Free Speech: Splenda Manufacturer Silences Critics

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Health

Apparently free speech is not a right where certain corporations and criticism of their products are concerned, comments Robin Good of masternewmedia.org. But are such heavy handed actions as requesting to block internet access to certain articles for all users in a country - in this case the UK - really effective or will they backfire in this age of free flow of information? Robin Good thinks that Tate & Lyle should take a clue...

"In an alternative health newsletter I read came some interesting and disturbing news about free speech on the Internet. Dr. Joseph Mercola, whose Mercola.com website and newsletter are among the most widely read sources of alternative health-care information, has been coerced into blocking readers in the U.K. from reading his opinions about a controversial sugar alternative called Splenda.

An article in The Ecologist discusses the legal action threatened by Splenda maker Tate & Lyle. As Mercola explains, "I am forced to block all my comments regarding Splenda from the U.K. Tate & Lyle has assured me they will sue me if I do not. This is largely related to the liberal libel laws in the U.K. What is perfectly legal in the United States is not in the U.K., as freedom of speech is severely restricted over there."

Tate & Lyle, whose researchers developed sucralose (later branded as Splenda), joined forces with multinational firm Johnson & Johnson to market sucralose under the auspices of a new company, McNeil Nutritionals. So you can see why Mercola might feel compelled to respond to a legal threat from an entity with very deep pockets.

I find it sad that a corporation would try to squelch legitimate criticism of its product in this manner. Indeed, I'd suggest that it's counterproductive. These types of situations tend to get lots of publicity, and Splenda's safety as a food likely will become a larger issue. I wonder when corporations will get on the Cluetrain (http://www.cluetrain.com/) and understand that in our digitally networked world, it's better to publicly engage critics in a dialog rather than try to shut them down with brute force.

Silencing Mercola's point of view will only spawn a thousand other Internet critics who won't be cowed."

As we have already seen with Aspartame, the FDA and other countries' health authorities are largely standing by the side of manufacturers, when there are public doubts and complaints of adverse effects regarding artificial sugar substitutes, or any of their 'approved' products including pharmaceutical medicines. Once approved, these things seem to have a strange immunity to critical questions and even to voluminous information about actual adverse effects associated with them. We have seen this with Vioxx, the painkiller withdrawn only after tens of thousands of deaths were linked to it. We are seeing it again with psychiatric drugs that lead to suicide and violence and are still available.

With a public system of health protection that does not seem to function, we might just have to arm ourselves with information and make some conscious choices.

Certainly the suppression of public criticism by large corporations and by the very health agencies that should be policing them is not a reassuring sign.

But as Robin Good has pointed out, in this day and age, suppressing criticism by brute force may not be the way to go. Information wants to be free. Suppress it and it might just come back to haunt you in other areas...

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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?

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.

But Can Consumers Trust This Research Data?

The vast majority of studies submitted to the FDA were unpublished animal and laboratory studies performed by Tate & Lyle itself, and therefore liable to charges of potentially unacceptable bias.

Only five involved human subjects, and these were short-term, often single-dose, studies that clearly could not adequately reflect the expected real-world usage of sucralose.

After questions were raised by the FDA about the safety of sucralose for diabetics, and prior to approval, a further five human studies were eventually submitted. On April 1, 1998 the FDA approved sucralose for limited uses; one year later it approved it as a general-purpose sweetener. 

Some questions about sucralose's safety, arising from the data submitted to the FDA, remain unanswered. These studies included unsettling findings about animals, which, when exposed to high doses of sucralose, experienced:

• Shrunken thymus and spleen

• Enlarged liver and kidneys

• Reduced growth rate in adults and newborns

In the FDA's 'final-rule' report, several of the studies submitted by McNeil were found to have 'inconclusive' results or were 'insufficient' to draw firm conclusions from them. These included: 

• A test that examined the clastogenic activity (ability to break chromosomes apart) of sucralose, and a test that looked for chromosomal aberrations in human lymphocytes exposed to sucralose

• A series of three animal genotoxicity studies

• Laboratory studies using lymphoma tissue from mice, which showed that sucralose was 'weakly mutagenic' (capable of causing cellular mutations)

Clastogenic, genotoxic and mutagenic substances are all potential risk factors in the development of cancer.

In addition to these, three studies that looked at very specific 'anti-fertility' effects of sucralose and its breakdown products, especially with regard to sperm production, were also deemed insufficient; this is particularly worrying since other 'chlorosugars,' such as 6-chloroglucose, are currently being studied as anti-spermatogenic drugs.

Furthermore, the administration observed that McNeil had failed to explain satisfactorily a reduction in body weight seen in animals fed suc