Aspartame Declared ‘Possible’ Carcinogen. Here’s What That Really Means

is not effective. “If consumers are faced with the decision of whether to take cola with sweeteners or one with sugar, I think there should be a third option considered, which is to drink water instead and to continue to limit the consumption of sweetened products altogether,” he said. “This is particularly important for young children,” who are developing lifelong taste preferences.

Some scientists note that simply classifying something as a carcinogen is meaningless. “Classification alone is, at most, useless and in several cases—like in this case—is dangerous,” says Angelo Moretto, a professor at the department of cardiothoracic and cardiovascular sciences and public health at the University of Padua in Italy. It’s the dose that matters. Almost anything can be toxic if you have enough of it—even water, he says.

IARC rulings are famously cautious—the agency has previously declared everything from aloe vera to pickles to cell phones to be possible carcinogens. Moretto and his colleagues wrote in the online publication the European Scientist that the IARC Monographs are like the supercomputer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: In that book, Deep Thought’s answer to the question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” is “forty-two.” Yet no one seems to remember what the question itself was.

Like Deep Thought, “the ‘42’ answer that IARC has for everything is ‘carcinogenic’ because its pronouncements are limited to: carcinogenic, probably or possibly carcinogenic to humans, or ‘I don’t know,’” Moretto and his colleagues wrote. “But as another famous line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us, ‘Don’t Panic.’”