safety than it had to the studies suggesting harm. Agency reviewers pushed back against Millstone’s assessment. And in any case, aspartame has remained on the European market.
Was a little concerning.
The conflict of interest even more so:
The FDA has rules about who can serve on its advisory committees that are aimed at preventing conflicts of interest. However, a recent investigation by ProPublica found that consultants employed by McKinsey worked for the FDA on drug safety monitoring projects while simultaneously working for pharmaceutical companies directly affected by those projects.
As much as you may try to use a straw man to shift the discussion to governing or regulatory agencies, there is still no actual evidence linking aspartame to harmful effects in humans when used as a food additive.
Different agencies and studies can irresponsibly throw around words like “maybe” and “possibly” and “might”, but until there’s any real evidence linking aspartame’s use as a sweetener to an illness in a human, then it’s nothing but fear-mongering.
I don't believe I'm straw manning, and I think your characterization of that is a little unwarranted.
There is no study that conclusively points to it being harmful, that is true. But when there's a lot of money on the line and conflicts of interest start getting involved, I don't think it's entirely out of the question to be at least slightly wary of the 'official' recommendation from a verifiably financially biased institution. Regular folk aren't going to research all 154 studies on a single sweetener, making them inherently reliant on institutions (who can do meta studies) for advice. It's the quintessential laymen's quandary.
The EU seems to be, at least nowadays, a more trustworthy source regarding food safety, and are certainly more willing to reverse previously incorrect assumptions, such as when they reversed the ban on Cyclamate sweetener when it was found to be safe (yet it remains banned in the US). They, so far, also deem aspartame safe, and it's difficult to see how exactly it could be dangerous.
Is it safer than sugar, where there are known dangers? I think so, I'd pick a diet soda over a sugar-based one any day. But I think it's healthy to at least attempt to ensure the answer recommended to us is as unbiased as possible.
By the way, the article itself doesn't even suggest that aspertame is that dangerous:
“My big concern is that I don’t want people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to stop diet sodas, I’m gonna get sugared sodas,’ and then they start drinking those and gain weight, which we know is one of the major cancer risks,” said Bevers. “And that has solid data.” A better outcome of the recommendation would be if people who drink a ton of diet soda replaced some of it with water.
I think the takeaway from this article should be "Aspartame is probably pretty safe, but holy shit one of the main institutions we have in charge of determining that, along with a bunch of other substances, is basically corporate captured, so get your advice elsewhere."
Aspartame has been tested by far more than just the FDA and WHO, and nobody has ever found any link to any illness in humans, not ever.
And if you have any, you’d be the first.
It’s a straw man to argue your “uncomfortableness” with regulatory agencies as a reason not to trust aspartame. In fact, quite the opposite, as it’s the WHO who is doing the fearmongering.
And comparing it to any other approval processes is just a false equivalence.
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And there are many daily consumed food items (processed food, alcohol, ...) that are known to cause cancer but nobody tries to regulate those.
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Good to know, I’ll stick to sodas full of sugar, no problem can come from that 👍
The article says that sugar based drinks are far worse for your health than diet versions.
Your average pseudoscience obsessed health hobbyist is never going to notice that particular detail though.
What kind of sugar? High fructose corn syrup or sugar?
HFCS is metabolized in the liver making it far more damaging to the body. And soda that uses real sugar typically has a lower sugar content. Soda with real sugar also imparts a feeling of fullness, typically resulting in people drinking less.
I am going to need a source that HFCS is worse than sucrose for your liver.
People hear "high fructose" in High Fructose Corn Syrup and assume it's in comparison to other sugars, it is not. High Fructose corn syrup is a name to differentiate it from regular corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose.
Let's look at the real differences between HFCS and sucrose or table sugar. Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. HFCS is usually 55% fructose in beverages and 42% in most other HCFS sweetened products. This means that typically the High Fructose corn syrup has less fructose than regular sugar.
You could focus on beverages, but 5% isn't a huge difference, and if your going to talk about the dangers of sugary beverages it's always important to remind people that fruit juice has A LOT of fructose (go figure).
Sugar itself is the problem, monitor intake. HCFS is only an issue because the price drove down the cost of sweetening foods to everyone's detriment.
My brother in Christ, why is sucrose bad for your liver? Because it is metabolized into glucose and... Fructose
The metabolism of sucrose into glucose and fructose happens in the small intestines. Fructose enters the bloodstream and is metabolized by the liver.
(Here's a study on the liver effects.)[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6549781/]
It doesn't specifically say that fructose has a worse effect on the liver than sucrose, but it does say that fructose is 2x sweeter than glucose, which makes it more addicting, which causes you to drink more because you crave it. So I went looking up sweetness scales and fructose is also sweeter than sucrose (which is still sweeter than glucose), sometimes by a significant margin.
So if both are bad on the liver, fructose could possibly be worse because of a higher level of addiction due to sweetness level, which causes you to consume more than you might with just sucrose.
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Here’s another year old article that came out in response to this.
TLDR: You should not worry, and the only people who might think about worrying are those drinking 12 cans of diet soda a day — so basically no one.
"Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most consumers," said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety at the WHO, during a press conference in Geneva. He said the problem is for "high consumers" of diet soda or other foods that contain aspartame. "We have, in a sense, raised a flag here," Branca said, and he called for more research.
But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it disagrees with this new classification, pointing to evidence of safety. In a written statement, an FDA official told NPR that aspartame being labeled by the WHO "as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans' does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer."
The WHO has long set the acceptable daily intake, or ADI, of aspartame at a maximum of 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. So, a person who weighs 60 kilograms (about 130 pounds), could consume up to 2,400 milligrams per day, which is roughly equivalent to 12 cans of Diet Coke — much higher than most people consume.
I beg to differ I know for fact my dad drinks 12 cans or more a day. Hell I did at one time but with regular Dr Pepper. It not hard to go through a 12oz can of soda.
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I came in here ready to defend delicious aspartame from people who aren't science literate and was surprised to see many really good arguments and comments already posted. Lemmy, you're pretty cool as a community right now.
Realistically what it means is that millions of people will react with "meh, still gonna use it." I mean, have you met humans? We knew lead was toxic since at least the Roman era, but that didn't stop us from using it in everything - including food and drink.
The difference is that you can completely avoid lead poisoning if you eliminate exposure to lead, but you can't completely avoid cancer even if you eliminate exposure to carcinogens.
And eliminating exposure to aspartame would have only a minimal effect, at best, on your overall risk of cancer.
And they'll do that while standing in bright sunlight without sunscreen, drinking beer, eating red meat, processed food, candy with real sugar and driving in fossil fuel cars which are in the same or higher category of cancer risks.
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So according to WHO, aspartame is more cancerous than glyphosate
Mexican coke > regular Coke
Mexican coke Lite > Diet coke
Sorry y'all that's just coke math.
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I never trusted the stuff. We use to say this matter-of-factly when I was a kid, about thirty years ago. I'm glad to see that my unfounded confidence and speculation turned out to be right!
Ehhh, not so much. Honestly the rating for carcinogenic substances is very shaky and can be very misleading. Like many things, poison depends on the dose and the same with carcinogens. Bacon is a group 1 carcinogen, and cigarettes are a group 1 carcinogen. Despite the same rating, cigarettes are BY FAR much more carcinogenic.
For group 2b "possible carcinogens", it usually coincides with the frequency of the product. For this rating they review what a cancer victim typically eats/consumes/interacts with. Aspartame and many other ingredients, are labeled as possibly carcinogenic, as many victims have eaten them, but there is no strong correlation.
The problem is however, many of these ingredients are so common that almost everybody eats them. It's like saying "everybody who drinks water dies, it's poisonous!".
"possibly"
Not exactly. In this context "possibly causes cancer" translates to something like 'we have no credible evidence that it does, but we can't prove that it doesn't.'
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