Are artificial sweeteners like Splenda and Sweet & Low safe to consume? Study says yes. I say no!

A new study says that artificial sweeteners like Splenda and Sweet & Low don’t pose the health risks that people like me and others suggest.

Could natural health advocates like me have been wrong all along?  Let’s investigate, shall we?

An Italian study recently published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention concludes that saccharin and aspartame – the two most widely used artificial sweeteners in the world today – pose no cancer risk to the people that consume them.

They discovered this after analyzing previous studies done on the issue (data collected was between 1991 and 2004) and comparing and contrasting control subjects’ diets with those who were diagnosed with stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, and endometrial cancer.  Ultimately, they found saccharin and aspartame use to have no statistically significant impact on the subjects’ cancer diagnoses.

On its face, this looks like a win for the artificial sweetener industry.  It certainly flies in the face of a 2007 study done on artificial sweeteners and cancer, where European researchers found that rats consuming the sweet stuff were stricken by cancer after prolonged consumption.

Or does it?

In fact, it doesn’t, because the Italian researchers found that it didn’t contribute to only three kinds of cancer:  stomach, pancreatic, and endometrial.  Meanwhile, the 2007 European study found that it contributed to leukemia, lymphoma and breast cancer!

In other words, the Italian study’s only meaningful conclusion is that artificial sweeteners don’t contribute to specific cancers, not cancer in general.

But let’s pretend that artificial sweeteners in no way contributed to cancer.  That still doesn’t negate why you shouldn’t consume them, because health advocates like me and others don’t decry their usage for being cancer-causing.  We decry them for their contribution to a multitude of health risks, like weight gain, obesity and disrupting the body’s digestive function.

In fact, weight gain is the chief reason why health advocates like me oppose their use, as sugar-free varieties of sweets and other desserts trick the brain into thinking the body isn’t full, when in fact it is.  You can read more about this phenomenon here, as I’ve talked about this in the past and, as always, back up my assertions with studies.

So, is this study a win for the artificial sweetener industry?  No, indeed.  People like me have never targeted artificial sweeteners for being cancer-causing.  They may indirectly cause cancer – obesity is the contributing factor in 90,000 cancer deaths every year, according to the American Cancer Society (in the U.S. alone) – but the main bone of contention with artificial sweeteners is how they contribute to weight gain.

Sources:
foodnavigator.com
cancer.org