It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but odds are it will be meaningless - the research is sketchy at best for now.

In my mind with the quality of research out there right now, it will boil down to 3 outcomes:

• If you used a lot of artificially sweetened products to avoid consuming lots of sugar, and you would go back to using the same amount of sugar otherwise, then keep using the sweetener. Sugar is far more likely to cause damage to you.
• If you think you could cut out the aspartame and cut down on sugar, then do that instead.
• If you eat a decent amount of red meat, you may as well continue consuming aspartame. Odds are the meat will cause cancer long before the aspartame does.

The trouble is the news can latch on to the IARC plan to classify it as a class 2B carcinogen (“possibly carcinogenic”). The problem is, the IARC classification is kinda trash for an end user, since it only classifies the quality of the research available. Meat is a class 1 (“known carcinogen”), but so is asbestos and sunlight and alcohol. No one would argue that those are equivalent. Similarly, coffee, pickles and petrol are also 2B classifications. It’s easy for the news to run with “aspartame has been identified as possibly carcinogenic” and be completely correct while also entirely misleading.