Smoke and a Pepsi

This summer, Pepsi reintroduced a version of its signature cola sweetened with aspartame. The artificial sweetener had been removed less than a year earlier, in response to (unfounded) worries about its safety. But taking out aspartame did not reverse the slump in diet cola sales, as the company had hoped. Instead, sales continue to reflect a general decline in soda consumption.

From a public-health perspective, this overall decrease is positive, given that sugary soda — which is essentially fizzy flavoured water with no nutritional benefits — is a major contributor to rising obesity rates. But the public panic about aspartame highlights a worrying trend: fears are too often misdirected at new innovations, rather than the known harms they might reduce.

Given the very real health concerns linked to obesity, it is unfortunate that aspartame, which can help decrease sugar intake, should be the subject of decades of misinformation. A similar issue has emerged over another less-harmful alterna- tive to a product that’s far deadlier than soda: personal vaporizers, commonly known as e-cigarettes, which many people are using to replace lethal cigarettes.

Although the use of products like e-cigarettes has rapidly increased, many people still believe — as with aspartame — that they are as harmful, or more harmful, than the tobacco products they are designed to replace. This tendency to highlight unfounded concerns about safer alternatives to unhealthy products plays right into the hands of Big Tobacco and Big Food — two industries that have been accused of using similar tactics to deflect criticism of their unhealthy products.

Both create products with negative health effects that are used by great numbers of people. Both have employed similar marketing strategies, from targeting youth to expanding into untapped foreign markets. Increasing insights into the addictive qualities of sugar and other ingredients, and how companies design their products to exploit such properties, underscore these parallels.

We know that decreasing the consumption of soda and cigarettes will save lives. And while going cold turkey may not be feasible for cism about new products and technologies, particularly their long-term effects. Where real risks exist, it is important to identify them. But it makes little sense to focus on theoretical, minuscule or entirely bogus harms without acknowledging the reducing the harms caused by the devil we know — the one with a wealth of scientific evidence showing that it’s a massive public health concern — should be the priority.

If anything, the history of aspartame research shows an abundance of scientific caution. After safety concerns were raised, its initial approval was withdrawn, pending further testing. As a result of this controversy, it has remained under close scientific scrutiny since it was reapproved. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now says that aspartame is one of the most exhaustively studied substances in the human food supply.

Similarly, an extensive review by the European Food Safety Authority in response to public concerns confirmed that aspartame consumption at current levels is safe (one would have to consume 19 cans of diet soda a day to exceed the FDA’s recommended limits). Nonetheless, public misinformation continues to dissuade people from using it. Similarly, e-cigarettes are a new and promising technology for reducing the harms of a product the World Health Organization predicts will kill up to a billion people this century. Vaping electronic cigarettes is irrefutably safer than smoking regular cigarettes.

Britain’s prestigious Royal College of Physicians concluded that vaping is likely to be at least 95 per cent less harmful than smoking. While that precise figure might be debatable, the broader conclusion is not. Yet rumours and alarmist quasi-science of the kind that have long plagued aspartame now fuel regulations not grounded in evidence or good publichealth practices, and threaten both consumer acceptance of, and access to, products that are demonstrably less harmful than those they may be using now. More needs to be done to ensure that consumer knowledge — and regulatory priorities — better reflect the scientific evidence.