An agency within the World Health Organization (WHO) will soon name the widely used artificial sweetener aspartame a "possible carcinogen," based on a review of 1,300 studies, Reuters reported, citing information from two sources who are knowledgeable about the process.
But don't panic: The arm of the WHO that did the review, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), uses a classification system for possible and known carcinogens that is notoriously confusing and often misleading, Reuters noted. Science writer Ed Yong summed it up well in a 2015 Atlantic article, in which he wrote, "Perhaps we need a separate classification scheme for scientific organizations that are 'confusogenic to humans.'"
