The WHO declared aspartame "possibly" causes cancer. Here’s what that means. | Vox
Get ready for an earful about the health risks of Diet Coke, Trident gum, Equal, and other sugar-free items.
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.
So, I can keep drinking my beloved zero mountain dew?
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the IARC is more selective in its use of unpublished, confidential commercial data, and it takes greater care to exclude people with conflicts of interest from contributing to its evaluations.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.
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.
Does it have atomic mass? Then it probably can cause cancer.
This is a good rule, especially for things that change their own atomic mass.
Does it interact in any way whatsoever with the electromagnetic spectrum?
Yeah that'll give you cancer alright
I have atomic mass ... am I ... Doctor Manhattan?
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.
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.
In Mexico and other countries there are cities where you cannot drink the water so you end up drinking soda your entire life. Coca-Cola buys the good water and pollutes the rest so that they are the only safe drinking option.
The Vox article comes to the same conclusion.
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.
Don't forget cell phones, which are in the same risk category as aspartame.
A few months ago, Ann Reardon released a good video covering this
That was genuinely an excellent video, thanks for sharing. :)
Science Vs did an episode on this years ago.
Science Vs: Artificial Sweeteners - not so sweet?
Episode webpage: https://gimletmedia.com/science-vs/
That's cool. I just suggested the Ann Reardon video because she's addressing the findings from the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that's also mentioned in this article.
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.
colombian coke >
No sugar, no aspartame, just pure taste
EDIT: This is, in fact, false information! Please refer to @FlowVoid@lemmy.world's comment for the facts.
Mexican coke has been found to have no sugar in it, it also uses High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Any flavor enhancement over regular coke appears to be placebo, possibly an effect of the glass bottle.
The paper cited in that video had serious flaws in their methodology.
A repeat analysis by the same group found that Mexican Coca Cola actually does contain table sugar (sucrose) as well as fructose, whereas American Coca Cola contains no table sugar and more fructose than the Mexican version.
One thing I have observed with sodas containing aspartame, is the short shelf life, I think normally they give sodas 1 year but after 6 months the soda starts having an off taste that only gets stronger.
I have tried drinking a can of zero that was 2 years past the expiration date, and it tasted like cat piss.
Ps: I guess the aspartame molecules are not very stable in a soda mix?
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.'
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.
yeah def dont drink calories for no reason especially this stuff
Damn. I've got the Mountain Dew drinkers riled up.
"Possibly causes cancer" is sufficient for me to never the touch the stuff. Please stop drinking these things. They're literally addictive.
