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Sugar Free Gold, Fanta Orange Zero Sugar, 7Up Free, Pepsi Max, Diet Coke, Lipton Diet Iced Tea Lemon, Happydent Wave, Mentos Pure Fresh Sugarfree Mint Flavour Chewing Gum, Trident Sugar Free Chewing Gum, Equal Original Low Calorie Sweetener, Crystal Light Drink Mix, Mars Wrigley’s Airwaves Sugar Free Chewing Gum, Wrigley’s Extra Spearmint Sugarfree Gum — the list of products containing the artificial sweetener called Aspartame goes on and on.
It’s the same artificial sweetener that has created a buzz across the globe after a news report said the World Health Organization (WHO) is likely to declare it as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”, which means that it may cause cancer in human beings.
Aspartame is used in more than 6,000 products, including artificially sweetened drinks, sugar-free gelatin products and hard candies among others. Some of these products carry warnings but not necessarily against Aspartame. For instance: Diet Coke’s label states that the product should not be consumed by children, pregnant women or lactating mothers. Similarly, Happydent Wave, Xylitol Sugarfree Mint prohibits children from consuming the product along with those who are ‘phenylketonurics’ – an inherited disorder that causes a build-up of phenylalanine, an amino acid, in the blood.
Story of Aspartame
In the late 1800s, scientists were on a quest to find an alternative to sugar after realising that its consumption leads to obesity, diabetes and heart disease. After sugar consumption became a public health issue, in 1878, scientists found saccharin – 300 times sweeter than sugar with zero calories. Then in the 1930s, cyclamate was found, which was around 50 times sweeter than sugar.
In 1960, Aspartame was found, which was 200 times sweeter and contained calories similar to sugar. However, it was sweeter, so it was used in a much lower quantity than sugar. In 1976, sucralose was found, which is 600 times sweeter and contains zero calories.
While at present, sucralose is used in the majority of food items apart from plant-based stevia, Aspartame was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981.
It was first sold under the brand name NutraSweet, for which the patent expired in 1992. It was approved for general use in the European Union in 1994.
Till 1995, Indian laws permitted the use of only saccharin as a sweetener and laid down that Aspartame is known to be unstable in glass bottles under tropical conditions. But later, it was approved and flooded the market as a “sugar-free” option.
WHO announcement coming on July 14
The WHO, in an email, told News18 that in its “Monographs Programme, International Agency Research Cancer (IARC), conducts hazard identification, which is the first fundamental step to understanding carcinogenicity”.
Dr Margaret Harris, spokesperson at the WHO, further said, “Hazard identification aims to identify the specific properties of the agent and its potential to cause harm, ie, the potential of an agent to cause cancer.”
“The classifications reflect the strength of the scientific evidence as to whether an agent can cause cancer in humans, but they do not reflect how high the risk of developing cancer is at a given exposure level,” Harris added.
Harris further said the evaluations were “independent but complementary” and conducted one after the other in June-July 2023. “Given the close collaboration between the IARC Monographs and the WHO/FAO JECFA Secretariat, we have planned to present the results of both evaluations at the same time. This will allow us to clearly communicate the different purposes of a hazard identification and a risk assessment and help put these results into context,” the expert said.
Harris added: “These complementary results will be announced jointly by IARC and JECFA on July 14, 2023, and are confidential until the summary of the evaluations of IARC Monographs Volume 134 is published online… by The Lancet Oncology, and simultaneous publication of the JECFA findings on the WHO website.”
Found to be carcinogenic in rats, mice two decades ago
A study by France released in March 2022, published in PLOS medicine, involving 1,02,865 French adults discovered that synthetic sweeteners – particularly Aspartame – have been related to elevated most cancers danger.
The research discovered that Aspartame consumption was related to elevated breast and obesity-related most cancers dangers. It discovered an elevated total most cancers danger for greater customers in comparison with non-consumers. But this was not the primary time when its hyperlinks with most cancers have been established.
Published in 2005 in Environmental Health Perspective, an Italian study exhibits that Aspartame is a “multi-potential carcinogenic” compound whose carcinogenic effects are evident even at a daily dose of 20 mg/kg body weight – much less than the current acceptable daily intake for humans in Europe (40 mg/kg body weight) and in the US (50 mg/kg body weight). The study was conducted on Sprague-Dawley rats.
“The results of our study, therefore, call for an urgent reexamination of the present guidelines on the use and consumption of Aspartame (APM),” the research stated in 2005 – nearly 20 years in the past.
A follow-up research in 2007 discovered important dose-related will increase in malignant tumours in a few of the rats. It additionally demonstrated that when life-span publicity to Aspartame begins throughout foetal life, its carcinogenic results are elevated.
“The outcomes… verify and reinforce the primary experimental demonstration of [Aspartame’s] multipotential carcinogenicity at a dose degree near the suitable day by day consumption for people… when life-span publicity begins throughout fetal life, its carcinogenic results are elevated,” the researchers wrote in Environmental Health Perspectives.
In 2010, the results of a lifespan study again confirmed that “[Aspartame] is a carcinogenic agent in multiple sites in rodents and that this effect is induced in two species, rats (males and females) and mice (males),” the researchers reported in American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
Harvard researchers in 2012 discovered within the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition a optimistic affiliation between Aspartame consumption and elevated danger of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a number of myeloma in males and leukaemia in women and men. The findings “protect the opportunity of a detrimental impact… on choose cancers” but “do not permit the ruling out of chance as an explanation”, the researchers stated.
US FDA calls it most studied meals additive
On the opposite, the vast majority of research proved that one must devour quite a lot of Aspartame to be in danger. For occasion: a report states {that a} 60 kg grownup must drink greater than 30 cans of eating regimen soda every single day to be in danger.
The US FDA – the world’s strictest well being regulator – says Aspartame is without doubt one of the most studied meals components within the human meals provide. “To decide the protection of Aspartame, the FDA has reviewed greater than 100 research designed to determine potential poisonous results, together with research that assess results on the reproductive and nervous techniques, carcinogenicity, and metabolism”, it stated on its web site.
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