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The Pursuit of Sweet

One compound blazed a trail for other artificial sweeteners: saccharin. Three hundred times sweeter than sugar, with no apparent side effects, it was touted to consumers as the gateway to a world of sweetness without consequences. Over time the saccharin story grew more complicated; while the substance remained unchanged, perceptions of it have undergone almost alchemical shifts. In its 130-year history saccharin has been a laboratory accident, a wonder drug, a dangerous carcinogen, and a consumer cause célèbre.

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Featured

 A Brief and Bizarre History of Artificial Sweeteners

Dig into the backgrounds of the Big Four artificial sweeteners—saccharin, cyclamate, aspartame and sucralose—and you'll 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 don't taste that good.

 Sweet as saccharin

Saccharin, the oldest and first commercially available artificial sweetener, was discovered in the 1870s and patented on September 15, 1885. Discovered by chance, this organic compound has made life sweeter for many. A.S.Ganesh gets into the story of how saccharin came to be...

 The Quick and Dirty Guide to Saccharin

Fun fact: Saccharin is banned in Canada, where Sweet 'N Low is made with a compound called cyclamate instead. But cyclamate is banned in the US, so we're saccharin all the way!

Articles of Interest

The Saccharin Bann: A Bittersweet Aftertaste

On March 9 - as almost everyone must know - FDA announced a ban on the only artificial sweetener permitted in the American food supply, saccharin. The agency was required to ban the substance because of the Delaney Amendment, which was added to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958. According to the amendment, which is named for New York Rep. James Delaney, any substance that causes cancer when ingested by man or animal must be banned.

A sweet spotlight on saccharin

Sweet’N Low or Sweet’N No? That is the question. Saccharin — a popular artificial sweetener known by its brand names Sweet’N Low, Sweet Twin, and Necta Sweet (in the United States) or Sugarine (in Australia) — has had a tumultuous history in the sweet spotlight.

How Safe Is Saccharin (Sweet'N Low)?

Saccharin may have been exonerated as a cancer-causing agent, but it's not used too often today — mostly because newer sweeteners like aspartame and Sucralose don't have the strong bitter aftertaste.

Saccharin solution?

Sugar substitutes may mess with gut bacteria—causing obesity in the process.

Saccharin Sweet Now Comes Without Hazardous Baggage

In case you weren't around or paying attention back then, researchers in the early 1970s found saccharin could cause cancer in rats. That made a bunch of people nervous. So the Food and Drug Administration took saccharin, discovered serendipitously at Johns Hopkins way back in 1878, off its list of food ingredients deemed to be automatically safe in 1972. Though saccharin was never banned by the FDA, it did carry beefed-up warnings about cancer for a while. And because saccharin and some derivatives were considered to be potentially carcinogenic to humans, the EPA in 1980 added the sweet stuff to its list of chemicals that should be treated as hazardous waste.

Saccharin: a toxicological and historical perspective

Saccharin, first synthesized in 1879, eventually became popular as an inexpensive substitute for sugar, particularly as a non-caloric sweetner. The dispute concerning the safety of saccharin for human consumption is almost as old as saccharin itself.

Saccharine Held Free of Risk

Saccharin, an artificial sweetener the Food and Drug Administration tried to ban because studies linked it to bladder cancer in rats, appears to be safe for use by humans, the American Medical Association said today. Numerous studies on several other species, including humans, have shown no link between saccharin and cancer of any kind, the association's Council on Scientific Affairs concluded.

The Sweet and Not-So-Sweet History of Saccharin

When it was first introduced to the public, saccharin seemed to be a miracle. The substance is about 300 times as sweet as sugar, and it doesn't have any calories. What’s not to love about that?

Resources

Sweet'N Low

Sweet'N Low® was a radical innovation. Now it's a familiar part of the American landscape.