Once people hear aspartame is a possible carcinogen little attention is paid to the science: Expert

Food companies that use aspartame might be forced to change their ingredients if the public perception of the artificial sweetener turns negative following reports that have deemed it possibly cancer causing, one expert is warning.

The use of aspartame, commonly found in soda drinks, was flagged as possibly being carcinogenic, according to a report from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The report might be enough to cause panic in consumers, and as a result force the hand of food companies to replace it with other ingredients, Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food analytics lab at Dalhousie University, told BNN Bloomberg in an interview on Friday.

“The issue here is that as soon as you use the word cancer people pay little attention to the science, and that’s the danger here,” he explained.  

Charlebois stressed that it would take the consumption of 36 cans of soda per day every day to see the risk of cancer materialize in the human body from the substance. Despite this, he said the public could very likely turn skeptical of the use of aspartame in their food to any degree.