Enjoy Your Artificial Sweeteners
Your artificial sweeteners are safe for you to consume. So is sugar. Information from the WHO isn't. Is it really Donald Rumsfeld's fault?
When flight attendants and their beverage carts finally arrive where I’m usually seated on an airplane, especially on an early-morning flight, they always look puzzled when I ask for coffee with “fake sugar.” Perhaps that’s a little hard to understand when competing with 70 or so decibels of aircraft noise.
When they ask me to repeat it, I ask for coffee and a colored packet. They affect the flavor profile of my food and beverages differently, and I prefer pink. I wouldn't say I like the overpowering metallic taste of the green packets of Stevia and use them only in desperation. Monkfruit works. There are others.
They nod, smile, and sometimes softly chuckle. Usually, they serve the yellow one, best known as Splenda or sucralose, one of our newer artificial sweeteners. It’s made with natural sugar, with naturally occurring parts of the sugar molecule replaced with chlorine to take away the 15 calories and carbs that come with a teaspoon of the real stuff. There’s more chlorine in your water (it makes it safe to drink), so don’t freak out.
As with the other two best-known artificial sweeteners - saccharine (Sweet N Low) and aspartame (NutraSweet, now Equal), they work by being practically indigestible. Your tongue enjoys the sweetness but the sweeteners don’t metabolize in your system. It goes out the way it comes in. Zero calories while being 300 to 600 times sweeter than sugar.
For people with type 2 diabetes - over 37 million Americans, 1 in 10 and growing - and others trying to limit calories or carbohydrates (looking at you, KETO followers), artificial sweeteners are a blessing. I’m not among the 37 million yet, but my father was and sincerely appreciated the innovation.
And they’ve been under attack since the “Delaney Clause” of the late 1950s, when the late US Rep. James Delaney, D-NY, chaired a House Select Committee on the growing use of chemical pesticides and herbicides in food products. He offered an amendment to the 1938 law that established the US Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to ban carcinogens as food additives. It was so simple, yet so broadly written, that it included even naturally occurring substances known to cause cancer, including a popular ingredient then (not now) in root beer. Under pressure from farmers and food makers, regulators and lawmakers struggled mightily to curb the Delaney Clause significantly as analytical chemistry advanced, with scientists able to detect parts per billion (one part per billion is equivalent to one second in 31.71 years). They can go parts per trillion now. And just you wait.
Delaney lived long enough to see his namesake clause do enormous damage, first to the cranberry industry in 1959 and later to apple growers, thanks to the phony Meryl Streep-inspired Alar scare.
Pro tip: don’t take nutrition or food safety advice from celebrities.
That led to the establishment of a “de minimus” test. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1988 eventually found a way to declare a cancer risk from pesticides negligible and therefore exempt from the Delaney Clause. But the National Resources Defense Council took that to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (yeah, them) and won in 1992.
While the Delaney Clause’s pesticide applicability was removed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in the 1996 Food Safety Modernization Act, just before I joined the food industry, it’s still around. And its biggest beneficiaries are trial lawyers and so-called consumer advocacy organizations. Where there are deep pockets, trial lawyers and consumer advocates likely stalk nearby.
Here’s another pro tip: The last thing a private food maker wants to do is kill their customers or make them sick by cutting corners. It’s a fast track to kill a brand if not a company, and send you to jail and ignominy. If they’re marketing a product, whether a food additive or a flavoring, chances are they have the science behind them.
But when the government starts making things or partnering with those who do, you know what happens. Good luck in court.
And now, you can toss into the mix the World Health Organization and its International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC). That leads us to last week’s news - search for “aspartame” in your favorite search engine, best encapsulated by Jon Entine from GeneticLiteracyProject.org:
Does aspartame, used in thousands of products, from Diet Coke to Trident Gum to Log Cabin Sugar Free Syrup, cause cancer?
This Friday, two United Nations-affiliated organizations will publicly release assessments evaluating the carcinogenicity of the world’s most popular artificial sweetener. Two things are all but certain to happen: The two agencies will arrive at starkly differing conclusions, with only one raising a red flag about potential threats to human health; and the conflicting recommendations will ignite a media storm, social media will blow up, and many environmental groups will call for tighter restrictions or even bans on aspartame and other sweeteners long-judged safe by global science agencies. And within days, TV and internet ads seeking ‘victims’ of the sweetener will begin appearing.
The consequences of this fracas? The public will yet again question whether it should put its trust in supposedly independent government oversight agencies or rather with activists claiming to have the public’s best interests at heart.
Entine reports that you must consume about 36 diet Snapple drinks daily for the rest of your life for aspartame to cause cancer. The IARC on Friday said it was somewhere between 9-14. “For example, with a can of diet soft drink containing 200 or 300 mg of aspartame, an adult weighing 70kg would need to consume more than 9–14 cans per day to exceed the acceptable daily intake, assuming no other intake from other food sources.” What happens if you exceed “the acceptable daily intake” once? Twice? Every day for a decade or two or three? Nobody knows.
My money is on Entine for the win.
That’s interesting since the stuff (the artificial sweetener) goes through you, practically unmolested by your digestive system. Maybe we should ask Donald J. Trump, who reportedly drank about a dozen servings of Diet Coke daily in the White House. I bet he still does.
Maybe formaldehyde, which aspartame is accused bizarrely of converting into, helps preserve the brain’s ability to function. Joe Biden, call your office.
A reminder from high school chemistry class: the dose makes the poison. Even the overconsumption of water can kill you (hyponatremia).
Maybe we have the late Donald Rumsfeld - or, more specifically, the wild overreactions to him by the media and anti-corporate activists - to blame for all this hysteria.
Rumsfeld is best remembered as the youngest and oldest person to serve as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. A collegiate wrestler at Princeton and Navy pilot, he served five years in Congress before joining the Nixon Administration as a US Ambassador. With Ford’s ascension to the White House in 1974, Rumsfeld became Chief of Staff and, a year later, famously swapped jobs with Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney in a Cabinet shuffle known as the “Halloween Massacre.”
Rumsfeld, who passed away in June 2021 at age 88, moved from government to the private sector with the ascension of Jimmy Carter to the presidency and became CEO and/or Chairman, over time, of three companies: GD Searle, the inventor of aspartame; General Instrument, the inventor of HDTV; and Gilead Sciences, the inventor of Tamiflu—an impressive array of technological innovation. But the GD Searle experience - the company was sold to (trigger warning!) Monsanto in 1985 and is now owned by Bayer AG - seems to inspire so much of Rumsfeld's estimable legacy.
As the story goes, and lots of lefty publications are happy to tell it - true or not - Rumsfeld engineered the Reagan Administration’s 1981 nomination of Arthur Hull Hayes as the Commissioner of the FDA. Rumsfeld then “called in” his “markers” and jammed aspartame’s approval through the FDA over the objections of scientists. When Searle sold to Monsanto, Rumsfeld reportedly pocketed $1 million. Many of those same stories tell wild tales of aspartame turning into formaldehyde (embalming fluid) in your system and causing brain tumors. Again, look up “Rumsfeld aspartame” on your favorite search engine, and pour yourself a cold one. Enjoy the show.
Since I’m sick at home with my second case of Covid in 18 months, thanks to recent international travel (thanks, Spain and American Airlines!), the WHO is freshly on my mind again, mostly for their complicity in the Wuhan virus pandemic. They conspired with and remained under the throes of Communist Chinese influence to cover up the lab leak, thus prompting the pandemic’s early spread. Malevolent actors in the US aided and abetted, and you know who they are. In fairness, it caught the world unaware and the WHO was part of the problem.
They still are. The entire global health infrastructure, especially in the United States, took a massive hit in its credibility from its failure to prepare for and address the pandemic once it hit. We were lied to and sources we’ve learned to trust were censored and silenced by our government through social media. We still are being lied to. And most of the malevolent actors are still around.
I’m sure not taking any cancer warnings from the WHO seriously. Neither should you. The fact is that artificial sweeteners are the most tested food additives in world history, 60 years and running. You can look that up, too. Saccharin carried warning labels for causing cancer in lab mice for about two decades until science proved it didn’t, and President Clinton got rid of those, too. Enjoy your packets, whatever color you choose. I’m pro-diversity.
Just remember all things in moderation, of course, including moderation.
Speaking of Rumsfeld, this is what I best remember about him. Rumsfeld’s Rules and his “known and unknown” analytics. Just brilliant. And don’t forget his app, Churchill Solitaire.