A Brief and Bizarre History of Artificial Sweeteners | SAVEUR http://www.saveur.com/artificial-sweeteners?cmpid=swmenews022520...

By GABRIELLA GERSHENSON FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Synthetic sweeteners seem like a miracle food. They require no land for growing, no smoke-belching
refineries, and most of them pass through your body unmetabolized, which is what makes them
zero-calorie and safe for diabetics, since they dont affect blood sugar levels. The perfect food of the
future.
If only.

The promise of a calorie-free treat has stronger pull than any of these
deterrents, which is why the next big sweetener is always around the
corner.

Dig into the backgrounds of the Big Four artificial sweetenerssaccharin, cyclamate, aspartame
and sucraloseand youll find no shortage of fraught history. There have been questions of safety.
Cancer in lab animals. Reports that sugar substitutes actually encourage weight gain. And they dont
taste that good.
But the promise of a calorie-free treat has stronger pull than any of these deterrents, which is why
the next big sweetener is always around the corner. The histories of these compounds also reveal
the unexpected roads the scientific discovery process takes; the path to sugar-free sweetness
takes detours through everything from coal tar to ulcer medication.
Lets review how weve come so far.

In the Beginning, There was Saccharin

Saccharin, named for the Latin word for sugar, was discovered accidentally in 1897 by a Johns
Hopkins University researcher who was looking for new uses for coal tar derivatives. He forgot to
wash his hands before lunch and tasted something sweet on his fingers. (Similar versions of this
story occur in the accidental discoveries of cyclamate, aka SweetN Low, and aspartame, too.) After
tasting everything in his lab to determine the source, he figured out it was benzoic sulfimide, a coal

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tar derivative that is 300 times sweeter than sugar. (Fun fact: Monsanto got its start in 1901 selling
saccharin.)
By 1907, saccharin was already widely used in sodas and canned goods, but most Americans had
no idea it was in their food. As part of a series of sweeping food and drug reforms, Harvey Wiley, the
head of the chemical division of the United States Department of Agriculture, recommended banning
saccharin for possibly being toxic. The person who got in his way was President Theodore
Roosevelt, who was on a weight-loss regimen that included a dose of saccharin prescribed by his
doctor.
The sweetener was eventually banned in 1912, but the decision was reversed during World War I,
when sugar rations necessitated the use of saccharin as a substitute. Once the war was over,
people continued to enjoy the calorie-free sweetener.

SweetN Bad for You

The introduction of a sweetener called cyclamate to the American market coincided with the diet
soda boom of the 1950s. Cyclamate is what sweetened Tab and Diet Pepsi, and what filled the
iconic pink packets of SweetN Low. The substance was discovered in 1937 when a University of
Illinois grad student working on a fever-reducing drug tasted something sweet on his finger during a
smoke break. (Yes, this really is how science works sometimes.)
That was cyclamate, a chemical thats 30 to 50 times sweeter than sugar. By 1963, cyclamate was
Americas favorite artificial sweetener, costing a tenth of the price of sugar and with zero calories.
By 1968, Americans were consuming more than 17 million pounds of the stuff each year. That all
came to a halt when the sweetener was proven to cause bladder cancer in rats, resulting in an
immediate ban by the FDA thats still in effect. In response, SweetN Low swiftly became a
saccharin-based product.

A is for Aspartame

It took more than a decade for the next big artificial sweetener to pick up where cyclamate left off. In
another accidental discovery, James Schlatter, a research chemist for G.D. Searle and Company,
licked his fingers while developing a new ulcer drug in 1965 and, yes, tasted something sweet. That
was aspartame, an amino acid compound (a mixture of aspartic acid and phenylalanine) that is 200
times sweeter than sugar.
After a holdup with the FDA in 1974, when approval was paused due to claims that aspartame
caused brain tumors, the sweetener finally hit the market as Nutrasweet in 1981. According to the
Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, aspartame replaced more than a billion pounds of sugar in
the American diet during the 1980s. (Diet Cokemade with aspartamewas launched during this
time.)
Though health complaints and investigations linked to both aspartame and saccharin persisted
throughout this period, consumption of diet sodas continued to climb in the 80s and 90s, eventually
plateauing in the aughts.

Along Came Splenda

Sucralose, which was later marketed as Splenda, was created in 1976 when scientists found a way
to molecularly bond sucrose molecules with chlorine. (Yes, chlorine.) One researcher was asked to

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test the chlorinated compound, but misheard the request and tasted it instead. The researcher
survived, and in so doing paved the way to a product that is about 600 times sweeter than sugar.
Unlike the artificial sweeteners that came before it, sucralose is partially metabolized by the body,
which means it does deliver calories. Also unlike the others, its heat-stable, which means you can
bake with it.
Thus Splenda has replaced NutraSweet as the most widely consumed sugar substitute on the
marketfor now. The search for the next big artificial sweetener is already on, including a promising
compound called neotame. Only time will tell.

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