Aspartame Linked to Leukemia

mercola.com

Doubts flare up once again regarding the safety of the artificial sweetener aspartame.

The additive, also known as NutraSweet, is 200 times sweeter than sugar and is used throughout the world in 6,000 diet foods and pharmaceutical products including Diet Coke, Pepsi Max, strawberry yogurt, Wrigley's Extra Spearmint chewing gum, vitamins and sugar-free cough drops.

According to a team of Italian scientists, using aspartame has been linked to cancer--specifically, leukemias in rodents.

Bitter Results

For the study, researchers fed 8-week-old rats varying concentrations of aspartame.

Results showed that, compared with control rats given no sweetener:

Many of the female rats fed aspartame--at levels very near those to which humans can be exposed to--developed lymphomas or leukemias; the risk increased with the dose of aspartame.

Sparse malignant brain tumors were also observed in treated male and female rats and none in the controls.

Researchers explain the findings raise concerns about the levels of aspartame to which humans can be exposed and, therefore, "urgent re-examination" of aspartame's safety is needed, "especially to protect children."

Setting "Safe" Boundaries

The existing European Food Safety Authority safety review for aspartame led to the setting of an Acceptable Daily Intake, or ADI, of the sweetener at 40 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) of body weight.

ADI is the projected amount of an additive that could be routinely consumed every day over a lifetime with no significant health risk.

However, the aspartame-cancer study has prompted the European Food Safety Authority to order an expert assessment of the data "as a matter of high priority."

In fact, the safety authority recently stated that aspartame had been considered safe ... until now.

European Journal of Oncology 2005

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