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STORY: Could drinking diet sodas, chewing gum, and eating yoghurt lead to cancer?

The World Health Organization is set to label aspartame - an artificial sweetener found in these products - a possible cancer risk.

But will consumers be willing to kick the habit?

"It seems like everything causes cancer these days."

"I always knew it kind of tastes funny."

"I'd rather even have sugar instead of aspartame."

Discovered in 1965 by an American chemist and approved by the FDA nine years later, aspartame is about 200 times sweeter than regular table sugar.

It has almost zero calories so became popular with increasingly diet-conscious consumers.

Shoppers can find it in everything from Weight Watchers yogurts, to some Snapple drinks and Mars' Extra chewing gum.

"It's convenient for companies to construct what we call a 'health halo' around some of these products."

Noah Praamsma is a nutrition education coordinator with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

"Unfortunately, in this case, as you dig a little deeper, you realize that sometimes something like a diet soda might not quite be the health food that we might have hoped."

Food companies need to decide whether to fight back against the labeling, ignore it, or find alternative sweeteners to use.

However, recent recipe tweaks by soft drinks giant PepsiCo demonstrate the struggle of balancing health concerns with taste.

PepsiCo removed aspartame from sodas in 2015, only to bring it back a year later, and then remove it again in 2020.

Here's Adam Coons, a portfolio manager at Winthrop Capital Management.

"We do see the big soda manufacturers like Pepsi and Coke changing their formula over time. Now this takes time because you can't just say, 'Hey, we're going to replace one sweetener with another.' Taste is what drives the majority of the sales with one manufacturer over another."

Reuters sources say the International Agency for Research on Cancer - an arm of the WHO - will list aspartame as a 'possible' carcinogen in July, putting it in the same category as lead and some pesticides.

However, the IARC has two, more serious categories: “probably carcinogenic” and “carcinogenic”.

The latter category includes tobacco and alcohol.

Analysts say, like with smoking, it could be a while before a behavior shift is seen.

"The consumer will continue to do something that they know is somewhat harmful to their health for quite a while. It takes a big shift, I mean we saw it in cigarettes, everyone knows that it causes cancer, yet they're still a product, right?"