Tuesday Tip: Aspartame and Cancer 🥤

You may have seen some headlines recently about the World Health Organisation cancer agency reclassifying aspartame, a key sweetener in diet drinks, as possibly carcinogenic. So is this a sign to panic and stop drinking diet drinks/eating foods with sweeteners? Well let’s just look at this a little closer.

The WHO cancer agency reclassified aspartame as a class 2B carcinogen, which means it’s “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence, including animal studies. They’ve specifically said that it needs more research. For reference other substances in this category include pickled vegetables and aloe vera (coffee was, too, before being reduced to 3 in 2016.). Now this only considers whether something could cause cancer, but importantly not at what dose it’s dangerous.

Another WHO group, the JECFA, is an international scientific committee that evaluates the safety of, and the risks associated with, food additives, contaminants, and naturally occurring toxins in food. They concluded that the data evaluated indicated no sufficient reason to change the acceptable daily intake of 0-40 mg/kg body weight for aspartame. A 355 ml can of Diet Coke contains ~ 200 mg of aspartame. If you weigh 70 kg, you would need to drink ~15 cans of Diet Coke per day for it to even begin to have any negative effects.

Most notably if this info is concerning you and you’re worried about consuming aspartame as a result then you also need to consider the other foods in that category – pickled veg etc. More importantly the first thing you should do is stop drinking alcohol; an actual toxin the WHO has classified as a Group 1 carcinogen (“there is sufficient evidence the agent causes cancer in humans”). In fact, the WHO even states there is NO safe amount of alcohol consumption that doesn’t affect health : “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage.”

So if we’re talking about relative risk, you’re more likely to get cancer drinking even the smallest amount of alcohol than you are drinking a few cans of Diet coke or any other artificially sweetened drink/food a few times per week. So I’m summary – don’t panic and if you enjoy a diet beverage continue to do so!

Happy Tuesday 🤗xx