ASPARTAME, the artificial sweetener used in thousands of foods and drinks, does not pose a cancer risk, contrary to the findings of a scientific study, the European Union’s food safety agency said yesterday.

Aspartame, which is 200 times sweeter than sugar, is used in a wide range of lowcalorie products from Diet Coke, Lucozade and Robinson’s fruit squashes, to Müllerlight yoghurts, Walkers prawn-flavoured crisps, sugar-free gum and many puddings and desserts.

It is marketed under trademarks including NutraSweet and Canderel and is thought to be consumed by one in fifteen people worldwide every day.

A recent study in Italy claimed that the sweetener increased cancers in rats. However, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which reviewed the Ramazzini Institute research, found no conclusive evidence that aspartame was responsible and that, although the additive did cause damage to the rats’ kidneys, this would not happen to human beings.

“Our conclusion on the basis of all the evidence currently available to us is that there’s no reason to revise the previously established ADI (acceptable daily intake), nor at this stage . . . to undertake any further extensive review of the safety of aspartame,” Iona Pratt, the chairman of the EFSA’s working party, told a news conference in Rome yesterday.

Aspartame’s ADI is set at 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight — equivalent to 2,800 milligrams for an average British adult or about 600 milligrams for an average three-year-old child. An adult would have to consume 14 cans of a sugar-free drink every day before reaching the ADI, assuming that the sweetener was used in the drink at the maximum permitted level.

The EFSA said that increased incidence of leukaemias and lymphomas in the rats in the Ramazzini study could be attributed to chronic health problems that made the animals predisposed to such conditions, and not consumption of aspartame.

This year Roger Williams, the Liberal Democrat MP for Brecon and Radnorshire, called on the Government for action about the growing body of evidence suggesting that the sweetener might pose a significant risk to human health.

Addressing an adjournment debate in Westminster, Mr Williams said that evidence of aspartame’s carcinogenic properties and the adverse brain reactions that it could cause was irrefutable. He said that the problem still went widely unnoticed by doctors because aspartame consumption was not considered when patients complained of headaches, blurred vision, mood swings and other neurological disorders.

Several international experts have also voiced concern about the sweetener’s safety and its original appraisal process, dating back to the 1980s.

A study by Ralph Walton, professor of psychiatry at Lake Erie College of Medicine in Pennsylvania, suggested that intakes of 30mg per kg per day — about eight or nine Diet Cokes — could trigger reactions as serious as haemorrhaging in the eye.

Professor Walton said he believed that aspartame was also a factor in the increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes because it affected appetite and induced carbohydrate cravings, leading users to gain weight. He added that patients who had come to him with mental problems such as headaches had their health transformed by cutting down their intake of aspartame.

Food manufacturers welcomed the EFSA’s verdict. Alain Beaumont, secretary-general of the European beverage association, UNESDA, which represents leading soft drinks producers such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury-Schweppes, said that the announcement had reconfirmed the safety of aspartame “as an important tool in the fight against obesity”.

But the Ramazzini Institute, which tested aspartame on 1,800 rats over their entire lives, stood by its findings and said that it planned further research.

“Because of the globalisation of the industrialised diet and the ever-increasing use of artificial sweeteners among billions of people in both industrialised and developing countries, the European Ramazzini Foundation considers its work on sweeteners to be of the highest priority for the protection of public health,” it said in a statement.”

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