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Is aspartame harmful to cancer? What other sugar substitutes are allowed by the current law? Is it really safe?

In July this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, also known as IARC, announced that aspartame was classified as a class 2B carcinogen, that is, "a substance that may cause cancer to human beings". After all, aspartame, as the representative of the third generation synthetic sugar substitute, has been active in food processing for decades since 1965. We are familiar with Diet Coke, Sprite, Green Arrow and so on. Is there any harm?

Use aspartame as food.

Aspartame's international security dispute is nothing new. Since the listing of aspartame, there has been a security dispute. Here we need to analyze from several aspects:

1. First of all, we need to make sure that there is no basis for talking about safety without dose. Both safety and anxiety depend on intake.

JECFA, the United Nations Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives, also announced in July this year that the daily allowable intake of aspartame is 40 mg per kilogram of body weight, so aspartame is safe as long as it is within the allowable intake range of laws and regulations. This data is reliable data based on a large number of animal experiments.

Dose control is safe.

2. Aspartame intake has an impact on health.

Although there is no direct evidence that aspartame causes cancer, aspartame, as one of the sweeteners, will still have a certain impact on the human body. For example, although sweeteners do not contain high calories like sucrose, they will produce metabolites such as aspartic acid, methanol and phenylalanine after metabolism, which will have an impact on people with phenylketonuria and phenylalanine allergy, while the further metabolites of methanol are formic acid and formaldehyde, which are also toxic to human body.

3. Because of the low calorie of aspartame, consumers will also feel psychologically relaxed and deceive themselves, thinking that they eat healthily and have low calories, thus inadvertently ingesting more food and energy under the stimulation of sweetness, leading to excessive intake, leading to obesity, abnormal metabolism and other problems.

Therefore, according to the current research data, the harm of aspartame can be controlled, but it is better to eat natural food as much as possible, as long as the amount is well controlled.

Speaking of sweeteners, apart from aspartame, what other sweeteners are permitted by law? Is it really safe?

Sweeteners are basically divided into two categories, as shown in the following figure:

Sweetener classification

Generally speaking, as long as it is allowed by law and used within the prescribed dosage range, it is safe, but it is not completely healthy, especially for long-term intake, but there are some unhealthy factors. For example, some sweeteners, such as sucralose and stevioside, have been found to change the composition of intestinal microbial flora, causing disorder of glucose metabolism, and some sweeteners will damage the immune system and induce diseases.

As consumers pay more and more attention to food safety, most manufacturers have upgraded their product lines and adopted safer natural sweeteners, such as erythritol and glucoside, to replace synthetic sweeteners such as aspartame, so as to gain the trust of consumers.

The vitality of replacing sugar with saf erythritol

However, no matter what kind of sugar substitute, it is not as safe as the natural sugar that humans have eaten for thousands of years. Therefore, as long as the intake is well controlled, high-quality natural carbohydrates can still replace industrially processed sweets and drinks. After all, carbohydrates are essential nutrients for human beings. Besides providing energy, they also have various important functions, which cannot be rejected blindly, and should be taken reasonably.