Is sweetener hidden in 6,000 products a danger to your health? As Pepsi drop aspartame in America - yet keep it in YOUR drinks - scientists insist it's totally safe
- Aspartame used for 30 years in fizzy drinks, chewing gums and medicines
- Food regulators say it is the safest and most thoroughly tested sweetener
- But critics warn it can cause health issues like brain tumours and cancer
- Pepsi announced it's dropping the sweetener from drinks in US but not UK
Found in more than 6,000 products
worldwide, the additive has been consumed by hundreds of millions of
people over the past 30 years in fizzy drinks, low-calorie yoghurts,
chewing gums and medicines
No food ingredient divides opinion and generates controversy quite like the artificial sweetener aspartame.
Found
in more than 6,000 products worldwide, the additive has been consumed
by hundreds of millions of people over the past 30 years in fizzy
drinks, low-calorie yoghurts, chewing gums and medicines.
Supporters and food regulators say it is the safest and most thoroughly tested sweetener on the planet.
But
critics — particularly those in the U.S. — disagree. They claim there
is compelling evidence linking aspartame to a catalogue of ailments
including headaches, blurred vision, depression, seizures, birth defects
and even brain tumours and cancer.
Last
month the aspartame row came to the boil once again when Pepsi
announced that it was dropping the sweetener from diet drinks in the
U.S.
The
parent company, PepsiCo, insists it is not withdrawing it on health
grounds, and that aspartame will still be used in drinks in Britain and
the rest of Europe.
The
company claims the decision is a commercial one: that it is responding
to consumer fears about the ingredient and falling sales of 5 per cent a
year in America. There, PepsiCo will replace aspartame with an
alternative called sucralose.
Seth Kaufman, vice-president of Pepsi, said: ‘Aspartame is the number one reason consumers are dropping diet soda.’
The
move is the latest twist in an extraordinary saga that goes back nearly
40 years to when aspartame was discovered in a drugs company
laboratory.
It
was mired in controversy right from the start. Originally approved in
the U.S. in 1974, it was withdrawn a year later after regulators
discovered a catalogue of flaws in its safety trials, including sloppy
research and poorly controlled experiments.
It
took six years of investigations and legal wrangles before it was
finally approved in 1981, and since then it has been dogged by claims
that it triggers health problems.
By
1984 there were enough anecdotal reports of headaches and mood changes
from consumers for the United States Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to investigate.
It gave aspartame a clean bill of health — but the scare stories continued.
The
arrival of the internet in the 1990s generated a tsunami of
anti-aspartame stories. In 1999, hoax emails and websites sprang up
linking it to multiple sclerosis and lupus, claiming that it caused
blindness, spasms, shooting pains, headaches, depression, anxiety,
memory loss and birth defects.
Pepsi
announced that it was dropping the sweetener from diet drinks in the
U.S. The parent company, PepsiCo, insists it is not withdrawing it on
health grounds, and that aspartame will still be used in drinks in
Britain and the rest of Europe (file pictures)
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