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SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns are very passionate about their soda. One ingredient in diet soda, aspartame, has created quite the controversy online. But a Westminster chemistry professor said readers should look closer at some of the studies.
"It's an artificial sweetener, which means that it is completely synthetic," Robyn Hyde, a professor of chemistry at Westminster College, said. "It is made in the laboratory."
A simple Google search will show thousands of results on the topic.
"You will find those that say it's completely safe," Hyde said. "And definitely those that are going to say it's the most dangerous poison out there that is regularly incorporated into our food."
Of all the studies and results, Hyde said she comes to the same conclusion most other do.
"Aspartame is generally safe if you're staying within what are the FDA acceptable intake limits."
The FDA limit is 50 milligrams per kilograms of body weight. That's the equivalent of drinking 20 cans of diet soda a day. Drinking more than 20 would exceed that recommended limit.
But Hyde said aspartame isn't just in diet sodas.
"You'll find it in gums, you'll find it in yogurt — you actually can find it in oatmeal," she said. "You can find it in almost any kind of snack that's supposed to be low-calorie."
Some of the literature online says that aspartame causes cancer. Hyde said there are even some studies that support the idea, but that readers should take a closer look at the experiments.
"The only rats that actually showed a significant increase in cancer rates were those rats that were consuming 2,000 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day, every day."
That's 40 times the FDA recommended amount of aspartame, or the equivalent of 800 cans of diet soda a day.
"And at that level actually, I would begin to question if caffeine becomes toxic," Hyde said.
Ultimately, Hyde said the decision to drink diet or regular soda comes down to making that personal choice.
"I wanted something sweet and you know, the good old freshman 15 that comes," Diet Coke drinker, Courtney Brown. "And so I thought that this would be a way that I could get my sweet in, if I had my diet soda."
It's also about having a good balance.
"I always take a Coke to the tops of my hikes," said Coke drinker Morgan Bridge. "That's like my reward at the top is, congratulations, you have a Coke."
