Top Sweetener Officially Declared a Carcinogen

by Dr. Joseph Mercola, ©2023

(Jul. 14, 2023) — The World Health Organization has finally gotten around to declaring the popular artificial sweetener aspartame a potential carcinogen.¹ I warned about aspartame’s cancer-causing potential on my site over 25 years ago, in my best-selling book, “Sweet Deception: Why Splenda, NutraSweet, and the FDA May Be Hazardous to Your Health,” in 2006, and in an article I wrote for The Huffington Post.² It’s since been deleted — but you can see just how long this danger has been known.

The ruling comes from sources with WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), who said aspartame will be listed as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in July 2023.³ Additional findings from the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization’s Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), which is in the process of updating its aspartame risk assessment, are also expected.⁴

Donald Rumsfeld’s Hand in Aspartame’s Approval

JECFA has vouched for aspartame’s safety for decades, stating since 1981 that it’s safe when consumed within accepted daily limits.⁵ It was 1981 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first approved aspartame.⁶ At the time, the late Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. secretary of defense, was chairman of G.D. Searle, aspartame’s manufacturer, and he was reportedly instrumental in its approval.

At a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry, the FDA had refused to approve aspartame due to concerns that it could induce brain tumors.⁷ The late John Olney, a renowned neuroscientist who tried to prevent aspartame’s approval, also wrote a letter to the Board of Inquiry in 1987, warning of aspartame’s neurotoxicity, including the potential for brain tumors and damage to children’s brains.⁸ As reported by Rense.com:⁹

“The FDA had actually banned aspartame based on this finding, only to have Searle Chairman Donald Rumsfeld … vow to ‘call in his markers,’¹⁰ to get it approved.

On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener, and Reagan’s new FDA commissioner, Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry’s decision.

It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision, but Hull then installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then personally broke the tie in aspartame’s favor.

Hull later left the FDA under allegations of impropriety, served briefly as Provost at New York Medical College, and then took a position with Burston-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for both Monsanto and GD Searle.”

Aspartame’s Cancer Link Known for Decades

Despite aspartame’s approval, by 1987 a series of investigative reports raised concerns that the chemical’s approval was mired by conflicts of interest, poor quality industry-funded research and revolving-door relationships between the FDA and the food industry.¹¹

By 1996, a team with the department of psychiatry at Washington University Medical School questioned whether increasing brain tumor rates had an aspartame connection. “An exceedingly high incidence of brain tumors” has been identified in aspartame-fed rats compared to rats not fed aspartame, they explained, adding:¹²

“Compared to other environmental factors putatively linked to brain tumors, the artificial sweetener aspartame is a promising candidate to explain the recent increase in incidence and degree of malignancy of brain tumors.”

Then, in 2006, a study led by Dr. Morando Soffritti, a cancer researcher from Italy who’s the head of the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, found that, even in low doses, animals were developing several different forms of cancer when fed aspartame.¹³

That year, the team concluded aspartame was a “multipotential carcinogenic agent, even at a daily dose of 20 mg/kg body weight, much less than the current acceptable daily intake” and stated a reevaluation of aspartame consumption was “urgent and cannot be delayed.”¹⁴

A 2007 follow-up study confirmed the findings of aspartame’s “multipotential carcinogenicity,” even at doses close to the acceptable daily intake for humans. Further, it also demonstrated that when lifespan exposure beginning in utero was assessed, aspartame’s “carcinogenic effects are increased.”¹⁵ In 2010, Soffritti and colleagues again warned that aspartame was a carcinogenic agent in rats and mice.¹⁶

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Research Supporting Aspartame’s Carcinogenicity Is Widespread

These studies were only the beginning of the evidence showing aspartame’s cancer-causing potential. In 2012, Harvard researchers published a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which found:¹⁷

“In the most comprehensive long-term epidemiologic study, to our knowledge, to evaluate the association between aspartame intake and cancer risk in humans, we observed a positive association between diet soda and total aspartame intake and risks of NHL [non-Hodgkin lymphoma] and multiple myeloma in men and leukemia in both men and women.”

Adding further concerns over aspartame’s safety, U.S. Right to Know reported:¹⁸

“In a 2014 commentary in American Journal of Industrial Medicine,¹⁹ the [Cesare] Maltoni [Cancer Research] Center researchers wrote that the studies submitted by G. D. Searle for market approval ‘do not provide adequate scientific support for [aspartame’s] safety.

In contrast, recent results of life-span carcinogenicity bioassays on rats and mice published in peer-reviewed journals, and a prospective epidemiological study, provide consistent evidence of [aspartame’s] carcinogenic potential.’”

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