Consumers, food-makers face choice as WHO cancer agency set to warn on aspartame sweeteners

 Consumers, food companies, retailers and restaurants need to decide whether to fight back or find alternatives to one of the world's most common artificial sweeteners, as a leading global health body prepares to declare it a possible carcinogen. On Thursday, Reuters reported that aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gums, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm. The IARC ruling does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators.

Several consumer industry trade bodies - whose members use aspartame - on Thursday rejected the IARC’s assessment. “The headlines could have a negative impact on sales volumes of lower-calorie sodas, which is really a function of how much attention the story garners," Garrett Nelson, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, said.

Shoppers can find aspartame in Weight Watchers yoghurts, some Snapple drinks and Conagra’s Mrs. Butterworth’s syrups. "We think this report is likely to cause beverage companies and trade groups both to challenge the findings and swap to substitute sweeteners in their recipes such as stevia,” Nelson said.

He added companies have likely started testing recipes to ensure that the taste of their products remains consistent. To be sure, analysts said consumer companies might not immediately rush into reformulating, waiting instead for food and drug agencies around the world to take a stance on IARC’s assessment.

Another issue is how quickly other types of sweeteners could be produced in sufficient volume to provide substitutes as aspartame, a mainstay ingredient of packaged foods for decades, is one of the world's most widely-used sweeteners.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/consumers-food-makers-face-choice-161805057.html