WHO: ‘Sweetener aspartame possibly carcinogenic’ | Healthy

“We are not advising companies to recall their products and we are not advising consumers to stop taking (aspartame) completely,” said Dr. Francesco Branca, chief executive of the WHO Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, during the presentation of two sweetener reports.

Two departments of the WHO have recently dealt with aspartame. One examines whether there is demonstrable evidence that a substance is a potential risk, the other assesses at what quantity of that substance in a food product there is an actual health risk.

The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) examined the extent to which aspartame can be a danger. Experts met on June 6 and 13 and concluded that the sweetener “is possibly carcinogenic to humans”.

That happened after three studies found “limited evidence” that aspartame can lead to cancer in humans. More specifically, according to the WHO, it would be a hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer. However, according to Branca, further research is needed to “explain this further”.

At the same time, another WHO department, the Food and Agriculture Organization Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), which deals with the ‘safe limits’ of substances added to food, sees no cause for concern or the guidelines on the daily consumption of adjust aspartame.

“If consumers are faced with the choice of cola with sweetener or cola with sugar, I think a third option should be considered: drinking water,” said Branca.

The acceptable daily intake (ADI) of aspartame has been set at 40 mg/kg body weight per day and remains unchanged. To go over that dose, an adult weighing 70 kilograms would have to drink more than 14 cans of diet soda containing 200 mg of aspartame per day, if no other foods containing the same sweetener were consumed.

Aspartame, which is about 200 times sweeter than regular sugar and contains hardly any calories, has been widely used as a sweetener since the 1980s. It has also been a subject of debate for decades.

Soft drink industry interest groups as well as scientific experts say the studies on which IARC bases its judgment contain little evidence. Previous studies, they say, have established the safety of aspartame. “If there was any cause for concern, they would have changed the daily intake guidelines,” Arnold Baskies, former president of the American Cancer Society, told Bloomberg news agency.

The American food and drug watchdog FDA also reacts negatively. “The fact that aspartame has been listed as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ by IARC does not mean that aspartame is actually associated with cancer,” the FDA said in a statement. “The FDA disagrees with IARC’s conclusion that these studies support the classification of aspartame as a possible carcinogen.”

According to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the popular sugar substitute is safe when used normally. Only people with the metabolic disease PKU should avoid aspartame.