I am a dentist and a mother of three. I know that even the most responsible parents will not be able to stop children from eating sweets altogether, but we can point them to healthier choices. My professional concern for oral health makes opting for non-nutritive sweeteners over sugar obvious. The aspartame reports have not changed my mind as the link to cancer looks tenuous at best, even by the World Health Organization’s own risk assessment standard. Press reports in the U.S. and across the Atlantic confirm this.
For the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, there is no debate about aspartame, one of the most common sugar substitutes in food items like dentist-preferred diet soda and some sugar-free gum. The agency released a statement vehemently disagreeing with IARC’s classification and emphasizing that reviews conducted by its own scientists found no safety concerns.
For consumers, alphabet-soup agencies mean less than the practical question: If non-nutritive sweeteners were to fall out of use altogether, would our health be in a better or worse position?
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The answer is obvious: We’d be in a worse place because of our relationship with sugar, which humans crave.
