Ocean Spray Diet Juices Safe: Presence Of Aspartame Claim is False

Ocean Spray is a well-known beverage brand that offers a wide range of fruit-based drinks. It was established in the 1930s in the US and then became popular worldwide. The brand has a variety of products including both normal and diet juice. 

Recently, social media users are claiming that Ocean Spray brand’s diet products contain Aspartame as an ingredient instead of sugar for sweetness which is harmful and not safe for human consumption.

However, Fact Crescendo found the claim to be false. Ocean Spray’s diet products do not contain Aspartame. 

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Fact Check- 

First, we searched for the list of ingredients used in Ocean Spray’s diet drinks. We found that the product contains filtered water, cranberry juice (water, cranberry juice concentrate), cherry juice (water, cherry juice concentrate), natural flavor, pectin, citric acid, fumaric acid, ascorbic acid (vitamin c), sodium citrate, sucralose, malic acid, red 40, acesulfame potassium, blue 1.

This means that Aspartame is not an ingredient in the product. 

But what is Aspartame and is it harmful for human consumption?

Aspartame is a low-calorie sweetener which tastes sweet but does not contain any natural sugars and its calorie level is much less than sugar. It is 200 times sweeter than sugar that is why it is used in very less quantity. It is an artificial substance and made of two naturally occurring amino acids called aspartic acid and phenylalanine.These two amino acids are found in various foods and in the human body as well.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) conducted a study and classified Aspartame as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B) based on limited evidence for cancer in humans. Group 2B category means possibly carcinogenic to humans. Gasoline engine exhaust, occupational exposure as hair dresser or barber etc falls under this classification.

JECFA had also concluded that there was no convincing evidence from experimental animal or human data that aspartame has adverse effects after ingestion. JECFA confirmed that aspartame is safe to consume within the daily limit of 0–40 mg per kilogram of body weight. That means, a 70 kg adult would need to drink more than 9–14 cans of diet soda in a day to go over the limit, as long as they don’t get aspartame from other foods.

Conclusion: 

Fact Crescendo found the claim to be false. Ocean Spray Diet beverages do not contain Aspartame as an ingredient. Also, aspartame has been declared safe for human consumption by food safety regulatory bodies.