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!
In the early days of YouTube, after I saw a video where they boiled a can of Coke and found 13 spoons of sugar. I stopped drinking that stuff. Aspartame or not, I’d rather drink water.
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!”.
There’s still no evidence that it does. Unless, perhaps, you’re injecting gigantic amounts of it into rats or something. But drinking it in a soda? Nobody’s ever proved any evidence that it’s anything but safe.
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.
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the IARC is more selective in its use of unpublished, confidential commercial data, and it takes greater care to exclude people with conflicts of interest from contributing to its evaluations.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.”
And there are many daily consumed food items (processed food, alcohol, …) that are known to cause cancer but nobody tries to regulate those.
Big sugar vs the artificial sweeteners?
They’re the same companies.
Coke vs Diet Coke.
Coke is downstream of Sugar and Artificial sweetener manufacturers. Coke doesn’t care what sweetener you prefer in their products as long as they make a profit.
Aspertame was owned by Nutrasweet, where as big sugar, is, well, sugar cane and sugar beet plantation owners and processors.
Both of them were competing with each other for adoption in products and when sold direct to consumer (I.e, equal). They both had a vested interest in slandering the other.
See this as an example.
And that sounds a lot like a false equivalence based on pure speculation with zero evidence to back it up.
And there was always a lot of evidence of the damage caused by second-hand smoke that tobacco industries simply paid politicians to ignore. Hell, all you had to do was look at the walls and curtains of a smoker to see the tar and smoke stains. It was clear as day.
For decades studies from all sorts of institutions, both big and small and independently-funded have failed to find any evidence at all that aspartame is unsafe for human consumption as a food additive.
The “zero” beverages are usually sweetened with Sucrolose primarily. Not Aspertame. Though I’ve seen some with primarily Sucrolose and also Aspertame as a secondary ingredient.
The original selling point was partly that it wasn’t aspartame, but I think that’s changing to the mixture since some people react poorly to sucrolose.
You should switch to Diet Baja Blast. It’s healthier because it’s tastier or something.
So according to WHO, aspartame is more cancerous than glyphosate
Does it have atomic mass? Then it probably can cause cancer.
