Obviously, alcoholic drinks present other dangers (driving drunk, alcoholism), but my question is specifically related to the cancer-causing nature of aspartame-sweetend soft drinks and alcoholic beverages, comparatively.
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Nearly everything will cause cancer at very high exposure levels and *everything* will cause health problems, including death, if you consume too much.
An important thing to understand about a lot of modern health information has to do with the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO. Under that agreement, the EU is not allowed to impose barriers on US goods except for a few limited reasons, one of which is public health.
The US has historically outcompeted Europe in agricultural and food products and European countries historically imposed high tariffs and other barriers on US agricultural/food goods to prevent the EU market from being dominated by the US. With the adoption of the Marrakesh Agreement, Europe could no longer rely on tariffs to protect its market, so it switched to the public health rationale instead.
In the 90’s and 2000’s, there was a big push by the EU to expand the threshold under which products would be considered to be carcinogenic, to the point that they could declare anything coming from the US to be a potential carcinogen and impose restrictions on it. This push was not meant to affect EU products, but ended up became an important ideological point for left wing political parties across the globe.
As a result, the push to expand the scope of what is considered to be carcinogenic spread to the WHO, which has been increasingly declaring products and substances to be suspected carcinogens even though no rational person would think that they were based on the level of exposure necessary for them to cause cancer.
The recent reclassification of aspartame is a good example of this – there has been no change in the understanding of the level of aspartame exposure that is necessary to cause cancer. To be at *any* risk of cancer, you would need to drink several gallons of diet soda a day, every day, for years.
The same is true of alcohol. Alcohol does not cause cancer under normal exposure levels. However, if you’re an alcoholic who is drinking tremendous quantities of alcohol every day for decades, then alcohol does increase your chance of developing liver and digestive cancers.
Anytime that you hear that something is a carcinogen or possible carcinogen, you should take that news with a gigantic grain of salt. Again, nearly everything that you eat, drink, or breath is a carcinogen at sufficient levels of exposure. Under normal levels of exposure, nothing is any worse than anything else.
The nature of the human body is that it ages. You will eventually die as a result of that aging process. There is nothing you can do to prevent yourself from dying and the only factors that have ever been shown to have a meaningful impact on life expectancy are exercise and calorie intake – moderate exercise and low calorie intake are both associated with a longer lifespan than any other lifestyle.
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