Back in the 1980’s, while still living in Australia, I used to work for a very well-known worldwide pharmaceutical company (whose name I won’t put here for legal reasons). I worked in the Research & Development Lab and we did some lengthy research on Aspartame as this well-known pharmaceutical company was considering putting Aspartame in one of their liquid antacid products.
The research done in Australia on Aspartame at that time — along with other research done in Europe — showed Aspartame to be a carcinogen (cancer causing) and the Australian Health Department would not provide approval to include it as an ingredient in the liquid antacid product (nor anything else for that matter).
I imagine those “rules” have been relaxed since the 1980’s because Aspartame is a real money maker. But to this day, knowing what I saw in that research, I have never ingested a product that contains Aspartame, and I do everything I can to talk my friends out of any dietary drinks or products that contain it also.
Just my 10 cents worth.