BOOKS
A TALE OF SWEET NOTHINGS An exploration of the long history and varying public perceptions of ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS REVIEWED BY AUDRA J. WOLFE
BETWEEN MARCH and December 1977,
Americans sent more than 1 million letters to Congress, the Food & Drug Administration, and President Jimmy Carter protesting FDA’s incipient ban on saccharin. Reacting to news that the artificial sweetener could increase the incidence of cancer in rats, Acting FDA Commissioner Sherwin Gardner had announced that saccharin would be taken off the market at the start of the new year. But for many of these correspondents, the threat of losing immediate access to their Diet Pepsi, Tab, and Weight Watchers’ puddings greatly outweighed the potential longterm health costs of saccharin. These loyal consumers credited saccharin with not only their weight loss, but also their happiness. In the end, faced with pleas from constituents like Virginia Tamarin, who wrote that “life is not worth living without diet foods,” the Senate shelved the ban. Tamarin’s letter is quoted in Carolyn de la Peña’s book, “Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda.” The book is an attempt to explain the enduring appeal of sugar substitutes in the face of nearly constant concerns about their safety. As of 2007, almost two-thirds of Americans reported regular consumption of such products as Sweet’N Low (saccharin), NutraSweet (aspartame), or Splenda (sucralose); the combined annual global market for these three artificial sweeteners is estimated at more than $3 billion. Yet a generation after the Senate called off the saccharin ban, artificial sweeteners have not escaped their critics. Criticism of artificial sweeteners once came largely from consumer advocates and alternative health practitioners who claimed that government
regulators were ignoring the perils of these substances in favor of industrial profits. Now, the loudest voices belong to food activists in the vein of best-selling author Michael Pollan. Diet foods once offered the promise of allowing Americans to reduce their waistlines without reducing their consumption; now they stand in for the worst of what Pollan has called “edible food-like substances” in his book “In Defense of Food.” Unbeknown to today’s artificial EMPTY sweetener critics, PLEASURES: The Story of Artificial de la Peña shows, Sweeteners from they are echoSaccharin to ing an argument Splenda, by Carolyn made more than a de la Peña, University century ago. Sacof North Carolina charin, the original Press, 2010, 296 pages, $32.50 hardback artificial sweet(ISBN 978-0-8078ener, first came to 3409-1) U.S. consumers’ attention as an “adulterant” that stole nutritional content from otherwise supposedly healthy foods, like ginger ale. Soda manufacturers began substituting saccharin for sugar soon after the coal-tar derivative’s discovery in the late 19th century. It was cheap, it was sweet, and—unlike sugar—it was free from market fluctuations associated with political instability. In the days before labeling requirements, few manufacturers bothered to notify their customers of the substitution. In 1911, FDA Commissioner Harvey W. Wiley believed saccharin to be an impurity, categorizing it along with alum and sodium benzoate as a substance that provided color or flavor without adding nutritional benefit. Even so, its dual use as a medically useful product
for diabetics made it difficult for early regulators to categorize it. President Theodore Roosevelt’s own doctor recommended that he consume saccharin daily. Despite Roosevelt’s objections, early-20th-century regulators agreed that the substitution of saccharin for sugar devalued food products by lowering their “fuel value.” The very thing that would later make artificially sweetened foods desirable—their lack of calories—marked them as fraudulent in an era when sugar consumption was praised for its nutritional value. IT WAS DURING the sugar shortages of
World War II, de la Peña argues, that U.S. housewives came to discover the virtues of saccharin. Official recommendations from home economists and food-safety experts explicitly warned against using saccharin as a sugar substitute, pointing especially to its bitterness in cooked foods. In sugar’s place, they recommended corn syrup, molasses, or maple syrup. Nevertheless, leading saccharin manufacturers, including Monsanto, E. R. Squibb, and Parke-Davis & Co., reported soaring demand for their product shortly after the beginning of rationing. The unavailability of sugar, combined with a growing interest in dieting and weight loss, encouraged women to experiment with a product officially marketed only to diabetics. Here de la Peña’s substantial skills as a social and cultural historian are on fine display as she uncovers evidence for such covert usage not only in specialty diet books and queries directed to the “ladies’ pages,” but also in more unexpected sources, such as the popularity of decorative, bird-shaped dispensers for saccharin pills. Using saccharin became a way for women to exercise control and display their sophistication. The practice of using artificial sweeteners was made substantially easier in 1951, when Abbott Laboratories received FDA approval to market Sucaryl, a sodium cyclamate that dissolved easily and lacked saccharin’s bitterness. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both Sucaryl and saccharin increasingly found their way into American homes, whether in the form of prepackaged diet foods or as individual pills to sweeten reduced-sugar desserts. Often,
Unbeknown to today’s artificial sweetener critics, they are echoing an argument made more than a century ago. WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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sure” in a diet chocolate soda came not from the presence of a particular brand of artificial sweetener but rather from the absence of calories. CCG’s managers, on the other hand, appear in her portrayal to have been seduced by the glamour of science. Basking in the undivided attention of Abbott’s highly educated accounts men, members of the California agricultural cooperatives soon laced more than half of their product with Sucaryl. In de la Peña’s interpretation, signing on to Sucaryl allowed the men of CCG to join Abbott’s ranks on the forefront of scientific innovation, giving them an opportunity to “transcend the as in the author’s illumilimits of what they had come to SWEET PILLS These bird-shaped dispensers define as possible.” Certainly, Diet nating discussion of the for saccharin were relationship between Delight’s market success exceeded popular after World Abbott Laboratories and War II. the bounds of what CCG’s leaderthe California Canners & ship thought possible—at its height, Growers (CCG) cooperathe brand outsold Dole and Libby. tive, food manufacturers Whether this temporary success and looked to their partners in the chemical subsequent financial disaster add up to the industry for product ideas, technical exper“spiritual” experience the author claims it tise, and a sense of chemical camaraderie. to be is more questionable. In CCG’s case, this partnership turned This incident is one of several where the disastrous when Abbott’s assurances of author’s interpretation stretches the evisafety proved no match for a series of studdence. In part, this reflects the fact that so ies that demonstrated a clear link between much of the mundane, day-to-day work of cyclamate consumption and bladder cancer making and marketing chemicals remains in rats. FDA’s October 1968 announcement opaque and mysterious to historians. Open that Sucaryl would be banned left CCG corporate archives are few and far between; holding more than 3 million cans of Diet Dein de la Peña’s case, it’s telling that this parlight brand California fruit. The loss proved ticular story is based on CCG’s papers, not insurmountable for CCG, and the cooperaAbbott’s. For outsiders, “Empty Pleasures” tive eventually filed for bankruptcy in 1983. offers a too rare glimpse of how the business of chemistry actually works; insiders WOMEN DIET entrepreneurs, relying as may be curious to see how historians exthey did on a different set of marketing and plain the industry to one another. production techniques, found more lasting Whether inspired by a desire for status, success in brands such as Jean Nidetch’s control, profit, or gender equity, the entreWeight Watchers program, which focused preneurs of artificial sweeteners deserve on the psychology of desire rather than the credit for a shared oddity of American life: cult of the lab. Their success, de la Peña To lose weight, we eat more. Despite the argues, was tied to the idea of food without recent frenzy of public health advocacy surcalories rather than to a technological relarounding the obesity epidemic, Americans tionship with a specific artificial sweetener on a diet are more likely to reach for a sugarproducer. free (that is, artificially sweetened) yogurt In de la Peña’s analysis, the success of than for an apple, or to reach for a diet soda Weight Watchers and CCG’s bankruptcy instead of water. Ultimately, “Empty Pleamust be understood in part through changsures” argues, we must change the way we ing relationships among gender, technology, live if we want to change the way we eat. expertise, and status in late-20th-century America. The diet entrepreneurs naturalized artificial sweeteners by defining them AUDRA J. WOLFE is a freelance editor and as “legal” or “sinless” treats in a world of writer. She is based in Philadelphia, where she dangerous, sugar-filled foods. The “pleaalso lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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