Last week’s news on aspartame might have sounded bad for Coca-Cola and other consumer-product companies that widely use the artificial sweetener. After all, no manufacturer wants this kind of headline about one of its key ingredients, “Aspartame May Be a Carcinogen: How Worried Should You Be?”

But attorneys in the food and beverage industry and academia say the mixed messages released on Friday about aspartame are unlikely to trigger the torrent of litigation that some class action lawyers had been gearing up for.