At the heart of this latest scare lies the artificial sweetener aspartame. UK regulators have passed it as safe for use, but Italian scientists have linked it to leukaemia in rats.
What foods are effected?
The controversial additive is found in over 6,000 types of food, drink and medicines, including chocolate bars, ice cream, fruit yoghurts, soft drinks and chewing gum, which makes it pretty hard to avoid. To give you an idea of the scale, it's consumed on average every day by one in 15 people around the world. It's popular with dieters because it has next-to-no calories and manufacturers love it because it's a third of the price of sugar.
The science
The latest research comes from Dr Morando Soffritti and colleagues at the Cancer Research Centre in Bologna. They fed eight-week-old rats varying concentrations of aspartame. Their study found the risk of developing lymphomas or leukaemias rose with the dose of aspartame.
Dr Elaine Vickers, cancer information officer at Cancer Research UK, speaking to the BBC, said, 'If a risk to humans does exist, it will almost certainly be very small. However, we welcome the news that the EFSA [European Food Safety Authority] will undertake an urgent assessment of this work.'
What does that mean for you?
Concerns have been raised about aspartame in the past, but the EFSA say it is safe to use as long as people stay within an Acceptable Daily Intake, or ADI - an estimate of the amount of an additive that could be eaten every day over a lifetime with little to no health risk.
To exceed the ADI an adult would have to drink 14 cans of a sugar-free drink every day and this assumes the sweetener was used in the drink at the maximum permitted level. In practice, most drinks use aspartame in combination with other sweeteners so that the level is considerably lower, says the Food Standard Agency.
So there you have it. It's probably safe to use as long as you don't exceed the ADI, but if you're still concerned there are plenty of alternatives. Try using honey, fruitsana (fruit sugars) or Perfect Sweet - derived entirely from xylitol, a naturally occurring substance found in strawberries, plums and pears.
