Consumers, food-makers face choice as WHO set to warn on aspartame sweeteners

On Thursday, Reuters reported that aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gums, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm.

"Certainly cutting down on it is a great place to start," said Noah Praamsma, nutrition education coordinator with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. "It's really incredible once you start removing things from your diet, it can be a little bit of a challenge at first, but people's tastes do change. These soda companies really know how to make a product that develops a dedicated customer base, and sometimes the ways of doing that can be a little nefarious, so weaning oneself off is a great place to start. There's a lot of options these days that don't rely on any sort of sugar or non-sugar sweeteners."

The IARC ruling does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators.

"We do see the big soda manufacturers like Pepsi and Coke changing their formula over time," said Adam Coons, portfolio manager at Winthrop Capital Management. "Now this takes time because you can't just say, 'Hey, we're going to replace one sweetener with another.' They tried this in different forms and fashions over the years and different marketing campaigns that drive that. But the taste is what drives the majority of the sales with one manufacturer over another, so when I say this is going to take time, that is the biggest part of this, is that what is the formula that maintains the current taste? Because we've seen in the past when Coke has tried to change their formula and people moved away. So there's a lot of things that go into this, and the consumer taste is a very, very difficult thing to get right, so the fact that they already have it right, that's why they're reluctant to change. But they're going to have to. And so that's going to take a lot of marketing research, a lot of scientific research to determine what is the best alternative to maintain our current customer."

"I'm kind of addicted to Diet Coke a bit and that's going to make me maybe want to think about changing to flavored sparkling water, maybe, that's not got any sugar or aspartame in it," said a frequent diet soda drinker, Richard Harmer.

Shoppers can find aspartame in Weight Watchers yoghurts, some Snapple drinks and Conagra’s Mrs Butterworth’s syrups.

Coons said consumer companies might not immediately rush into reformulating, waiting instead for food and drug agencies around the world to take a stance on IARC’s assessment.

"The consumer will continue to do something that they know is somewhat harmful to their health for quite a while," he said. "It takes a big shift, I mean we saw it in cigarettes, everyone knows that it causes cancer, yet they're still a product, right? So it's no surprise to me that it's taken this long to move away from it and at the end of the day, it's largely driven by sales and marketing. So if you're getting sales with a product, there's not a big incentive for these companies to shift. What I see changing now is that this is really highlighted, it's in the news, and so they're going to get a lot of questions. I do want to see how this goes. They're obviously going to come out and act like they're going to create the narrative that, 'Hey, we're looking into this, we're looking to change.' I think it's going to have to gain momentum for it to really stick."

"It seems like everything causes cancer these days, so I kind of take it with a grain of salt," said Harmer. "I don't think I'm going to give up Diet Coke completely."

Another issue is how quickly other types of sweeteners could be produced in sufficient volume to provide substitutes as aspartame, a mainstay ingredient of packaged foods for decades, is one of the world's most widely-used sweeteners. Regulators have authorized it for use globally after reviewing all the available evidence, while major food and beverage makers have for decades defended their use of it.

Hard Habit To Break

Nonetheless, some big companies have in recent years followed a trend of removing - or reducing - aspartame from their products over the concerns of some consumers and health professionals.

In 2014 General Mills swapped the aspartame in Yoplait Light for the sweetener widely known as Splenda. Packs of Zero Sugar chocolate made by Hershey's state they are "Aspartame Free."

It has, however, been a challenge to break the habit.

PepsiCo had aspartame removed from some US diet sodas in 2015, replacing it with a blend of sucralose and acesulfame potassium, only to add it back to some products a year later - and then remove it again in 2020.

Sweeteners have varying levels of sweetness and price and are different chemical compounds, making it difficult to simply swap ingredients. Aspartame, for example, is about 200 times sweeter than sugar and costs more than saccharin, roughly the same as sucralose and less than stevia, a sweetener industry source said.

Sales of some sodas and sweet foods and beverages have been on the decline for more than a decade as some consumers worry about eating too much sugar, while others shift away from diet items over concerns about sweeteners.

"Any time an organization like the World Health Organization changes guidance, it really just causes people to question, 'OK, what can I trust anymore if things are constantly changing?' So really the message that I and some of my colleagues are often preaching is, 'Hey, let's really just focus on a whole food and especially plant-based diet,'" said Praamsma. "It's a really secure place to eat, a secure pattern that repeatedly has been shown to really be beneficial for health. I would encourage people to just realize that this is the way science works sometimes, but also as much as possible, realize that there are consistent eating patterns that have been shown over and over again to be risk-free."

Reuters