Don’t overreact to the cancer risk of sugar-free sweeteners
There was good reason to avoid products with the artificial sweetener aspartame even before the World Health Organization classified it as a “possible carcinogen." Now diet soda drinkers might want to quit their cans. But first, some perspective: “Possible carcinogen" is the weakest of three bins into which WHO classifies anything that’s even remotely tied to cancer in any kind of study. It labels substances with more serious links to cancer as “probable carcinogens" and if the evidence is really strong, “carcinogenic to humans." That middle category includes things that many of us consume routinely, including alcoholic beverages and very hot drinks (linked to oesophageal cancer).
The evidence behind possible carcinogens is more tenuous. The low-frequency radiation emitted by cell phones is in that category because studies have suggested weak associations with cancer in animals. In the case of aspartame, some studies show rats fed high doses of aspartame are more likely to get brain cancer and several other malignancies.
Adding to the concern, a large 2022 study followed more than 100,000 people in France and found a possible small increased cancer risk in heavy users of artificial sweeteners. But studies like this can’t prove that the sweeteners caused cancer. It’s possible that the group consuming more sweeteners also ate more processed food, or were more obese, or there was some other link.
A better way to get information would be to treat the humans more like the lab rats, feeding some people aspartame and comparing them to control groups. And now someone has done that, setting up a randomized controlled trial. The study wasn’t set up to find a cancer link, but it did connect artificial sweeteners with the same
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