WHO says soda sweetener aspartame may cause cancer, but it’s safe within limits
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I drink one can of diet soda a couple of times a week and was starting to get worried lol
If you don't suffer from Phenylketonuria, Phenylalanine is a harmless amino acid. And should you suffer from that you will know.
Methanol on the other hand is known to be damaging. However if you drink beer you consume small amounts of methanol. Same for most alcoholic drinks. But these small amounts are very high compared to what you get from aspartame.
Which is why I was never worried too much about aspartame in small amounts. Just don't make it your main hydration source.
One small doubt in my comparison is that one of the main treatments for methanol poisoning is to give pure ethanol. Since it competes with the same enzymes, alcohol dehydrogenases, that break Methanol down into toxic compounds.
If you consume aspartame without alcohol there's no ethanol to compete.
But it's still small amounts, do with that what you will.
If you've ever been to California you will know that everything may cause cancer. The question is how much. And I still think Aspartame is the least of your worries if you don't live an extremely healthy lifestyle already. I.e. zero sugar, zero alcohol, no red meat, no processed food, no cigarettes...
He dead before 60. Couldn't work at 50.
It took me a long time to figure out why these things happened, by checking ingredients of everything, finding what's common, eliminating elements until I've reached the one that caused the issues. That was aspartame.
The fact that it may cause cancer really is enough to avoid it. Smoking three packs per day is more likely to going to cause you cancer earlier than smoking only five cigarettes per day, yet people don't run around claiming that it's fine because it's only so few anyway.
It's really problematic that societies have adopted this idea that a little poison is totally fine, as if there wasn't already hundreds of little poisons and damaging effects acting on your body on a daily basis.
I think in regards to your final point, though, it’s important to remember the adage: “the dose makes the poison.”[0]
Tangent ahead:
It is empirically evident that exposure to urban envorinments as a child shortens your lifespan.
Of course this is an example where it seems impossible to clean the correlation of common causes that you might not want to consider.
But, it is also proven that processed sugar causes cancer, obesity etc
It is proven that noise and air pollution cause cancer, strokes, mental health issues, etc
It is also proven that processed foods in general cause health issues.
The examples are intentionally diverse. Another one:
It has even been proven that there is a direct link between air pollution and suicide rates: https://www.google.de/search?q=study+pollution+suicide
intentionally linking to google here because there are many studies about the topic, with varying amounts of effort to "control" for factors like income and "pre-existing conditions".
Summary of my long post:
The meme "everything causes cancer" is overused, and the reality is that we just don't care a lot about many things.
What this means for aspartame, I cannot tell, still consuming it occasionaly. But I also drank at least a litre of regular cola when young :D