Sweeteners
battle over aspartame suggests, the truth behind the IARC’s announcement is rather less straightforward, leaving aspartame’s ultimate impact decidedly fuzzy.
Something’s rotten
Since its creation in 1965, aspartame has been a popular sweetener in soft drinks.
manufacturers are being pushed to tweak ingredients list. But if the avoidance of natural sugars is obviously a social good, we should hardly imagine that humanity’s love for sweetness has vanished altogether. On the contrary, as global average sugar consumption has now fallen to 21.4kg, reports the International Sugar Organization, substitutes have soared. Nowhere, is this clearer than the skyrocketing popularity of aspartame. First created in 1965 from two naturally occurring amino acids, this artificial sweetener is 200 times sweeter than traditional sucrose, reports EFSA. And that figure is amply matched by the sector’s growth: already a $9bn industry, Market Data Forecast suggests global aspartame could be worth $12bn by 2028.
“Most cancers have a long latency period: from exposure to [the] appearance of cancer. Research studies in humans [require] a longer time to evolve to the point where we have enough to evaluate the literature.”
Marjorie McCullough
But if aspartame is making fortunes as vast as the sugar boom of old, it arguably comes with baggage all its own. Even while it was being approved by the FDA, aspartame was dogged by worries about its health consequences, with some suspecting it could promote brain cancer. Similar concerns have persisted ever since, spanning everything from liver cancer to leukaemia. Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) made its own judgement. Linked to the UN and WHO, the IARC suggested that aspartame was “possibly carcinogenic” for humans, an announcement that spurred a storm of media attention. But amid the headlines, and as the long
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Aspartame has been a culinary staple for decades. “Aspartame has been widely used since the 1980s,” is how Harriet Burt of the World Action on Salt, Sugar and Health campaign group puts it. It is used “extensively” in soft drinks as varied as Diet Coke and Ribena Light and shadowed by other products too. If you’ve ever had ice cream, breakfast cereal or even a low-fat yogurt, chances are you’ve consumed aspartame. Quite aside from its sheer potency, this isn’t hard to understand. Boasting far fewer calories than natural sugar, it allows consumers to enjoy a treat without feeling too guilty. Yet alongside this popularity, and as the IARC’s intervention in July 2023 vividly implies, aspartame has long been stalked by controversy. Even in 1974 when aspartame was first approved by the FDA, some critics argued that the research into its safety was flawed, suggesting it could be linked to brain cancer. Similar questions have persisted ever since. Through the 1980s, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigated the potential for aspartame to cause various unpleasant side effects, including insomnia, nausea and diarrhoea. Though the organisation ultimately rejected such associations – arguing that the symptoms involved were common enough to have plausibly been caused elsewhere – the concerns have persisted. In 2006, for instance, scientists in Italy suggested that aspartame could cause leukaemia and lymphoma in rats. While later evaluations have severely criticised the study’s design, the controversy has continued to rumble into the following decade.
How to explain all this confusion? For Marjorie McCullough, the question can fundamentally be understood in terms of how science is done – especially when possible carcinogens are involved. “Early studies were conducted with animal models,” explains McCullough, senior scientific director of epidemiology research at the American Cancer Society. “Most cancers have a long latency period: from exposure to [the] appearance of cancer. Research studies in humans [require] a longer time to evolve to the point where we have enough to evaluate the literature.” Indeed, and as McCullough points out, though the “evidence from epidemiological studies in humans is growing”, clarity around various types of cancer remains limited.
No can do
When the IARC published its announcement that aspartame was “possibly carcinogenic” for human consumption, the world’s media could hardly restrain
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