Artificial Sweeteners, Aspartame, And Cancer

Explaining the confusing news about artificial sweeteners and your risk of cancer

Pictured: Delicious. Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

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.

Take the recent noise about sucralose. Sucralose — the sweetener used in Splenda — is incredibly well-researched and generally considered to be fine. However, a recent study showed that when rats eat sucralose it can possibly break down into very small quantities of a substance called sucralose-6-acetate. This substance can, at very high concentrations, potentially cause some extremely minor negative impacts on cells in petri dishes.

Pictured: Different from a human being (probably). Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

If you read it like that, the research sounds fairly innocuous — it is very much lab-bench, early data, which in all likelihood has no bearing on human health. The amount of sucralose that you have to eat/drink to get the concentrations that were found to be harmful in these studies is tens of thousands of times more than a human being could…