The short and sweet of the aspartame debate: No cause for alarm

The artificial sweetener aspartame that’s widely used in fizzy drinks has just been classified as “possibly” cancer-causing by UN scientists - but there’s no cause for alarm.That’s the key message from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), whose assessment of aspartame was carried out on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), by an expert panel of nutritional epidemiology and nutritional toxicology scientists.With more details on what these findings mean for all of us, UN News’s Daniel Johnson spoke to IARC’s Mary Schubauer-Berigan, who’s head of the agency’s Monographs Programme.