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Cake day: June 20th, 2023
  • xthedeerlordx@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Aspartame: Sweetener used in Diet Coke possibly causes cancer, WHO set to declareEnglish
    191·
    1 year ago

    If you want to ignore the vast majority of safety research about artificial sweeteners, then sure… From this very article you posted:

    "“IARC is not a food safety body”

    The IARC’s decisions have also faced criticism for sparking needless alarm over hard-to-avoid substances or situations. It has previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its “probably cancer-causing” class, and classifying the use of mobile phones as “possibly cancer-causing”, similar to aspartame.

    “IARC is not a food safety body. The World Health Organization’s Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) is currently conducting a comprehensive food safety review of aspartame and no conclusions can be drawn until both reports are published,” Secretary General of the International Sweeteners Association, Frances Hunt-Wood, said in their press release.

    According to the ISA, aspartame is one of the most thoroughly researched ingredients in history, with over 90 food safety agencies across the globe declaring it is safe, including the EFSA.

    The International Council of Beverages Association (ICBA) shares a similar position, arguing that aspartame has proven to be a safe tool to reduce calories and sugars in diets.

    “The best available evidence from large population studies shows that low and no-calorie sweeteners as a replacement strategy for added sugars is associated with reductions in important public health outcomes such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and death,” John Sievenpiper, Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, told on behalf of the ICBA in their press release.

    Aspartame has been extensively studied for years. Last year, an observational study in France among 100,000 adults showed that people who consumed larger amounts of artificial sweeteners – including aspartame – had a slightly higher cancer risk.

    It followed a study from the Ramazzini Institute in Italy in the early 2000s, which reported that some cancers in mice and rats were linked to aspartame.

    However, the first study could not prove that aspartame caused the increased cancer risk, and questions have been raised about the methodology of the second study, including by EFSA, which assessed it."

    Observational studies do not equate to causation