Life After Aspartame

By Pat Thomas

This article first appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Ecologist, Volume 35, No.7.

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?

Life After Aspartame

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 commercialize 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 United States, 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 'made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar' -- a claim that is currently the subject of a heated legal challenge in the United States. While it is true that sugar, or sucrose, is one of the starting materials for sucralose, its chemical structure is significantly different from that of sucrose.

In a complex chemical process, the sucrose is processed with, among other things, phosgene (a chemical-warfare agent used during WWI, now a common intermediary in the production of plastics, pesticides and dyes), and three atoms of chlorine are selectively substituted for three hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) groups naturally attached to the sugar molecule.

This process produces 1,6-dichloro-1, 6-dideoxy-beta-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-alpha-D-galactopyranoside (also known as trichlorogalactosucrose or sucralose), a new chemical substance that Tate & Lyle calls a 'water-soluble chlorocarbohydrate.'

Accepting Tate & Lyle's classification of sucralose as a chlorocarbohydrate at face value raises reasonable concerns about its suitability as a food additive. Chlorinated carbohydrates belong to a class of chemicals known as chlorocarbons.

This class of chemicals includes a number of notorious human and environmental poisons, including:

* Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
* Aliphatic chlorinated carbohydrates
* Aromatic chlorinated carbohydrates such as DDT
* Organochlorine pesticides such as aldrin and dieldrin
* Aromatic chlorinated ethers such as polychlorinated dioxins (PCDD) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDF)

Most of the synthetic chlorinated compounds that we ingest, such as the pesticide residues in our food and water, bio-accumulate slowly in the body; and many cause developmental problems in the womb or are carcinogenic. How do we know that sucralose is any different?

Tate & Lyle insists that sucralose passes through the body virtually intact, and that the tight molecular bond between the chlorine atoms and the sugar molecule results in a very stable and versatile product that is not metabolized in the body for calories.

This doesn't mean, however, that sucralose is not metabolized in the body at all, and critics like HJ Roberts argue that, during storage and in the body, sucralose breaks down into, among other things, 1,6 dichlorofructose, a chlorinated compound that has not been adequately tested in humans.

Tate & Lyle maintains that sucralose and its breakdown products have been extensively tested and proven safe for human consumption. The company notes that in seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), McNeil Specialty Products submitted more than 110 studies that attested to the safety of sucralose.


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