Sucralose Study Ripe for Scare-Mongering

By Ruth Kava — October 26, 2016

A recent article, published in the journal Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry reported that when people eat the non-nutritive sweetener sucralose (the sweetening ingredient in Splenda®) some of it is absorbed into the blood and then excreted by the kidneys in urine. Such a report is ripe for the scare-mongers, especially since the report found that the level of sucralose in the blood is higher in children than in adults. But is this something to be worried about? Unlikely......To Read More...

Chemists Were Wrong About Splenda - Medicinal chemists — organic chemists who study drugs — frequently develop an ability that is sometimes informally called "eyeball toxicology," or the ability to determine a rough idea of the toxicity of a substance just by seeing its chemical structure on paper. It is a form of intuition. The longer you do the job, the better you get at it. It would be reasonable to call this skill a "highly educated guess," which is acquired through years of studying the relationship between the structures of a variety of chemicals and their toxicity. It's not perfect, but we often get it right. It could just as easily called acquired toxicological judgement. Or, "that is one nasty looking molecule!"  ......
 

Sugar, Gallbladder Cancer Supposedly Linked, Study Claims -  As you're probably aware, everything from obesity to baldness is being blamed on high consumption of sugar. Now there's a new ailment to add to the list — gallbladder cancer — at least according to a new study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.  The gallbladder is a small sack (usually depicted as green) that's tucked away between lobes of the liver. Bile produced by the liver is collected and stored in the gallbladder. When a fat-containing food is consumed, the gallbladder contracts and sends the bile, through a series of ducts, into the small intestine where it helps digest fats so the body can absorb them. Gallbladder cancer can occur in the sack itself, in the collecting ducts in the liver, as well as in the ducts leading from the bladder to the small intestine (the "biliary tree" includes the whole set of ducts both within and outside the liver).......

 

Health Panel Applauds Approval of New Sweetener - The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a consortium of more than 250 scientists and physicians today applauded approval of the use of a new noncaloric sweetener, sucralose, by the federal Food and Drug Administration.This approval significantly broadens the dietary choices of Americans stated Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, president of ACSH.  Sucralose is made from table sugar, or sucrose, which is then slightly modified to make it even sweeter and able to resist metabolism by the body. The resulting compound is approximately 600 times sweeter than sugar, and thus can be used in truly tiny amounts to sweeten a wide variety of foods.......

 

Blog hits the right note on chemophobia - The American Council on Science and Health has been fighting chemophobia since its inception in 1978. Unfortunately the advent of the Internet, while providing much valid information, has also become a venue of inaccurate and fear-mongering sites. Thus, we were more than pleased to discover a blog on the website of Scientific American by chemistry Ph.D. student Chad Jones that debunks some pseudo-scientific fear-mongering on the site of Dr. Joseph Mercola about the synthetic sweetener sucralose (sold as Splenda).......

 

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