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(CNN) — Sugar — how can something so good be bad for us?
Actually, it’s not, if you keep to the newest dietary guidelines recently announced by the USDA: only 10 teaspoons of sugar a day for the average person. Unfortunately, that equals just one 16-ounce bottle of regular soda.
Most Americans eat much more sugar than that — more like 30 to 40 teaspoons a day — and we’ve learned just how unhealthy that can be. Abundant added sugar is now linked to a host of health issues: obesity, chronic inflammation, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, even cancer.
To satisfy our sweet tooth, many of us turn to the fake stuff — artificial sweeteners. There are just five approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States: acesulfame potassium (sold as Sunett and Sweet One), aspartame (sold as Equal, Nutrasweet and Sugar Twin), neotame (sold as Newtame), saccharin (sold as Sweet’N Low, Sweet Twin and Necta Sweet) and sucralose (sold as Splenda). One more, cyclamate, is widely used in more than 100 countries, but banned in the United States.
The FDA says all five approved sweeteners are safe as long as they are used in moderation. That means no more than 23 packets a day of Splenda, Sweet One or Newtame, 45 packets a day of Sweet’N Low, or 75 packets a day of Equal.
Sounds doable. So why do so many people still consider artificial sweeteners dangerous?
Partly it’s due to our suspicion of putting anything chemical or artificially manufactured in our bodies. It’s also due to a long history of overly publicized, poorly designed, badly executed animal studies that the FDA now says falsely linked artificial sweeteners to cancer. Then there are recent studies (many in mice) that have raised the concern that daily consumption of diet soda might lead to a higher risk for metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes, among other concerns.
Here’s a history on where we’ve been and where we stand on today’s major artificial sweeteners. Get ready, it’s a roller-coaster ride.
Saccharin and cyclamate
A 1969 study found sperm and chromosomal breaks in rats exposed to cyclamates. Then a 1970 study found feeding high doses of the chemical to lab rats (5% to 7.5% of the diet) caused bladder cancer in the rodents. The FDA quickly acted, completely banning the use of cyclamate in 1970. Cumberland Packing Corp., the owner of Sweet’N Low, just as quickly switched to an all-saccharin version.
But by that point cyclamate and saccharin were intertwined, in studies and in the public consciousness. Another 1970 study found bladder tumors in eight of 80 rats fed a high-dose mixture of the two. More research followed, finding urinary, lung, stomach and reproductive tumors. Despite warnings the studies were flawed, by 1976 the FDA announced a plan to ban saccharin.
Congress — pushed partly by lobbyists in the food industry, partly by a public outcry against losing access to the noncaloric sweetener — took a softer approach. Instead of a ban, Congress decreed in 1977 that any food sweetened with saccharin must carry a scary warning label: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”
2000: Saccharin will not give you cancer, even if you’re a lab rat
Research into saccharin continued. A review study in the Annals of Oncology found over 20 studies analyzing the effects of high-dose exposure in rats, yet only one showed any evidence of bladder lesions. A closer look at that study discovered researchers used a breed of rat frequently infected with a parasite that would leave it susceptible to bladder cancer.
Another set of studies looked at second generation rats and also found bladder cancer. But then it was discovered that feeding rats Vitamin C at the same levels as saccharin would also produce bladder cancer. It turned out rats have different urine components than humans, and it was those components that were interacting with the sweeteners and leading to the bladder damage. Studies done on primates found no bladder tumors, and human studies in Denmark, Britain, Canada and the United States showed no connection either.
In 2000, Congress removed the warning label. Saccharin was OK again. But by then, several competitors had arrived on the scene and taken over a greater share of the exploding marketplace.
Aspartame
1965: Another accidental find, in many ways ‘Equal’ to its predecessors
Chemist James M. Schlatter was looking for an anti-ulcer drug when he stumbled upon the sweet taste of aspartame by (you guessed it) licking his finger. A mix of aspartic acid and phenylalanine, two naturally occurring amino acids, aspartame entered the growing artificial sweetener market in 1973. Today we know it as Equal, Nutrasweet or Sugar Twin.
Unlike the other artificial sweeteners, which are usually excreted unchanged, aspartame can be metabolized, so it does have minimal calories (about 4 per gram). It also has some known health concerns. It should not be used by anyone with the genetic disorder phenylketonuria or certain rare liver disorders, or pregnant women with high levels of phenylalanine in their blood, because it doesn’t metabolize properly in those individuals. The FDA requires any food made with aspartame to put that restriction on the label.
1996: Charges that aspartame causes brain tumors, proven and unproven
Animal studies in the 1980s showed no cancer-causing effects from aspartame, even in high doses, and no damage to DNA. But that didn’t stop a researcher named J.W. Olney and his associates from drawing a connection between aspartame use and the increasing number of brain tumors in humans, as both occurred over the same 20 years. Based on a study (later disproven) that showed 12 rats developed cancerous brain tumors after eating aspartame for two years, Olney and his colleagues proposed aspartame was the likely cause.
Reaction was swift, with some calling for a ban on aspartame. But others pointed out the “ecological fallacy” in Olney’s argument. Why not call foul on VCRs, home computers, or the hole in the ozone layer, which were also newly present during the same time period?
A case-controlled study on children with brain tumors soon put the matter to rest, finding “little biological or experimental evidence that aspartame is likely to act as a human brain carcinogen.”
The next generation: Sucralose, neotame and acesulfame potassium
1967: Another brave chemist tastes his delicious experiment
What ever happened to safe lab protocol? Yes, acesulfame potassium, also known as acesulfame K, Ace-K, or ACK, was discovered by Karl Clauss and Harald Jensen in Frankfurt, Germany, when they combined fluorosulfonyl isocyanate and 2-butene. Clauss spilled some and then (of course) licked his finger. The tabletop version is called Sweet One, but it’s often used in combination with other artificial sweeteners to better mimic the “real” taste of sugar.
1976: Another one bites the sweet dust
Scientists were working with a chlorinated sugar compound in 1976 when one of the researchers decided to (what else?) taste it. Sucralose was born. It’s made by replacing three hydrogen and oxygen atoms in sucrose with chlorine atoms, making it about 600 times sweeter than sugar.
Today we know this chlorine-based sugar derivative as Splenda. As the most heat-stable of all the artificial sweeteners, it’s popular with food manufacturers.
2002: The final artificial sweetener birth was planned
Unlike those of its predecessors, neotame’s was a planned birth. With the market for artificial sweeteners in the billions, scientists around the world were playing with chemicals to find the next big hit. They also wanted to improve on older models: fix the bitter aftertaste and develop higher heat stability and a higher sweetness factor (so you could use less and save money).
Developed by Monsanto, the owners of Nutrasweet, neotame certainly delivered on at least two of those goals: It is heat-stable, and the intensity of its sweetness is 7,000 to 13,000 times greater than sugar. But the sweetness takes a while to develop in the mouth, it lingers longer, and it can have a licorice-like quality, so neotame is most often used in combination with other artificial sweeteners.
2005: Diet sodas cause weight gain
By 2005, millions of people were using artificial sweeteners for weight control. So it was a shock when researchers at the University of Texas found that conventional wisdom was wrong, when they analyzed eight years of data from the San Antonio Heart Study. The more diet sodas a person drank, the more likely he or she was to gain weight.
To this day, no one knows why. Was it due to the artificial sweetener? Was it something else in the soda? Does drinking a diet soda make it more likely a person might order a double size burger and fries? As several reviews point out, it remains a riddle.
2012: Artificial sweeteners probably safe, but some lingering health concerns
Studying the effects of specific artificial sweeteners is a challenge in today’s world, as many soda and food manufacturers create mixtures of sweeteners to mimic sugar and make their products taste unique. So it’s hard to tease out which of the sweeteners might be a problem.
But studies continue to find concerns that bear watching. A 2008 study found drinking more than two servings of diet soda a day doubled the risk for kidney decline in women. A 2012 study suggested a possible connection between diet sodas and an increased risk for vascular events. If you use a ton of sweetener — more than 1680 milligrams a day, and that’s a lot — you could have a somewhat higher risk of bladder cancer. And several studies have discovered that daily consumption of diet soda may be linked to metabolic syndrome — a sort of prediabetes — and Type 2 diabetes, perhaps because it alters people’s gut bacteria.
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