In 1965, American chemist and researcher James Schlatter was working for G.D. Searle & Co. on developing a stomach ulcer drug.
He took a short break from his long day and rifled through some papers.
However, maybe out of laziness, sloppiness, or forgetfulness, when the pages got stuck, he licked his fingers. He paused for a minute because he'd just tasted something 200 times sweeter than sugar.
What on Earth could that be?
He looked at the dry, powdery residue stuck to his fingertips and traced the substance back to a beaker filled with aspartic acid and phenylalanine.
He eventually refined the substance to create what we now call aspartame, and, in just a few years, G.D. Searle & Co. marketed aspartame as a miracle sweetener called NutraSweet.
Soon the sweet stuff was used in everything from diet sodas and chewing gum to cereal and ice cream, and quickly became the world's top alternative sweetener. Today, roughly 6,000 products on the market contain aspartame.
But just two weeks ago, on July 14, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially classified aspartame as "possibly carcinogenic."
Now, if you're like me and don't see a reason to ever eat or drink any product with aspartame, you've got nothing to worry about. But for the millions of people who've been duped into guzzling down Diet Coke their whole lives and now wonder why they're so unhealthy, well, this could be a big problem.
But first we've got to understand what this WHO statement really means.
A body within the WHO called the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) chooses substances that it wants to study and evaluates them for cancer risk based on the current available scientific literature.