Sweetness and Enlightment from the Food Police

I knew there was a reason I was starting to like, and I mean REALLY like, Splenda.
Splenda is the brand name for the artificial sweetener sucralose. It hasn't been around long but I’ve been feeling this peculiarly strong devotion to it.
Oh sure, there are a few practical considerations. It has effectively zero calories and doesn’t promote tooth decay like sugar does. It doesn’t break down and lose its sweetness if you cook with it, like aspartame (NutraSweet) does. And, also unlike aspartame, it’s an artificial sweetener I can actually get my wife to use. She hates the taste of aspartame so much she’ll drink a regular leaded soda full of sugar rather than touch a Diet Coke. So, yes, practically speaking, there’s a lot to like.
But it’s one thing to appreciate the attributes of a product, and something else altogether to feel a real personal affinity for it, and lately I’ve come to be especially fond of Splenda.
It’s really very simple. Splenda has just received one of the best endorsements any food can get.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has put Splenda on its S#@%&* list.

I suppose this kind of thing was inevitable. Splenda is exploding in popularity. Since it was introduced in 1999, it has managed to capture 51 percent of the American market for sugar substitutes. Over the past year, consumers have bought $177 million worth of the stuff. By some estimates, it’s made its way into 20 percent of U.S. homes and it’s currently used in 4,000 products.
Now comes before us the Sugar Association, which represents beet and cane sugar growers. For obvious reasons, these folks are concerned about Splenda’s blockbuster appropriation of a huge chunk of their market and they’ve been throwing out everything including the kitchen sink in an attempt to derail Splenda. All perfectly understandable of course. Business is business.
But sometimes business and especially advocacy campaigns can make for some pretty strange bedfellows and this donnybrook has made for some of the most inexplicable bedfellows imaginable.
In its latest maneuver against Splenda, the Sugar Association has teamed up with the folks at Merisant, the makers of the aspartame sweetener Equal. These are the natural enemies of the sugar people. But they’ve hooked up in a lawsuit against Splenda's marketer, McNeil Nutritionals.
Now for the "Crying Game" plot twist:
They’ve also joined forces with, yes, the food cops of The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the natural enemy of both NutraSweet AND sugar producers!
Unless you’ve been living in cheeseburger paradise (and if so, I envy you) you’ve heard of the hypochondriac food fanatics of the CSPI.
The “public” part of CSPI is really something of a misnomer. Those people aren’t “interested” in any part of the public with which I’m familiar. It’s really more like the Center for Science in the Interest of Miserable Masochistic Vegan Monks.
These are the people who have condemned as deathly unhealthy: Chinese food, Italian food, Mexican food, hamburgers, pizza and movie theatre popcorn. They’re constantly claiming Americans eat too much sugar and they give aspartame/NutraSweet a yellow warning designation.
Nonetheless, this curious coalition has cobbled itself together accusing McNeil Nutritionals of…
Ready?
…false advertising!
The Splenda ad campaign proudly proclaims that Splenda is “made from sugar so it tastes like sugar.”
Pretty clever, no?
This sinister slogan has the added devious advantage of being, well, the truth!
Splenda’s crucial ingredient sucralose is created by processing sugar in a technique that swaps three chorine atoms onto the sugar molecule to create a compound so stable it survives cooking and even metabolization after it’s eaten. That means the sugar no longer delivers any of its calories into the body.
So, okay, Splenda does indeed start out as sugar.
Problem?
The Sugar Association claims the ads IMPLY that Splenda is “natural,” but nowhere does McNeil actually make that claim. In fact, while company representatives have been quoted as saying correctly that “Splenda is made from cane sugar,” they’ve also clearly said that in its final form “It is not sugar and it is not natural, although the chemical structure is similar to sugar’s.”
Penn State food scientist Manfred Kroger has said highlighting the sugar component makes sense. “It has to come from something and if it comes from sugar, I would want people to know that.” The sugar connection looks especially advantageous for Splenda, and more of a problem for Equal maker Merisant, when you consider that NutraSweet is made from the much less appetizing sounding chemicals aspartic acid and phenylalanine. These are two amino acids which are perfectly safe but just don’t have the friendly sound of good ol’ sugar.
True to form, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, for its part, takes the cake (probably a tofu cake) in its analysis. A CSPI spokesman spells it out with the truly profound gripe that Splenda “happens to be a synthetic chemical cooked up in a flask somewhere.”
Well, duh. Let’s hear it for modern science.
Actually the essence of the CSPI’s problem seems to be the group’s familiar, incessant, refrain that Americans are too dumb to take care of themselves. To back it up, the Center cites a survey it performed last year which found that 90 percent of consumers don’t know sucralose contains chlorine. You have to wonder what would have happened if the survey asked the same question about municipal tap water. Of course, all surveys conducted by crackpot activist groups are to be viewed with skepticism since we have no idea precisely how the survey’s inquiries were conducted or how the questions were phrased.
There is, for example, the same study’s finding that only 57 percent of the people who’ve tried Splenda know it’s an artificial sweetener.
And the other 43 percent thought what? That it was sugar?
Seeing as Splenda is dramatically more expensive, many times the price of sugar, precisely what were these people willing to pay so much more FOR? Unless perhaps the question is what precisely constituted an “artificial sweetener” according to the surveyors of the study. Did they ask the same question about NutraSweet and Sweet'n Low, or aspartame and saccharine? Was there any explanation given? Or does the CSPI simply assume its standard thesis that any confusion is a function of consumers being stupid and in need of the protection of wiser guardians like the CSPI?
For a saner perspective, one can turn to John Childs, not an unbiased player in this comedy. His investment company owns NutraSweet Co. “I think Splenda has done an excellent job of marketing” he says. “I tip my hat.”
Fortunately, the CSPI’s patronizing hysteria is, again, doing nothing but underscoring the group’s neurotic disconnect from the real lives of real American consumers. Splenda remains so popular; there have been periodic threats of a shortage. I’ve certainly had the occasional problem grabbing it at the supermarket before it’s sold out. And by this summer, both Coke and Pepsi plan to reformulate some of their diet drinks to include Splenda, meaning, I hope, that I can finally get my wife to enjoy one of them.

Thank you Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Thank you for showing the way.

April 4, 2005