Life after aspartame

Pat Thomas

9th August, 2005

Aspartame should never have reached the marketplace. But even if the authorities were to remove it from sale tomorrow, how much faith should consumers place in the other artificial sweeteners on the market?

There is not a single artificial sweetener on the market that can claim, beyond all reasonable doubt, to be safe for humans to consume. Saccharin, cyclamate and acesulfame-K have all been show to cause cancer in animals. Even the family of relatively benign sweeteners known as polyols, such as sorbitol and mannitol, can cause gastric upset if eaten in quantity.

NutraSweet believes that its new aspartame-based sweetener, Neotame, is 'revolutionary'; but, seemingly, it is only a more stable version of aspartame. This leaves the market wide open for sucralose.
Sucralose, sold commercially as Splenda, was discovered in 1976 by researchers working for British sugar refiner Tate & Lyle. Four years later, Tate & Lyle joined forces with Johnson & Johnson to develop and commercialise sucralose under the auspices of a new company, McNeil Specialty Products (now called McNeil Nutritionals). Sucralose has been approved by more than 60 regulatory bodies throughout the world, and is now in more than 3,000 products worldwide. In the US, Coca-Cola has developed a new diet drink sweetened with Splenda, and other major soft drink manufacturers are expected to follow suit.

Splenda is advertised as being...

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