It only takes one diet soda a day to increase your risk of leukemia. This is based off new findings from what has been deemed the longest running study on aspartame as a carcinogen in humans.
This study has opened the door for future findings. For this study researchers have analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study for a twenty-two year period. A total of 77,218 women and 47,810 men were included in this analysis. What seems to set this study apart for all of the rest aside from its wide scale is its thoroughness.
This study assessed aspartame intake like no other study before. Every two years each participant was given a detailed dietary questionnaire. their diets were also reassessed every four years. You see this is important because previous studies only assessed the participants’ aspartame intake at one single point in time which affected their accuracy dramatically leading them to find that there was no link to cancer. By assessing frequently the data becomes more accurate.
This new study has shown that drinking just one twelve ounce can of diet soda per day can lead to things like:
- An almost fifty percent higher leukemia risk (forty-two percent higher to be exact in men and women)
- Over one hundred percent higher risk for myeloma (one hundred and two percent to be exact and in men)
- thirty-one percent higher non-Hodgkin lymphoma risk (in men)
These were all done by comparison to people who drank no diet soda. It also unknown as to why the risk only increases for men in the cases of myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. However, it is known that diet soda is the largest source of aspartame in the Americans actually consume over five thousand tons of aspartame almost ninety percent being through diet sodas.
This goes to show that we should make an extra effort to cut aspartame out of our lives. Cancer is all around us and as we are slowly coming to realize it is being fed to us each and every day.