The World Health Organization will on Friday announce that aspartame an artificial sweeter used in soft drinks, is a cancerous agent based on findings of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the WHO.
More stories:
In their recent deliberations, the external experts of the IARC concluded that their ruling aims to evaluate the potential hazards of a substance, solely based on existing published evidence. However, it should be noted that this assessment does not consider the safe consumption levels of a particular product.
Ynet found that sales of soft drinks containing aspartame have dropped by 12% in the past week including sales of Coke Zero and Diet Coke, Sprite, Fanta Zero and Diet, Pepsi Seven Up and more.
But the reduction cannot be exclusively attributed to warnings published by WHO because other diet soft drinks that did not contain the artificial sweetener also saw a reduction in sales although they only dropped by 4%.
Industry executives said it was too early to confirm a downward trend in sales ahead of the WHO announcement, but restaurants and coffee shops said they observed their customers avoiding those drinks, over the past week.
Aspartame is also used in candy and gum and in some diet dairy products and desserts but there, customer awareness was not considered as widespread and sales have thus far not been affected.