The challenge you have here is that aspartame isn't just one of most widely studied substances in the food chain, but that it's also one of the most widely and vigorously consumed. People drink a <i>lot</i> of diet soda; a lot of people drink it to the exclusion of all other liquids. So it's going to be tricky to get the epidemiology to match up with the claim here: if aspartame is meaningfully carcinogenic (meaning: more than by the trace amounts all sorts of other things in the food supply are, from small quantities of mold due to spoilage to acrylamide forming in almost anything we cook), we'd expect to see a pretty obvious effect in case rates.<p>The article mentions a French study showing a "slight" increase, over 100,000 pts, in an observational study that used self-reporting to control for other risk factors. I can't find it; has anyone else?
Donald Rumsfeld was famously influential in getting aspartame's approval ; however more of the story behind this can be found here: <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8846759/Nill,_Ashley_-_The_History_of_Aspartame.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8846759/Nill,_As...</a><p>In 1984 the year after aspartame's approval for soft drinks, the company that held the exclusive patent on it, sold $600 million worth (1984 dollars) of it.<p>Myself the truly distasteful part is the use of neotame (a follow-on to aspartame) on animal feed, to get animals to eat feed that they normally would not; for instance, if the feed is rancid or otherwise in a condition/taste that normal animal instincts, would have the animal reject the food...
To clarify, this doesn't mean aspartame in food is harmful, it means that in certain circumstances it's possible for the chemical to cause cancer. For example, workers exposed to extremely high levels during manufacturing, or breakdown products formed during improper storage.
It's always surprising to me how quick we are to go from discovering a chemical to mass-producing it. We're only just figuring out all of the negative externalities of things like PFAS, and they're in absolutely everything (packaging, clothes, pizza box linings, food cans, cookware...)
Thats interesting. All the recent scientific evidence I have been seeing has been saying that Aspartame really isn't bad. This seems suspect. It's so hard to trust science today since it has become so intertwined with politics and corporate agendas.
The weird thing about this is that i stopped drinking Diet Coke, specifically because of aspartame, after reading this same thing in 1996 or perhaps early 97. WHO's decision to wait nearly 30 years before backing that just makes them look impotent.
Literally read halfway down the article before they say that "working overnight" is also in the "probably carcinogenic" category and that the organization is known for publishing confusing results that cause panic.<p>FFS
Healthcare Triage did a review of the research years ago: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf82FfX-wuU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf82FfX-wuU</a><p>tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that <i>did</i> find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.
> The "radiofrequency electromagnetic fields" associated with using mobile phones are "possibly cancer-causing"<p>Wow. Easier to list out what doesn't cause cancer
Honestly, what I want to know in a headline like this is "what changed?"<p>As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in <i>many</i> studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.<p>So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?
The most obvious substitute for aspartame is sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. In liquid form, and the quantities that people drink soda, the health risks are immense. Cardiovascular decease kills a comparable amount of people as cancer overall, from all sources. For aspartame to end up a net negative, it’d have to be massively carcinogenic.<p>Certainly its better to replace Diet Coke with water, all else equal, but the effort in changing habits is much higher. There is a ton of preventable decease due to bad diet and lack of exercise, despite well known causes. So why is that?<p>Health discussions have this psychological bias where people think “be more like me” is effective (don’t do drugs, just go out and meet people, exercise more, just stop smoking). The fact that people think like this, despite the war on drugs disaster, is madness. Especially when the solution is so simple: throw the moralism away and focus solely on harm reduction – also known as “whatever works”. Just good old empiricism.
Mobile phones, WiFi etc a have been under the same classification by WHO since 2011. The industry didn’t take it too seriously, and probably this one doesn’t mean anything either.<p><a href="https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....</a>
A few of the conspiracy nutters that I know firmly beleive that "Big Aspartame" is responsible for suppressing information about its dire negative effects.<p>But when you consider:<p>- how many doctors and scientists are personally/professionally motivated to research this<p>- how many gov't organizations are concerned about this<p>- how many industry competitors would benefit from discovering this<p>- how many lawyers would get rich from exploiting this<p>...then I somewhat doubt that one group could suppress all of this, globally, for 40+ years. At this point, aspartame is probably one of the most researched food additives out there.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2B" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2B</a><p>I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.
Weird to have Coke in the Reuters headline when it's not just Coke that uses aspartame.<p>And this is interesting may be related?<p>>Aspartame is hydrolysed in the body to three chemicals, aspartic acid (40%), phenylalanine (50%) and methanol (10%). Aspartic acid is an amino acid.<p>>When there is an excess of neurotransmitter, certain neurons are killed by allowing too much calcium into the cells. ...The neural cell damage that is caused by excessive aspartate and glutamate ... they ‘excite’ or stimulate the neural cells to death.<p>>Methanol is highly toxic; it is gradually released in the small intestine when the methyl group of the aspartame encounters the enzyme chymotrypsin. It has been pointed out that some fruit juices and alcoholic beverages contain small amounts of methanol.<p>source: <a href="https://www.3dchem.com/aspartame.asp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.3dchem.com/aspartame.asp</a>
I hope this questionable categorization doesn't result in aspartame being removed from sodas; I much prefer it to other artificial sweeteners. Can definitely tell when Diet Coke is formulated to include them.
Everything <i>might</i> cause cancer.<p><a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...</a><p>The current system (especially CA Prop 65) makes it impossible for these pronouncements to carry any meaning whatsoever.
The US research history has to be one of the weirdest possible. Large financial incentive, actual fraud, repeated animal trials where everything goes wrong.<p>Does it cause cancer, does it have a negative effect on the brain, how much fraud was there? (eventually it was approved without science by FDA committee votes, they should be in prison for that alone)<p>But the only relevant question is: Does it help with weight loss? If the answer is no, who cares about everything else? There is no sugar shortage. We don't need a competing poison, we are doing great killing ourselves with just sugar.
A bit of background (from an unlikely source). The Tl;DR:<p><pre><code> \* Group 1: carcinogenic (this includes cigarettes, the HPV viruses that cause cervical cancer, and ionizing radiation)
\* Group 2A: probably carcinogenic (this includes red meat, hot beverages, and working as a hairdresser)
\* Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic (this is the group aspartame reportedly may end up in)
\* Group 3: not classifiable
\* Group 4: probably not carcinogenic (this list contains zero items; a chemical called caprolactam was previously on it, but was moved to group 3)
These are not designations of cancer *risk*, but of *the chance that there is a detectable link of some kind*.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://lifehacker.com/aspartames-possible-carcinogen-designation-means-basica-1850590970" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://lifehacker.com/aspartames-possible-carcinogen-design...</a>
Oh man, this report about Gen Z taking "Diet Coke" breaks to 'escape work' came to mind: <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/04/25/gen-z-diet-coke-break-trend-tiktok/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://fortune.com/2023/04/25/gen-z-diet-coke-break-trend-t...</a>
Nice! I can't wait for cheap obsolete sweeteners like aspartame and acesulfam-k to begone from my beloved energy drinks to be replaced with relatively modern and supposedly prebiotic alternatives like steviol glycosides, xylitol etc. Unfortunately even the most expensive energy drink manufacturers still use aspartame and acesulfam-k.
I wish there was a switch in the mass production of products to contain neither sugar or sweeteners.<p>But it feels like that is never going to happen.
Just returned from Ireland and every 'regular' soda was full of disgusting artificial sweeteners. In the usa these would be labeled diet. And of course sucralose was pretty common and we're now finding scary things about its harm to the human body. Sugar really isn't that bad..
One of my favourite all-time comments on HN was the guy that was constantly trying new experimental sweeteners just for fun and ended up with something that bound to his tastebuds for months. I can't find it.
It's better to not use sweetener at all, nor sugar. After some withdrawal period body stops to crave either. The only good amount of either is zero.
I wish they’d just force all products with a non nutritional sweetener to have a big cigarette-style warning label on the front of the packaging.<p>I still haven’t gotten over the rise of “organic” artificial sweeteners. That must have involved some N-th level regulatory capture with the product labeling regulators.
It seems within the past month we've seen the WHO warn about non-sugar sweeteners general, aspartame in particular, and looks like sucralose in particular. I'm not generally one to support conspiracy theories, but given the number of countries placing limits on added sugar, sugar taxes and the like, what are the odds the sugar/hfcs industries are funding these studies.<p>Not to mention that with aspartame in particular, the evidence is sparse and low quality. The verbiage regarding Sucralose in actual human terms of consumption are much more alarming. I generally try to keep any sweet drink consumption with meals, or otherwise sweetened with stevia (which has seen it's own detractors). Given a century and a half of food industry lies, disinformation, misinformation and tethers with regulatory bodies, it's really hard to believe anything and just defer to if it was considered "food" a couple hundred years ago.
This is awful reporting.<p>Aspartame has been studied for more than 40 years and no regulatory body in any country has found it to be cancerogenic; it is a risky substance for people with a rare desease called Phenylketonuria.<p>So, the reader will be under the impression that it will cause cancer, which is pretty dubious, all while obesity for which sugary drinks are partially responsible is a very real cancer risk.
Every now and then I get car parts delivered from USA and without fail they come with a label telling me they cause cancer. I can't take this kind of labeling seriously when it comes from an American source.
The whole war on sugar is baffling to me. After I had my first glass of soda in a decade, my impression is that artificial sweeteners are garbage. Poisonous, too. But this has been known for decades, hasn't it. It's cheap, though.<p>As for me, I am off to the toilet for my drink. It has served me well so far even though it has no taste or electrolytes