25 April 2012

Dr Soffritti's allegations, made at a conference on cancer in childhood today, are not new and have been scrutinised and rejected by regulatory authorities.

In May 2006, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) unequivocally rejected claims based on a Ramazzini rat study that aspartame was unsafe. In April 2007, Dr Soffritti made further allegations and referred to a second rat study on aspartame. This material was reviewed by EFSA, who again concluded that there was no reason to change its opinion.

In 2010, Dr Soffritti published a paper based on a mouse study on aspartame. In February 2011, EFSA announced its conclusion that the validity of the study could not be assessed and its results could not be interpreted.

The following points need to be taken into account when evaluating claims about aspartame safety made by Dr Soffritti:

• The laboratory at which the Ramazzini work is conducted did not follow internationally recognised Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) procedures. The rat colony was not specific pathogen free.
• The Ramazzini Institute refuses to provide government regulators with full access to its results. For example, only 70 pathology slides were provided to EFSA following the first Ramazzini rat study on aspartame in 2005. This compares with approximately 39,000 slides from carcinogenicity studies on aspartame that were submitted to the Food and Drug Administration before aspartame was first approved in the United States.
• The design and conduct of work at the Ramazzini Institute has been criticised by the United Kingdom Department of Health Committee on Carcinogenicity, by the French food safety agency (L'Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments), by the European Food Safety Authority, and by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To review the appraisal included in the 2006 Annual Report of the Committee on Carcinogenicity click here.
• The Ramazzini Institute does not reveal the source of its funding.
• The extensive body of data from human studies that support the safety of aspartame includes work related to cancer. For example, in 2006 the United States National Cancer Institute published the results of a five year study of over 500,000 people, which concluded that there was no link between aspartame and leukaemia, lymphomas or brain tumours.

Aspartame is simple food ingredient. It is a dipeptide of aspartic acid and phenylalanine, both of which occur widely in our diet. When we eat or drink products with aspartame, it is digested to aspartic acid, phenylalanine and a small amount of methanol. A soft drink sweetened just with aspartame contains less methanol than the same amount of orange juice. In 2002, the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Food stated:

"Aspartame is unique among the intense sweeteners in that the intake of its component parts can be compared with intakes of the same substances from natural foods."

Aspartame is probably the most thoroughly researched food ingredient, having been the subject of over 200 scientific studies. The science on aspartame has been reviewed by the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives of the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, by the European Food Safety Authority (and before that by the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Foods) and by the regulatory authorities in more than 100 countries. All of these bodies have found aspartame to be safe and have approved its use as a food ingredient.

Nevertheless, probably because aspartame is the best-tasting low calorie sweetener, and because low calorie sweeteners as a group are high profile ingredients, aspartame has from time to time been the subject of unjustified attacks.

By providing an excellent sweet taste without the calories of sugar, aspartame makes a useful contribution to a calorie-controlled diet and can help people to avoid overweight and obesity, themselves risk factors for cancer.