By Melissa 

ADOBE

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, an entity within the World Health Organization) recently announced that aspartame, a sugar substitute used in about 6,000 products worldwide, is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because reports of this assessment have circulated for two weeks, after anonymous sources leaked it to the press. The leak triggered a heated debate among experts on the benefits and alleged risks of the widespread use of sugar substitutes, also known as non-nutritive sweeteners. This includes saccharin, sucralose, stevia, monk fruit and others, though IARC only evaluated aspartame.

I am a dentist and a mother of three. I know that even the most responsible parents will not be able to stop children from eating sweets altogether, but we can point them to healthier choices. My professional concern for oral health makes opting for non-nutritive sweeteners over sugar obvious. The aspartame reports have not changed my mind as the link to cancer looks tenuous at best, even by the World Health Organization’s own risk assessment standard. Press reports in the U.S. and across the Atlantic confirm this.

For the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, there is no debate about aspartame, one of the most common sugar substitutes in food items like dentist-preferred diet soda and some sugar-free gum. The agency released a statement vehemently disagreeing with IARC’s classification and emphasizing that reviews conducted by its own scientists found no safety concerns.

“Aspartame being labeled by IARC as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer,” the agency said. “FDA scientists reviewed the scientific information included in IARC’s review in 2021 when it was first made available and identified significant shortcomings in the studies on which IARC relied.”