New article update: Just for your reading pleasure
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...nt/weekly/food
Chemical Warfare
I have no desire to become a statistic in what the Pentagon refers to as "collateral damage." So I have always been careful to stay well out of the line of fire whenever and wherever combatants are combating. Thus far, I have avoided being wounded in the food fight between fats and carbs by maintaining a position of strict neutrality.
But there is one currently raging conflict into which I shall leap. I have no sentiment for either side, but I am in the role of what amounts to an arms dealer, because I have important weapons to offer both. The war to which I refer is a chemical one, but its combatants are lobbing lawsuits, not missiles.
The Defense
Primarily in a defensive posture (although also in suing mode) is McNeil Nutritionals LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company that markets the artificial sweetener sucralose. Sucralose is manufactured by the British firm Tate & Lyle PLC and sold under the brand name Splenda.
Sales of Splenda currently far exceed those of any other artificial sweetener, including Sweet'N Low, which contains saccharin; Sunett and Sweet One, which contain acesulfame K; and Equal and NutraSweet, which contain aspartame and had been the top sellers in America until Splenda came along.
The Offense
On the offensive against McNeil is not only its main competitor -- Merisant US Inc., makers of Equal and NutraSweet -- but the industry that produces real sugar, represented by the Sugar Association. The allegation is that Splenda's widely advertised slogan, "Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar" is "deceptive and/or misleading."
Nobody questions whether Tate & Lyle's chemists actually do make sucralose from cane sugar, or sucrose. All McNeil will say about how they do that is to describe "a patented, multi-step process that selectively replaces three hydrogen-oxygen groups on the sugar molecule with three chlorine atoms." In more specific chemical terms: Eight of the sucrose molecule's 22 hydrogen atoms are paired with oxygen atoms as so-called hydroxyl groups, OH. Tate & Lyle's chemists replace three of those eight hydroxyl groups with chlorine atoms. (My guess is they do it by treating sucrose with hydrogen chloride.)
But isn't chlorine harmful to humans and animals and damaging to the environment?
In some forms, yes. For example, most common insecticides contain chlorine atoms in their molecules. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), an industrial byproduct, are among the most persistent environmental pollutants. But in other compounds, such as sodium chloride (table salt), the chlorine is not only harmless but essential to our health.
The Sugar Association's Web site makes the calculatedly alarming statement that when eating Splenda, consumers are "actually eating chlorine." Well, la-de-da. So are the consumers who are "actually eating" salt. My point is that chlorine is a common and versatile element that appears in hundreds of compounds with hundreds of different properties -- good, bad and indifferent.
The Weapons
So here is the weapon I offer to the Splenda forces: The Sugar Association's fright tactic against "eating chlorine" is misleading and disingenuous. And my chemical weapon for the Equal, NutraSweet and Sugar Association forces: Splenda's slogan, "made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar," is also misleading and disingenuous.
The lawyers may argue until they're blue in the face about whether Splenda really tastes like sugar, and I'm sure that a witness could be found to testify that it tastes like salt. But what does "tastes like" mean, anyway? Does it mean "tastes exactly like" or "tastes similar to"?
The Chemistry
But taste is not the point. To a chemist, it's the word "so" in the slogan. It implies that the taste of sucrose survives its chemical transformation into sucralose. But the implication that Splenda tastes like sugar because it was made from sugar flies in the face of what we know about chemical change: that changing any part of a molecule must invariably change its properties.
I can take some sugar into the laboratory, modify it chemically and wind up with something that tastes like almost anything you'd want -- or wouldn't want. For example, with nothing but a little sulfuric acid, I can turn sucrose into a steaming, seething, black mass that would dissolve your teeth if you tried to eat it.
So while I will swallow Splenda itself without concern (the Food and Drug Administration's imprimatur is good enough for me), I cannot swallow its slogan. I believe it is indeed misleading, just as alleged by the anti-Splenda forces. And while I'm at it, because all sugars (sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, etc.) have chemical names ending in -ose, naming the product sucralose is, again, disingenuous. Sweet it is, but a sugar it isn't.
Regarding the other arguments swirling around the bitter battle of the sweets -- whether or not sucralose is digested in the body and whether long-term human studies have shown its safety -- I hereby step adroitly out of the combat zone and assert my neutrality, inasmuch as these are not chemical issues.
I'll leave them to the lawyers.
I haven't tried Splenda yet & don't plan to. I don't avoid artificial sweeteners, but I'm not going to purchase them either. I guess you could say I'm indifferent. I think if you want to have a Coke, have a Coke, one of those half-cans. B/c if that's what you're craving, Diet Coke doesn't taste anything like it & you're still going to be craving the Coke. 
