Artificial Sweeteners, Aspartame, And Cancer
Explaining the confusing news about artificial sweeteners and your risk of cancer
The news about artificial sweeteners is incredibly confusing, and often scary. There was the recent story about sucralose being potentially genotoxic, and now the news that aspartame is possibly causing cancer. There’s nothing we love to hate more than a substance with the word ‘artificial’ in the name. The second something requires humans to actively process it somehow, it morphs from a wonderful natural product into a substance that is designed to make us all sick.
And then, just as we had all decided that artificial sweeteners were terrifying substances that were killing us all, the news breaks that actually aspartame is pretty safe. While the International Agency for Research on cancer, the IARC, has decreed that aspartame is a ‘possible’ carcinogen, another WHO body called the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) has said that there is “limited evidence” for carcinogenicity and that reasonable levels of intake of aspartame are safe. Suddenly, the entire idea that artificial means bad for your health is in question. It’s a cycle that repeats itself with impressive regularity, because we are torn between a hatred for the manmade and a love of just how useful artificial things can be.
