Aspartame is about to be proclaimed by the WHO as a possible carcinogen. What makes this any different from beer and wine, which are known to be carcinogenic already?

Question

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.

In: 1668

Answer 1

The World Health Organization have lists of chemicals for which they have looked at the available research to try to find out if their are carcinogenic or not. This is so that regulatory agencies in each country do not have to go through the same process as the WHO did. The chemicals are grouped into carcinogenic (group 1) and non carcinogenic (group 3). But then there are lots of chemicals for which there was too little evidence for either. These are put into probably carcinogenic (group 2A) and probably not carcinogenic (group 4). We need more research into these before we can say for sure.

The final group, the possibly carcinogenic chemicals (group 2B) are the chemicals for which there is almost no conclusive research at all. This is the group that the WHO puts chemicals that they investigate but could not find any studies saying they are carcinogenic or not, or an equal amount of studies for either. So this is the kind of default group. It should be noted that a lot of chemicals fall into this group because they are hard to study. In the case of aspartame a lot of consumers use it in an attempt to improve an unhealthy diet so there is naturally a lot of cancer among its users. And because cancer can take a long time to develop and is very random a proper double blind experiment is extremely costly.

As for alcohol there is some of the same problems with the studies as with aspartame. However there is a much stronger relationship between alcohol and cancer then between aspartame and cancer. Even when correcting for all the possible lifestyle factors such as obesity there is clear evidence that people who drink more alcohol is more likely to get cancer. But when looking at people who drink diet soda the evidence is ambiguous. So therefore alcoholic beverages is classified in group 1.