They are in thousands of products we slip into our grocery baskets each week — everything from ‘diet’ colas, soft drinks and yoghurts to chewing gum and toothpaste to slimming ready meals, cakes, ice creams and desserts.
You’ll find them in sachets to sweeten your tea and coffee. If you pick up any product labelled ‘sugar-free’, ‘reduced sugar’, or ‘low calorie’, it’s almost certain to contain them.
Yet this week the World Health Organisation delivered a bitter verdict on artificial sweeteners, with a study showing that just two glasses of diet drink a day increases the risk of early death.
Coca-Cola says that, ‘with over 200 studies to support its safety, aspartame is one of the most thoroughly tested ingredients in the world. Its safety has been validated time and time again, including by the European Food Safety Authority in 2013’ (file image)
The research, involving more than 450,000 adults in ten countries, revealed that the daily consumption of all soft drinks was linked to a higher risk of dying young. But an early death was significantly more likely with diet drinks — the ones that qualify for a green ‘traffic light’ label from the Government, meaning they are supposedly healthy because of their low sugar content.
So who should we believe? The World Health Organisation or the Government, which advises us that artificial sweeteners are good for us. To answer the question, we have to look at exactly what these sweeteners are.
Most are chemically synthesised food additives known as high-intensity sweeteners. They are compounds designed to elicit the same response from receptors on the tongue as the ‘sweet’ flavour we get from sugar. And they are hundreds of times more powerful.
These hyper-intense synthetic sweeteners found in fizzy drinks might warp our palates, to the point that we no longer enjoy eating foods that aren’t so sweet (file image)
In 2013, a study of more than 66,000 women over 14 years found that those who drank artificially sweetened soft drinks had a higher incidence of Type 2 diabetes than those drinking sugar-sweetened ones (file image)
Hidden sweeteners are 100 times more potent than standard sugar and this means people should not be fooled by the ‘sugar-free’ labels (file image)
The trouble is that concerns over their safety simply will not go away — even though food and drink manufacturers and national regulatory bodies such as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) insist they are safe.
For instance, the U.S. grocery chain Whole Foods Market refuses to stock products containing any synthetic sweetener. As it says on its website, listing the sweeteners it scorns: ‘No saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, neotame or acesulfame-k. We don’t allow it! All of these are synthetic compounds produced through complex chemical processes… not so appetising, huh’.
And that’s before some scientific studies have suggested that artifical sweeteners can cause brain damage, liver and lung cancer, brain lesions, and neurological and hormone disorders.
In 2017, a U.S. study of 2,888 people found that consumption of soft drinks containing artificial sweeteners was associated with a higher risk of dementia and stroke. It found no such increased risk from sugar-sweetened drinks. Other research flags up that artificial sweeteners could be worse for health than sugar. In 2013, a study of more than 66,000 women over 14 years found that those who drank artificially sweetened soft drinks had a higher incidence of Type 2 diabetes than those drinking sugar-sweetened ones.
One of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners — found in Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Sprite Zero, among other drinks — is aspartame.
Weight-for-weight it contains the same number of calories as sugar — four calories per gram — but it has been chemically engineered to be 200 times sweeter which means you only need a touch for any foodstuff or drink to taste sweet. Little wonder its use is so widespread. It is said to be one of the most rigorously tested food additives ever, and after what appeared to be a stringent assessment of its safety, aspartame was given a clean bill of health in 1994 when European regulators lifted restrictions on its use in the EU.
Sprite and Fanta are two fizzy drinks popular with children and studies have found accumulating evidence to suggest that people who consume these sugar substitutes regularly are also more likely to gain excessive weight
In 2013, the EFSA again reviewed the science on aspartame, and once more concluded that the sweetener was safe for the general population, including infants, children and pregnant women, specifically ruling out any association between aspartame consumption and brain damage or cancer.
On its website, Coca-Cola says that, ‘with over 200 studies to support its safety, aspartame is one of the most thoroughly tested ingredients in the world. Its safety has been validated time and time again, including by the European Food Safety Authority in 2013’.
Yet warning bells have sounded over its safety ever since it was first approved for use in foodstuffs and carbonated drinks in the U.S. in the early 1980s.
And now, after carrying out a painstaking new analysis looking at how aspartame’s safety status was assessed, University of Sussex researchers are calling for its use to be suspended. Worryingly, Professor Erik Millstone and Dr Elisabeth Dawson have detailed what they describe as ‘serious flaws’ in the approvals procedure.
They say that the European Food Safety Authority panel discounted ‘every single one’ of 73 studies that suggested aspartame could be harmful to health. In contrast, the panel accepted 84 per cent of the studies that found no obvious evidence of harm as unproblematic and reliable.
Prof Millstone and Dr Dawson believe that scientists sitting on the panel, which meets behind closed doors, may have been biased by commercial conflicts of interest.
They warn that the safety of aspartame for human consumption has not been ‘adequately proven’, and want it taken off the market in Europe while a thorough, independent and open examination of the science on the sweetener takes place.
The International Sweeteners Association — which represents the chemical companies that manufacture sweeteners — meanwhile, insists that an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has ‘consistently confirmed that aspartame is safe’.
But there is, perhaps, another persuasive argument for cutting out (or back) your consumption of products containing aspartame and other artificial sweeteners — one that might surprise you.
They may not do what they claim to do: help control weight.
Contrary to what you might expect, several large-scale studies have found a positive correlation between artificial sweetener use and weight gain.
One animal study, for example, found that rats consuming artificial sweeteners gained weight faster than those eating sugar.
Might artificial sweeteners, then, actually be more fattening than sugar?
In 2013, a wide-ranging review of studies on humans looking at the impact of artificial sweeteners on weight and other health outcomes found accumulating evidence to suggest that people who consume these sugar substitutes regularly are also more likely to gain excessive weight.
The puzzle is, if artificial sweeteners contain no, or low calories, how could they make you fat?
One emerging possibility is that an extremely sweet taste, unaccompanied by the calories that would accompany it in natural food and drink, encourages us to overeat by seeking out the ‘missing’ calories from other sources. ‘I’m drinking diet cola, so I’ll eat the doughnut’-type thinking.
Another theory is that artificial sweeteners disturb the hormones that regulate our appetite and which signal to our bodies that we have had enough to eat.
This leaves us feeling unsatisfied, which makes us more likely to overeat.
A further possible explanation is that because they over-stimulate our sugar receptors, these hyper-intense synthetic sweeteners might warp our palates, to the point that we no longer enjoy eating foods that aren’t so sweet.
Bear in mind just how sweet these high-tech chemicals are.
Aspartame — which along with acesulfame-k is 200 times sweeter than sugar — is a relative lightweight compared to saccharin, sucralose, neotame or advantame, which are respectively 300, 600, 8,000 and a mind-boggling 37,000 times sweeter than standard white sugar.
Personally, I avoid all products that contain artificial sweeteners. It seems to me that their off-the-wall sweetness aids and abets the root problem: a self-destructive craving for sweetness.
At least with standard sugar, if you decide to gradually reduce the amount you consume, you can surprisingly quickly reset and re-educate your taste buds.
Quite soon you’ll begin to find that less and less sugar is quite sweet enough for you, and start finding very sweet foods that you used to enjoy much too cloying.
It’s clear that we haven’t got to the bottom of how artificial sweeteners could be affecting our eating habits, or our health.
So, for the time being, I think it might be wise to err on the safe side and assume that a taste for larger-than-life chemical sweetness isn’t a habit that’s likely to keep us slim and healthy.
Joanna Blythman is an investigative food journalist and the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writer of the Year 2018.
