Aspartame (E951)

Names on a label

• E951
• E 951
• Aspartame

Labels outside Europe often print the number on its own, without the E.

What it’s used for

The FDA lists these uses in food: flavor enhancer; non-nutritive sweetener.¹

What regulators and scientists say

• EFSA set an acceptable daily intake of 40 mg per kilogram of body weight per day (November 28, 2013). For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult, that’s about 2.8 g a day.²
• The FDA permits it as a food additive by regulation (21 CFR 172.804).¹
• IARC classifies it as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B, 2024).³

An acceptable daily intake is, in EFSA’s words, “an estimate of the amount of a substance in food or drinking water that can be consumed daily over a lifetime without presenting an appreciable risk to health.”⁴

IARC’s groups “indicate the strength of the evidence as to whether an agent is capable of causing cancer,” but they don’t measure how likely cancer is at a given level of exposure.⁵