While the impact of sweeteners on health has been the subject of debate for years, a new French study has just decided: these food additives are indeed carcinogenic.
- Aspartame, a well-known artificial sweetener, is present in several thousand food products around the world. Its energy value is similar to that of sugar (4 kcal/g) but its sweetening power is 200 times higher, which means that a much lower quantity of aspartame is necessary to obtain a comparable taste.
- Other artificial sweeteners don’t even contain calories, such as acesulfame-K and sucralose, which are 200 and 600 times sweeter than sucrose, respectively.
According to a new French study published in Plos Medicinethe consumption of sweeteners is associated with an increased risk of cancer.
“While the carcinogenicity of some food additives has been suggested by several experimental studies, strong epidemiological data linking daily consumption of sweeteners to the etiology of various diseases is lacking,” explain the authors of the research in the introduction.
Exposures to additives
They therefore wanted to examine the associations between the consumption of sweeteners (total and the most frequently consumed) and the risk of cancer (overall and by the most frequent types of cancer). For this, they relied on data provided by 102,865 adults participating in the NutriNet-Santé study.
The volunteers self-declared their medical history, socio-demographic data, physical activity, as well as indications of their lifestyle and state of health. They also provided detailed information on their food consumption by sending scientists complete records over several 24-hour periods, including product names and brands. “This made it possible to precisely assess their exposure to additives, and in particular to sweeteners”, explain the scientists.
After collecting information on cancer diagnosis during the follow-up period (2009-2021), they performed statistical analyzes to investigate associations between sweetener consumption and participants’ cancer risk. They took into account many potentially confounding factors such as age, gender and level of education.
Breast cancer and obesity-related cancers
Scientists found that compared to non-consumers, people who ingested the most sweeteners, especially aspartame and acesulfame-K, had a higher risk of developing cancer of all types. Higher risks were particularly observed for breast cancer and obesity-related cancers.
“This large-scale prospective study suggests, in agreement with several experimental in vivo and in vitro studies, that sweeteners, used in many foods and beverages in France and around the world, could represent an increased risk factor for cancer”, explains Charlotte Debras, doctoral student and author of the study.
“These findings do not support the use of sweeteners as safe alternatives to sugar and provide new information to address controversies over their potential adverse health effects. They also provide important data for their ongoing re-evaluation. by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and other public health agencies around the world”, concludes Mathilde Touvier, research director at Inserm and coordinator of the study.
Further research in other large-scale cohorts will be needed to replicate and confirm these results.
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