I was driving home last night and got to thinking about how 60% of American’s are overweight and Saccharin. Saccharin is an artificial sweetner that fell off the store shelves when a study showed that Saccharin caused cancer in rats. And I remember a large controversy about how the rats were force fed the Saccharin and that the amounts were larger than a human could consume, etc.
The FDA did not ban saccharin, obviously cause you can still buy sweet-n-low, so it has been in use for years.
My question is, was the original research correct? Did the use of Saccharin cause an increase in cancer in humans? If so, why do they still sell it, and if not, why don’t they bring it back big time to replace nutrasweet?
yes saccharine causes excess bladder cancer in rats and mice. But no evidence in many studies in humans. No cites, but just google saccharine and cancer.
The industry fought for many years to get saccharin off the list of carcinogens. I work with the data that is used to determine if a substance causes cancer. Most people don’t know it, but there is an official US government list of chemicals that cause cancer. Many of the chemicals on the list are obscure chemicals you have never heard of but a few are known to most people. Even though they are obscure you might be exposed to them in everyday life - that is why they are tested in the first place.
The agency that conducts all this research, NIEHS, is a scientific agency that has no power to ban anything. But once a chemical gets on the list anyone who manufactures that chemical will pretty quickly take it off the market. Recently a chemical was added to the list that was in some laxatives so it was removed pretty fast.
As they say “To each his own”. I’ve been using saccharin for years and didn’t worry about the cancer warning because they fed those rats so much that at those rates you could get cancer from just about anything.
Johnny Carson said that it proved that Canadian scientists caused cancer in rats.
Sweet-n-Low isn’t saccharin. Matter of fact there was another sweetner that was banned from use in soft drinks, back many years ago. I can’t remember the name of it. Sweet-n-Low caught on fast because there was a need for a sweetner and it was deemed to be safe.
I’ve already got a waiting list of several people. You might want to see if your local library has it. Our library has an online database and you can request books be held for you if they are checked out (which all 4 copies of this book are currently.)
If not, the book itself is certainly worth the price. Amazon offers used copies starting at $7.55.
Good luck!
One of the chairmans of the FDA was… er… heavily involved with the makers of aspartame - and when he retired, he got a rather high paying job as a consultant for them. There’s a bit more to it, but I don’t have any cites handy - but my opinion is that the makers of aspartame bribed the FDA to pass a possibly dangerous aspartame and to demonize saccharin with ridiculous “scientific tests”.
I’ve heard that cyclamates were by far the best tasting artificial sweetener, much better than aspartame. I’m too young to remember tasting anything with them, though.
I can still remember how impressed I was with the taste of aspartame flavored diet soft drinks when they first came out, it was such a huge improvement over saccharine that it seemed like it was almost as good as sugar. After getting used to them there seems to be a huge difference between them and sugar now.
Whats the deal with this Splenda that’s recently come out? I haven’t tried it yet, even though we have a box of it at home.
Splenda is the trade name for Sucralose. Sucralose is sugar with some sucrose chains replaced with chlorine so it won’t be broken down by the body and it supposedly passes right through you. This site explains it all.
My wife and I have been using it for two years now. There are two forms of the sweetner. The normal form, where one little packet equals two teaspoons of sugar, and the granular form, where one cup of granular splenda equals one cup of sugar. The granular form has been bulked up with other carbohydrates. From my experience, one cup of granular splenda does not weigh the same as one cup of sugar, it is much lighter.
We’ve made scones, pancakes, cheesecakes, and Apple Pies with the granular splenda and they came out great.
I drink splenda in Dite Rite cola. It actually tastes like original Coke, as original Coke was made with Cane sugar and not Corn Syrup, and since Splenda tastes like sugar, the soda tastes better, YMMV.
Anyway, so that’s Splenda. Safeway, a major supermarket chain, now carries it next to Nutrasweet, and Sweet-n-Low. Since Splenda seems like such a good deal, why do they even have Questionable (or not) Saccharin on the shelf?
Wow, I can’t believe you perceive it this way. To me, aspartame-based drinks taste exactly like saccharine-based drinks. Always have, always will.
Which has always confused me - if aspartame is supposed to taste just like sugar, what do they put in diet soft drinks to give them a saccharine aftertaste? I’ve assumed that they already had a large segment of the population who were used to the taste of saccharine and liked it, and didn’t want to alienate their base of customers, so they found something else to make me gag at the first sip.
Ace-K is acesulfame potassium. It tastes a bit sweeter than nutrasweet, and, like Splenda, has the added benefit that it can be heated past 200 degrees without breaking down and tasting truly nasty (or had anyone else noticed that no baked goods contain nutrasweet?)
CurtC -
I doubt they put anything in Nutrasweet to make it taste more like Saccharine - nutrasweet only tastes better than saccharine (not too difficult - I grew up around Tab…Cecil was right, malted battery acid). Although, after a short while, drinking only diet soda will make sugared soda completely unpalateable - too sweet.
While the debate rages on about cancer and artificial sweeteners, everyone ignores the one demonstrated fact about artificial sweeteners. Whether or not they cause cancer, they certainly do not cause weight loss.
People don’t loose weight when they use artificial sweeteners. They don’t even moderate weight gains. They just make up the calories from other sources.
Feed animals a diet containing artificial sweeteners, and they gain weight.
Try adding a choice of artificially sweetened products to a population’s, (say a large country) available edibles. Wait a half a century, and compare the average weight of that population to that of their ancestors. There is an excellent example for you to examine. The United States of America.
Deaths from cancer caused by saccharin are not the danger, death from obesity related causes exacerbated by the profligate use of artificial sweeteners might well be. The answer to good health is to eat moderate amounts of a wide variety of wholesome foods, processed as little as good hygiene requires. Then exercise on a regular and rational schedule.
Tris
“I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.” ~ George Santayana ~
Sorry for the hijack, but IMHO, people obsess too much over the number of calories in a particular food or drink. The real question is, what is the effect of a particular food on your mind and body. Calories is only part of the picture. And for reasons that are not entirely clear, sugar-substitutes don’t seem to help people lose weight.
(But they’re great for diabetics, from what I understand)