Ok, so what's the straight dope on the whole "Splenda is practically DDT" crap?

Factual Questions
1

So a friend on Facebook posted a story about how Splenda is like a couple atoms away from being DDT and is horribly horribly dangerous, destroys your red blood cells, kills all your gut flora, kicks all your puppies, etc. Given that he’s a Mona Vie distributor (I keep him around for the highly amusing rah rah go team glurgy one-liners he posts from time to time) I take everything health-related he posts with a mountain of salt, but it turns out there are so many anti-Splenda pages out there I can’t find a cite that treats the question rationally.

Now I understand there are studies that show that artificial sweeteners don’t actually seem to help people lose weight. That’s apparently one of the least of their concerns, because SPLENDA IS ALMOST DDT! IT WILL KILL YOU!

Here’san example of the type of hysterical article I’m talking about. It makes a lot of scary claims and has links to anecdotes and studies that are then deliberately misinterpreted but offers no explanation of the mechanisms involved. What exactly about Splenda is supposed to be so dangerous?

2

Splenda is:

C[sub]12[/sub]H[sub]19[/sub]Cl[sub]3[/sub]O[sub]8[/sub]

DDT is:

C[sub]14[/sub]H[sub]9[/sub]Cl[sub]5[/sub]

Looks like 2 fewer carbon, 10 more hydrogen, 2 fewer chlorine, and 8 oxygen. So if I’m reading that right, Splenda is 14 atoms different from DDT.

3

I can’t address most of the issues you discuss in your post. But I will comment on artificial sweeteners not helping people lose weight. This will be true if the person takes the lack of sugar in his colas, tea, coffee, and so forth as license to eat more in other ways. If I go to McDonald’s and order a pair of Big Macs, a large order of fries, and a cinna-melt for lunch every day, it’s not going to matter that I put Splenda rather than sugar in my coffee.

4

Consider: Salt (NaCl) is one atom away from both a deadly gas and a violently-reactive metal. :eek:

Note: I don’t know how the various ions in DDT, Splenda, or salt react on their own.

5

The title of the article says ‘Made from Sugar, but is Closer to DDT’.

Here’s a comparison of Sucrose, Sucralose, and DDT (in that order):

C[sub]12[/sub]H[sub]22[/sub]O[sub]11[/sub]
C[sub]12[/sub]H[sub]19[/sub]Cl[sub]3[/sub]O[sub]8[/sub]
C[sub]14[/sub]H[sub]9[/sub]Cl[sub]5[/sub]

Sugar and Splenda have the same number of carbon atoms. The number of hydrogen atoms in Splenda is closer to the number of hydrogen atoms in sugar than it is to the number of hydrogen atoms in DDT. Sucralose and DDT to both have Chlorine atoms, which are not in sugar. But DDT doesn’t have oxygen. Also, the number of oxygen atoms plus the number of chlorine atoms in sucralose is the same as the number of oxygen atoms in sucrose.

So I think that sucralose is closer to sugar than to DDT, and that the title of the linked article incorrect.

6

Funny, but of course the connections matter far more. Splenda is sucrose that has been tri-chlorinated (there were some descriptions in previous threads on the subject and more information in the Wikipedia page and presumably patents.) DDT is a diphenyl that has been heavily chlorinated (p-Cl on the phenyls and a trichloromethane on the linking methyne.)

7

The SD is there have been various studies and neither sucralose or aspartame have been shown to be meaningfully harmful.

Honestly this issue comes up a lot because, as you note, there is a very large movement of people who seem to think artificial sweeteners are literally some sort of poisonous warfare agent that have, through corruption and/or lax oversight been allowed to go onto the market.

If you look at this catch-all Wiki page on sweeteners you will note that pretty much all of the major ones have been studied not dozens but hundreds of times by health agencies spanning the globe and no materially adverse effects have ever been linked to human beings.

Unfortunately I think part of the fear is spurred on because of grave misunderstandings that have come about in the past.

For example an artificial sweetener anyone alive in the 70s may remember, saccharin, was widely assumed to be bad for you for a long time. In the 70s Canada banned it for human consumption based on laboratory tests done on animals. The FDA in America was moving to do the same, but Congress stepped in and blocked it. For ever onward people have fueled their conspiracy theory fires against artificial sweeteners based on this action.

In truth, the study linking saccharin to cancer was done on laboratory rats and subsequent research has shown that it causes bladder cancer in rats through a mechanism that does not apply to the human body. Something many people need to remember is, just because rats are commonly used to test thing on, and just because they are mammals, there is not a 1:1 relationship between how things affect different species and how things affect us. There are many mammals that can and do eat things that would cause serious adverse effects in humans and vice versa.

So even the one artificial sweetener that has been genuinely banned by some countries, extensive subsequent research and the WHO has concluded it is safe for human consumption.

When it comes to the mainstream sweeteners used in consumer food products today (sucralose/Splenda and aspartame/NutraSweet) about the worst thing you can genuinely find is a few studies have shown they can cause cancer in rats. However again, both substances have been vetted and OKayed by hundreds of scientists and health organizations all over the world. As has been shown with saccharin just because something is a carcinogen in rats does not make it a carcinogen in humans. Further, the dosage in these studies that have found any problems with rats is insane. For example a study showed that Splenda can kill good gut bacteria in rats. The dosage for that study was the equivalent of consuming something like 10,000 packets of Splenda or many, many thousands of sodas or coffees worth of Splenda in a single day, every day for a period of time. I would posit far worse side effects would present if a human was consuming that much coffee or soda per day and from things other than the sweetener, think about how much caffeine would come with that many coffees or sodas.

8

Yes, I was being facetious. The molecules are completely different shapes.

9

NB: Cecil Adams on aspartame.

10

Actual DDT won’t usually kill you. You’d think they’d come up with a more deadly toxin to falsely associate Splenda with.

Seriously: DDT isn’t all that toxic to humans. You can literally eat the stuff and not suffer ill effects:

I’m not saying DDT is harmless. It will, eventually, kill a human if they eat or otherwise come into contact with enough of it. On the other hand, the stuff we spray around our homes to kill roaches is more toxic than DDT, and we don’t have massive problems keeping that under control.

Also, Dr. Joseph Mercola, owner of the webpage you linked to, is a scammer and a quack who has been warned by the FDA at least once in his slimy career.

11

Thanks for mentioning that. I’d heard it before, but had forgotten.

12

hell, water is one oxygen atom away from being a highly corrosive, unstable oxidizer (hydrogen peroxide, or H2O2.)

13

Thanks guys, especially those who posted the chemical formulas and their comparisons. That’s the kind of thing that’s getting lost amid the screamy blog posts.

Your post as a whole is a great summation of the problem. I’m just old enough to remember the saccharin scare. If I remember correctly, those studies like the Splenda studies also used far far more saccharin than a human would ever take in per day. The banning of saccharin, and later reading about the subsequent questioning of the results, is one of the main sources of my own skepticism when it comes to health studies and is why I ask questions like this. One study showing a health effect shouldn’t be grounds for changing your lifestyle, it should be grounds for more study.

14

And water has exactly the same molecular structure as DHMO! :eek:

15

Yes, I caught my neighbor spraying some on his lawn, and explained to him that it eventually finds its way into the water supply . . . and there’s no way to filter it out.

16

I use it as a solvent.

17

I think you are probably confusing saccharine with cyclamate. I do not think saccharine ever was banned (it was already in much too wide use for that to economically and politically viable), but cyclamate, though in most respects (probably including safety) a much better sweetener, suffered the fate you describe.

18

No, saccharin genuinely had a scare in the 1970s (in fact all the way back to Theodore Roosevelt people were wary of it, T.R. himself defended its use, though, and was a consumer himself) that lead to it being banned in some places. Saccharin was never banned here but the FDA was essentially going to up until Congress stepped in and stopped them because it would have been injurious to various industries.

I believe that after subsequent studies showed it was essentially harmless, very few countries ban saccharin today. Canada is the only one I know of and even they are considering lifting the ban, which by all accounts was probably an incident of jumping the gun in any case since the only negative studies were on laboratory rats and the science hadn’t linked it to issues in humans.

19

The cyclamate ban and the saccharin scare are actually related, by the way. The original study which showed rats getting bladder cancer actually involved rats that were consuming a mixture of both cyclamate and saccharin.

I believe at the time cyclamate was being produced under patent by Abbott Labs, whereas saccharin was produced by a wider range of companies and was generally a more widely use product (it had been around since the 19th century, cyclamate was from the 1940s iirc.)

Cyclamate got the ban in the United States because of the study, when the FDA moved to follow suit and ban saccharin is when Congress stepped in and said no.

What’s amusing is on the basis of the rat study cyclamate was banned in the United States and they tried to ban saccharin. Canada banned saccharin based on the study but cyclamate is still widely used in food products in Canada and was never banned.

I personally find sucralose to be the best artificial sweetener. I remember cyclamate from my childhood and I actually found its after taste worse than that of saccharin. I thought aspartame had a better taste than both, but my understanding is it breaks down when heated and thus isn’t very useful in anything that is baked. Sucralose tastes better than any of the previous ones listed and can also be used for baking, so I consider it the king of artificial sweeteners.

There was a run of diet beverages that came out awhile back that touted being made with sucralose (under brand name Splenda) and I found them much better than other diet sodas, but unfortunately it seems like they don’t offer them anymore.

20

DDT isn’t all that dangerous.