Oh my fuck. I hate news stories like this. Aspartame falls into the same cancer risk category as eating red meat sometimes and being kinda lazy. A rigorous systematic review was conducted of dozens of studies of aspartame and they did not find a plausible biologic mechanism by which aspartame could cause cancer. Epidemiologically, it's vaguely correlated, not causative of cancer.

Also, in the Reuters article it notes that a 132-lbs adult would have to drink 12 to 36 cans of diet coke a day for the dose/exposure to become relevant to the risk they're talking about. This article is talking about one study that is at odds with the systematically reviewed data from 40 human observational studies, 12 experimental animal studies, and 1360 assay/experimental end points to look for the supposed link.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691522007475#sec5

Per the article. You have to drink 12 to 36 cans a day (depending on the individual) before it even starts having health risks.

Hasn't this been known for a while or am I thinking of saccharine?

Being completely transparent I don't care if there are any health risks associated with it for the greater population. I am just allergic to it and it gives me the worst shits possible, so if we could stop putting it in things that would be killer. It's in every gum now so I just can't buy gum anymore.