A Harvard-affiliated hospital is backing away from its decision this week to promote a paper linking the artificial sweetener aspartame and cancer, now saying the evidence was "weak."
Brigham and Women's Hospital said in an email to reporters that data in the paper, which was published Wednesday in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition, "is weak, and that Brigham and Women's Hospital media relations was premature in the promotion of this work."
The hospital's public-relations department had promoted the study with an attention-grabbing headline: "The truth isn't sweet when it comes to artificial sweeteners."
In the study, researchers combed through two studies looking for increased risk of blood cancers related to consumption of the artificial sweetener.
When they looked at the two studies combined, they found some trends toward a higher risk of cancers that could be linked with aspartame, but the researchers now admit that the findings could also be due to chance.
