Investigating the relationship between taste perception of artificial sweeteners and cancer risk

To investigate whether taste perception of two artificial sweeteners-aspartame and neohesperidin dihydrochalcone (NHDC)-is causally associated with the risk of site-specific cancers.

A two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) study.

Genetic instruments for taste perception (6 for aspartame; 13 for NHDC) were obtained from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of Australian adolescents, and cancer outcome data were sourced from publicly available GWAS datasets.

Genetic data for taste perception from 1757 Australian adolescents and genetic data for cancers from large-scale GWAS cohorts, including UK Biobank (n 500 000) and FinnGen (n 500 000).

A one sd increase in the genetically predicted perceived intensity of NHDC was associated with an increased risk of male genital cancer (OR = 1·11, 95 % CI: 1·04, 1·19) and prostate cancer (OR = 1·03, 95 % CI: 1·01, 1·08) based on FinnGen data. These associations persisted after multivariable MR adjustment for glucose and aspartame perception but were not replicated in the UK Biobank. A weak protective association between aspartame perception and cervical cancer (OR = 0·998, 95 % CI: 0·997, 0·999) was observed, but this attenuated to null in sensitivity analyses.

This study found no compelling evidence that perception of aspartame or NHDC during adolescence causally influences later-life cancer risk. The findings highlight the importance of evaluating individual artificial sweeteners separately in future research examining potential health effects.