In the past couple months there’s been this report about aspartame being “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
And this report about sucralose potentially damaging DNA (!!!).
And this report about erythritol perhaps causing blood clots
Does any of it give my fellow artificial-sweetener-consumers pause?
Yes, which is why I won’t use them.
Whenever I point out these news pieces to my diet soda and artificially sweetened drink-loving wife, she dismisses it all as noise - “Meh, they’re always saying stuff like that.”
Nope. I don’t drink that much soda, but when I do, it’s always the artificial stuff. Something else will kill me first.
I’ll just point out that the oxygen you breathe and need to stay alive also damages DNA.
Banana emit and average of 0.05-0.10 µSv of radiation yet they remain a popular fruit and dieticians consider them to have many benefits.
Hence why I take any such statements or studies with a large grain of salt (which can also pose health risks in some individuals yet is also essential to continued life in humans).
Go with “all things in moderation”. Don’t drink/eat stuff with artificial sweeteners all day every day. I have seen nothing indicating occasional use is a hazard.
The great thing about being old is that when someone tells me that something I’m eating/drinking/doing/thinking can cause cancer, I can reply, “oh yeah? So what?”
According to a paper published by the NIH in 2021,
…the results of its long-term use remain difficult to predict.
Um, it’s been around since 1981. If there were health risks w/ aspartame, we would know it by now.
This should be way down the list of anyone’s worries.
And with every breath, you take in a few plutonium atoms.
This National Cancer Institute report on artificial sweeteners puts the matter of alleged cancer risk into perspective.
As for the W.H.O’s cancer agency labeling aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic”: IARC severely damaged its reputation by cooking the books to finger glyphosate as a carcinogen, a conclusion diametrically opposed to that reached by other major health organizations. So I’d “pause” for quite awhile before giving up aspartame-sweetened drinks on IARC’s say-so.
AIUI, the risk is real but at a concentration level so high that reaching it would be impossible. IOW:
I don’t avoid artificial sweeteners because they’re unhealthy. I avoid them because they taste terrible. Now, I haven’t tried all of them, and so it’s of course possible that one of the ones I haven’t tried tastes just fine, but I’ve tried enough that I have no particular interest in trying more. Given the choice between diet pop and water (and water is pretty much always an option, at least here in the First World), I’ll take the water.
But then, my usual beverage is tea, which has much, much less sugar than pop does anyway.
My 2¢:
I drink probably two gallons of artificially sweetened beverages a day, and have for 40 years. If there’s some weird disease or condition associated with them, I’m going to be a good case study.
We can add that data point to the registry, along with tales of healthy 95-year-olds who’ve smoked two packs a day for 80 years and drink a fifth of whiskey daily while carousing with untold numbers of women. 
No. For a few reasons, one of which is that if you look hard enough, you find that in sufficient quantities everything will kill you. For instance, anyone scared away from artificial sweeteners and going instead to traditional refined sugar (meaning ordinary table sugar – sucrose – and also high-fructose corn syrup) opens themselves up instead to risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, dementia, liver disease, and cancer. Oh, and acne. So, natural cane sugar will not only turn you into a depressed demented obese invalid with liver disease and cancer, but you’ll die covered in zits! I’m sticking with aspartame! 
And personally I don’t use any of that stuff, except that aspartame (and also acesulfame-potassium) is present in Coke Zero, which I do consume. But I often add rum to it, which I figure contributes so much harm of its own that I can ignore the effects of the artificial sweeteners! 
One more thing. The mention of the World Health Organization and its International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reminded me of a similar scary pronouncement from the IARC about the dangers of the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup). The noteworthy thing here is that the US EPA and the WHO IARC have come to diametrically opposite conclusions about it. The EPA considers glyphosate as “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” IARC has classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A).”
I don’t mean to disparage either of these agencies, but clearly studies like this are often intrinsically inconclusive. There are quite a few reasons that the EPA and IARC came to such different conclusions, and they’re mostly methodological, and there’s no reason to believe that either is more valid than the other, although it does seem that IARC has a tendency to consider more extreme scenarios and come to scarier conclusions. With glyphosate, for example, one reason for their “probably carcinogenic” conclusion is that they considered high levels of occupational exposure, such as for instance an occupation that requires someone to spray glyphosate daily and who doesn’t use adequate respiratory and skin protection.
To be perfectly fair, if one is going to fault the IARC for considering some extreme scenarios when evaluating glyphosate, there’s also reason for faulting the EPA for being maybe a bit too cozy with the industry.
Well, I’m not here to promote Coke, but IMHO they seem to have sorted out the problem fairly well with Coke Zero, where the combination of aspartame and acesulfame-potassium plus whatever magic they’ve worked with the rest of the ingredients actually turns out quite well. I now dislike regular Coke, not because it tastes bad (I can hardly tell the difference) but because I hate the thought of consuming such a massive amount of sugar.
Otherwise known as my hero.
I’m really old school - I’m all about the saccharin. We had our cancer scare and bans 50 years ago, but all warnings have long since been removed. Apparently it does cause cancer in rats, by a mechanism that isn’t relevant to humans.
Canadian rats, who are also known to smoke all day and do cocaine. However, they are also the friendliest rats you will ever meet.
I love it in iced tea. It dissolves quickly and tastes okay.
If you can show that the EPA tossed out evidence that contradicted its conclusions (like IARC did), then its findings can be similarly disputed.
Well, this discussion is supposed to be about artificial sweeteners, not glyphosate, but just to address that point: it’s not clear that either agency “tossed out evidence”. It is clear, however, that the EPA didn’t use all available evidence (emphasis mine):
(1) in the core tables compiled by EPA and IARC, the EPA relied mostly on registrant-commissioned, unpublished regulatory studies, 99% of which were negative, while IARC relied mostly on peer-reviewed studies of which 70% were positive (83 of 118); (2) EPA’s evaluation was largely based on data from studies on technical glyphosate, whereas IARC’s review placed heavy weight on the results of formulated GBH and AMPA assays; …
IOW, the EPA chose to believe internal assessments done by companies like Monsanto over peer-reviewed studies, and also, they mostly evaluated pure glyphosate, whereas the IARC placed considerable reliance on formulated glyphosate-based herbicides and also on AMPA – aminomethylphosphonic acid – which is the main substance into which glyphosate metabolizes.
I don’t want to take issue with either side, but one could forgive a suspicious person for regarding the EPA’s approach as perhaps somewhat analogous to asking tobacco companies whether they thought tobacco was perfectly safe, or the FAA giving Boeing extraordinary latitude to self-regulate matters concerning the 737 MAX.
All of that said, I luvs me some Coke Zero and I’m stickin’ with it. Honestly, the amount of sugar in most soft drinks like Coke is so massive that it has to be unhealthy.