2 crucial qualifiers to "aspartame causes cancer"
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Anti-Big Food activists have been dancing on their tabletops this week following the news that the World Health Organization’s IARC is set to declare the artificial sweetener aspartame as a “possible carcinogen”. Why such an announcement brings joy to some people is a mystery.
Here are the two important qualifiers:
This does not mean any evidence has ever surfaced indicating aspartame may be carcinogenic (none has);
The IARC is an outlier among all the world’s major feed safety bodies in making this determination. Nobody agrees with it.
The fact is that aspartame is the world’s single most exhaustively tested and retested food compound, a point I made 15 years ago in my Skeptoid episode on the topic, and no contradicting science has emerged since then. This constant retesting has been driven purely by consumer demand, and not by any new evidence.
Let’s look at these qualifiers in a bit more detail.
The ruling does not mean aspartame has been found to be carcinogenic; it hasn’t.
The IARC is expected to add aspartame to its group 2B list of possible carcinogens. There are 4 classifications, according to their website:
Group 1: Carcinogenic to humans. Sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.
Group 2A: Probably carcinogenic to humans. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.
Group 2B: Possibly carcinogenic to humans. Insufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.
Group 3: Not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans. None of the above applies.
Group 4: Probably not carcinogenic. (They’ve only ever classified 1 (!!!) compound as this — and their current list of classifications has removed the category altogether.)
Read those again. 2B is where aspartame is expected to be classified. If some brand new compound appears and we know nothing about it at all, it’s 2B by default until we know otherwise. This is not a ruling that should be of any concern.
But I think an important point is that the IARC’s classification system is kind of goofy, and definitely misleading. It’s been widely criticized more than once, and it’s a scale that no other food safety bodies use. The fact that they’ve only ever found one compound to be “probably not carcinogenic,” and later deleted that category, tells you all you need to know.
The IARC is an outlier and nobody agrees with this.
According to the latest analyses I’ve read, only two studies have ever found a correlation between aspartame consumption, and (1) neither involved humans, and (2) both involved insane doses of aspartame that far exceeded what you could get by eating food sweetened with it. Bananas are radioactive; there is an insanely high dose of bananas that would kill you with radiation poisoning. All proper, peer reviewed human studies ever conducted on aspartame have found no risk of cancer.
When the IARC infamously declared the world’s safest and most effective herbicide glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic” (group 2A) in 2015, Reuters published this article finding gross flaws in the IARC and their process. It found that the IARC had removed all references to the majority of studies that found there was no harm from glyphosate, and they only included a few fringe studies that were methodologically flawed, and in some cases, later retracted. IARC is the only agency in the world to make such a finding about either glyphosate or aspartame; all others disagree. The Reuters article is a great read, check it out. It reveals the IARC to be pretty darn shady, and they seem to be following the exact same logic with aspartame that they did with glyphosate.
So in summary, you still have nothing to worry about from consuming any food sweetened with aspartame. It remains safe when used as intended.
And hopefully you will grow a little more skeptical of the IARC.
If it were true that aspartame had been found to have been poisoning so many people for so long, this would be horrifying news that would sicken and sadden any rational person. If you or someone you know has been celebrating this news as some kind of a “win”, then I seriously question where that person’s head is at. More likely they are more concerned with their anti-Big Food ideology being proven right than they are with any actual human’s health — a petty and despicable viewpoint, in this writer’s opinion.
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