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One of the most popular diet drinks manufacturers, Pepsi announced recently that it will stop using aspartame as the artificial sweetener from its Diet Pepsi drinks.
The decision is a response to the customer feedback the company has been receiving ever since aspartame has gained negative reactions from nutritionists everywhere.
Pepsi will replace aspartame with another artificial sweetener called sucralose, also known as Splenda.
PepsiCo decided to stop sweetening its diet drinks with aspartame after many Americans have stopped buying the popular diet soda.
Pepsi’s number one rival is Coca-Cola, which announced at the beginning of this week that the sales for its Diet Coke, which is also sweetened with aspartame, have decreased by 5% on the North American market in the first three months of this year.
However, Coca-Cola stated that it doesn’t plan to replace the aspartame sweetener from its drinks, especially since Diet Coke is the number one diet soda in the United States.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, aspartame, also known as its brand names of NutraSweet and Equal, is one of the most studied substances in the food supply field.
The FDA said that there are more than 100 official studies that support the safety of aspartame.
A recent study, conducted by a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, showed that aspartame poses no health threat in the amounts consumed by people in the United States.
However, the same report added that the researchers are not certain whether this particular artificial sweetener can increase the risk of some types of blood cancers, especially in men.
The companies’ executives say that the decline on perception that aspartame is not safe is to blame.
John Sicher, who works as a publisher at Beverage Digest, said that many people have a negative opinion about aspartame. Sicher noted that he used a tool called Topsy to measure the what people on Twitter think about the sweetener and found that aspartame got a ranking of 22, which is way below the standard ranking from Congress, which is 38.
By comparison, Christmas has a rank of 88, while “love” a ranking of 96.
According to the same tool used to measure people’s opinion about different things, sucralose, another artificial sweetener used in Sparkling Ice, is not seen as negatively as aspartame.
The vice president of PepsiCo, Seth Kaufman, said that people are not drinking Diet Pepsi anymore because it contains aspartame.
