Saturday, July 08, 2006

The people who work on inventing artificial sweeteners won't eat Splenda

The New Yorker article on May 22, 2006 by Burkhard Bilger really intrigued me, and I've been distilling it down to friends as "the people who work on inventing artificial sweeteners won't eat Splenda" speech, but the article isn't posted on the New Yorker website. Someone has copied it to their blog, which is useful, and if you are interested in reading this fascinating little snippet about artificial sweeteners, there is a link below.

The phrase that struck me, got right to the heart of why I'm afraid of artificial sweeteners:

"Sucralose was declared safe by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998, but most taste researchers I talked to won't eat it. "I look at that structure and I have an irrational fear of it," one of them said. "I've seen the safety studies, and you feed it to rats and mice forever and nothing happens. But it just scares me."

Here is the article:

http://www.princeton.edu/~amoroz/2006/05/search-for-sweet.html

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Coach,
I ask you what are diabetics to do?
This rat has never had a problem.
heheh

Chas Chesterfield Esq. said...

high fructose corn syrup is probably worse for you.

Jill said...

I avoid corn syrup where ever possible and it is certainly on the list of things to minimize. I don't know why it is so bad, other than that it has invaded all our food and I find that offensive. But is it any worse than cane sugar? Chemically I think it's the same, but I'm just saying that, I have no actual idea of the facts. It can be hard to avoid when you love candy as much as I do. However, Splenda has now jumped to the top of the list of things I now have to avoid.