Should you kick your Diet Coke habit? As a public health expert, I’m not too worried

According to one study whose findings have not been replicated elsewhere, ‘going from having absolutely no aspartame to drinking a can of Coke Zero a day for a decade would raise your risk of cancer from 3.1% to 3.3%’. Photograph: carlosalvarez/Getty Images

We’ve been worried about artificial sweeteners and human health for decades. I remember when I was growing up a lot of parents would tell their kids to be careful about artificially sweetened things because they could cause all sorts of nasty conditions. In my teens a friend’s mother was convinced that her daughter’s Diet Coke habit was going to give her no end of issues later in life.

The latest news is no different. Aspartame, one of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners in the world, has made headlines as a cancer risk. This is because the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health Organization body, reclassified aspartame as a class 2B carcinogen, which means that it officially – according to the IARC – is a “possible” cancer risk.