Should you fear aspartame?
Should you fear aspartame?Soft drink giant PepsiCo recently announced its plans to stop sweetening Diet Pepsi with aspartame in response to growing consumer concern, yet the company, regulators and many medical authorities say the potential detrimental effect of the artificial sweetener on human health is overblown. So, what's really going on here and who should you believe?
The tricky thing is that there's lots of conflicting information out there on the safety of aspartame, and there's almost as much conflicting information out there on the scientific quality of that primary information. In short, it's a rabbit hole of never-ending argument.
That petition was filed in 1973 and was technically approved the following year, but approval was then delayed when concerns surfaced about the methods and research procedures Searle used to prove the safety of aspartame.
What followed for the next seven years was a series of audits, inquiries and even a grand jury investigation into both the safety of aspartame and the internal practices at Searle. While a board of inquiry declared in 1980 that more testing was required of aspartame due to concerns of possible carcinogenicity, the FDA commissioner found errors in the board's calculations of the potential risks and overruled its decision. In 1981 FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. ruled that aspartame was safe and approved its use as a tabletop sweetener and in dry goods; it was later approved for use in soft drinks in 1983.
While the initial science behind aspartame's safety was eventually validated, the climate of controversy and suspicion under which aspartame came to market has never abated and has flared up at certain times over the last three decades.
In 1985, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, who led an investigation into Searle and aspartame's safety prior to its approval, introduced the Aspartame Safety Act of 1985 to provide for further study in response to the widespread popularity of aspatame-based NutraSweet. The bill came out shortly after the Centers for Disease Control conducted a study on short-term negative side effects of aspartame use and found no reason for concern, which may have played a role in the bill failing to become a law. A lawsuit attempting to remove aspartame from shelves on health grounds also failed around the same time.
When the internet became a global phenomenon in the 1990s, an anti-aspartame community was able to better connect, coalesce and grow exponentially. A study published in 1996 by long-time aspartame critic Dr. John Olney and publicized by Metzenbaum suggested a possible correlation between the incidence of brain tumors and the introduction of aspartame to the market several years earlier.
The company producing Nutrasweet and the FDA both pointed out problems with Olney's study and it was widely criticized in scientific, academic and regulatory circles, but the mass media latched on to the fear factor over potential health concerns associated with aspartame, arguably exaggerating Olney's main conclusion, which was simply that more study of the effects of aspartame was called for.
Now, nearly two decades later, the influence of the internet on the aspartame debate has snowballed, and the web is filled with a dizzying array of claims, conspiracy theories, debunkings, and debunkings of those debunkings. Depending on what Google result you click on, you could find claims that aspartame is linked to the Nazis, the Illuminati, or that it causes multiple sclerosis, a claim that the National Multiple Sclerosis Society now lists on the "disproved theories" page of its website.
So how can we pull anything resembling the truth about aspartame, especially its effects or lack thereof on human health, from this tsunami of rhetoric spanning three decades?
Here's what we think we know with a pretty high level of confidence. While there's plenty of reason to doubt either the competence or the motives of both the aspartame manufacturers and the regulators from time to time, the science still speaks for itself, and it has yet to prove a conclusive link between aspartame and cancer, or even between aspartame and lesser health effects like headaches.
Of course, science has not completely disproven the existence of such a link either. Such is the nature of scientific inquiry – it's very difficult to prove a negative. All we can do is study something as rigorously as possible, and then continue to study it more. That process has been ongoing for almost four decades with aspartame, and the science has yielded a few false positives (including an oft-cited 2005 study linking high doses of aspartame intake in rats to brain tumors), a lot of data pointing to aspartame as a benign additive, and some studies that call for further study, which continues to be ongoing.
Today, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), among others, all consider aspartame to be safe for human consumption in the amounts currently recommended (one exception being those with the medical condition phenylketonuria, who should probably steer clear altogether).
"This opinion represents one of the most comprehensive risk assessments of aspartame ever undertaken," said Dr. Alicja Mortensen of the EFSA, following a full risk assessment in 2013. "It’s a step forward in strengthening consumer confidence in the scientific underpinning of the EU food safety system and the regulation of food additives."
While aspartame's early political history may leave reason to doubt its safety, the scientific consensus that has been amassed since then points in the other direction.
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