Aspartame, a commonly used sweetener for about 40 years in thousands of everyday consumer products around the world, has been declared “possibly carcinogenic”. This announcement, Friday, July 14, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) responsible for listing the causes of cancer, comes to feed in a decisive way the controversy that has surrounded this chemical for decades.
Aspartame, also identifiable under the code “E951” on the back of the products, thus joins group “2B” in the classification established by the IARC, alongside 322 other agents with effects and origins as disparate as progestogen contraceptives, gasoline, chlordecone or aloe vera. This is the third level of seriousness, behind carcinogens “probable”, such as red meat or glyphosate, and substances classified as carcinogenic to humans, such as alcohol or tobacco.
Concretely, this means that the level of scientific evidence is, for the moment, not sufficient to definitively qualify aspartame as a carcinogenic agent, but that serious signals exist. Twenty-five independent experts examined a corpus of 1,300 scientific studies published in recent years on aspartame. Those investigating the substance’s mechanisms of action in the body have identified evidence of oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, or nutrient intake, but have not been found conclusive regarding its genotoxicity, c ie its capacity to generate irreversible lesions of the genome.
Increased risk of liver cancer established
Regarding animal experiments, several studies from the Ramazzini Institute, in Italy, demonstrated an increased presence of tumors in mice and rats that consumed high doses of aspartame. Evidence considered “limited” by the experts because of certain biases present, according to them, in this work.
Finally, three epidemiological studies conducted on large cohorts in Europe and the United States have established a link with an increased risk of liver cancer, more specifically hepatocellular carcinoma in regular consumers of artificially sweetened drinks. Again, the level of evidence was judged ” limit ” – due to an insufficient number of studies. “These conclusions should be interpreted as a call to the research community to try to clarify and understand the carcinogenic risk that the consumption of aspartame may or may not present”commented Mary Schubauer-Berigan, Acting Head of the IARC Monographs Programme.
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