‘No place in our food’: Consumer groups launch petition to ban aspartame in Europe
A petition to ban the artificial sweetener aspartame was launched on Tuesday by the international non-profit Foodwatch, the French Cancer League, and the mobile app company Yuka.
The petition is addressed to the European Commission and EU member states.
"There's no time to lose. The inaction of governments and Europe over the last year and a half is intolerable,” Natacha Cingotti, a senior campaigns strategist at Foodwatch International, said in a statement.
“An additive with so many risks has no place in our food or drink,” she added, urging European decision-makers to “protect us".
The coalition said that aspartame is present in more than 2,500 products in Europe, particularly sugar-free food and drinks such as Coca-Cola Zero, Pepsi Max, and Sprite Zero.
Foodwatch partnered with Yuka, a mobile application that scans food and cosmetic product barcodes and rates them based on their health impact.
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"95 per cent of Yuka users say they have stopped buying products containing controversial additives thanks to the app," said Julie Chapon, Yuka’s managing director.
“We now want to empower consumers so that they can act as a lever for banning this risky additive”.
The app says it has 45 million users in Europe.
On average 40 per cent of Europeans reported consuming aspartame with Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands having higher consumption, according to a survey based on seven countries commissioned by Foodwatch.
In all the countries, the majority of respondents agreed that aspartame should be banned from food as a precautionary measure until its safety can be guaranteed.
Aspartame was classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in July 2023.
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This means that there’s limited evidence linking it to cancer in animals and humans, especially liver cancer.
The IARC recommends limiting daily intake of the artificial sweetener to 40 mg/kg body weight.
This would represent around a dozen cans of a sugar-free beverage for an adult weighing 70 kg.
The European Commission didn’t immediately reply to Euronews Health's request for comment.
