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Life & Arts

Suspicious sweeteners may be worth the risk

Get Well

Ron Douthitt

There's entirely too much hoopla being paid to the artificial sweetener Splenda. The sugar industry should be happy Splenda works in harmony with sugar and can also be used for baking, a first in the artificial sweetener market. But apparently it's not and hasn't released the details as to why it's suing the makers of Splenda.

What is interesting, however, is that Splenda is supposed to be the worst of all the artificial sweeteners. Since Splenda is made from sugar and is genetically altered, I can't imagine how it could be any worse than other sweeteners out there.

Apparently, the first smear campaign fizzled rather quickly, and the sugar industry has come back for a second round, claiming Splenda's ads are misleading -- something in the milk isn't white. The sugar industry is probably suing because Splenda's aggressive marketing campaign has paid off so well and cut into the sugar, or "poison" revenues.

Splenda is in almost every pre-packaged, sweetened item at the supermarket in order to cut down on calories. What I can't figure out is why Splenda has been met with such open arms. It's good, but it's not that good.

Sweet'N Low (saccharin), which is four times sweeter than sugar, has a bitter aftertaste and got a bad rap to start, but truthfully it's the safest one of them all. Equal (aspartame) is 300 times sweeter than sugar and has a gritty aftertaste. Strangely enough, both Equal and Splenda have been banned in the United Kingdom and Canada. I still don't know what all the mystery surrounding Splenda's ban is about, but aspartame has been proven to cause brain damage in children. It has a controversial history that seems to have been shoved under the table. 

In 1975, the pharmaceutical company Searle, which discovered aspartame by accident and immediately patented it, tested it for safety on rats about the same time Sweet'N Low was so controversial and was apparently proven to cause liver cancer in male rats. But after Sweet'N Low got the OK as long as they agreed to package it with a warning, Searle was busted when it was leaked that they were taking the tested rats' blood and replacing it with healthy blood. Therefore, they went through another decade of testing before they could prove that aspartame was safe. 

The ironic thing is, no matter what type of potentially toxic sweeteners we continue to ingest, Americans are still getting fatter. It's been proven sugar is poison to humans and should be used with discretion and moderation. The artificial stuff is controversial at best. Sweet'N Low still has warnings on its package stating it has been proven to show liver cancer in laboratory animals, but they were pumped with enough saccharin to cause any living organism to contract cancer.

A little sugar isn't bad, but the best way to avoid any problems is to limit intake and maintain a healthy diet, something that is apparently easier said than done for most Americans. At the same time, some of us are so vain that we really don't mind weighing the possible risk of cancer, if we can just stay thin.
 

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