Does Aspartame Really Cause Cancer?

Sometimes you just have to laugh at how crazy some researchers are and how gullible some people can be.

I was surfing the internet the other day when I came across a dire warning cautioning people to watch out for Nutrasweet because it has now been proven to cause cancer.

Well, I have to say that I’m not a Nutrasweet type of guy. But the article definitely caught my attention. So I checked it out. And, in fact, guess what?

There was an article published 13 years ago that did conclude that aspartame, the artificial sweetener in Nutrasweet, Equal, and Sugar Twin, does indeed cause cancer – at least in rats.

But is it really something we need to worry about? I’ll tell you the facts. You can judge for yourself.

Researchers reported on the results of an experiment in which they gave increasingly high doses of aspartame to a group of rats and mice. The animals were fed the various doses of aspartame every day from the time they were in the womb until the day they died. The results showed that when 1.5% of their entire diet by weight consisted of aspartame, the male and female rats and the male mice (but not the female mice) did indeed have a low, but statistically significant increase in lung and liver cancers. The researchers could not explain why the female mice showed no risk for cancer even at the highest doses.

Also, there were no cases of cancer in any of the animals whose diets had less than 1.5% aspartame. So what do you think is a reasonable conclusion here?

According to my research, the average adult human eats about 5.5 pounds of food per day. So to eat 1.5% of his diet in aspartame, he would have to eat 1.32 ounces of aspartame per day. That’s about 37,000 mg. One packet of Equal has about 20 mg of aspartame. So that would mean our guy would have to eat 1,850 packets of Equal to get the same amount of aspartame as the rodents.

Not only that, but he would have to eat that amount every day of his life starting from the very first day he was conceived. If he started eating anything less than that amount, his added risk of cancer would go to zero – no added risk at all.

So I have a different conclusion about the study than our extra cautious friends have. I think it very clearly shows us that the chance of getting cancer from having some aspartame every now and then is about as close to zero as you can get. So I’ll leave it up to you to decide for yourself whether you want to use it.

Aspartame can cause headaches and other issues in sensitive people. If you notice any adverse events while using it, simply stop and the problems will likely go away. This is why I prefer stevia as a natural sugar substitute. But I’m not worried about aspartame causing cancer. It’s been on the market for a long time and hasn’t increased cancer risk. Now we know why.

Yours for better health,

Frank Shallenberger, MD