In the past year, shares of Tate & Lyle, one of the world's largest manufacturers of sweeteners, have nearly doubled in price. And sugar has had nothing to do with it. The company sold its stake in Domino Sugar four years ago, then came up with something much more profitable: sucralose, also known as Splenda. The sweetener is sold in yellow boxes and sachets with royal-blue script reminiscent of Domino's packaging. "Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar," the slogan claims, but like all other sugar substitutes, sucralose was born in a laboratory. The country's entire supply is produced in one well-guarded and famously secretive facility in Alabama, where truckloads of common table sugar are shipped in weekly, to be modified via a complex chemical process involving chlorine and phosgene gas. The result is so intensely sweet that Tate & Lyle has to cut it with 600 parts filler to approximate a natural sweetness.
What can make a chemical so sweet? And is it bad for us? The questions aren't trivial: Eight out of 10 Americans now consume some sort of artificial sweetener. Last year alone the food industry introduced 2,225 reduced-sugar and sugar-free foods, many of them made with sucralose. Chemical additives are nothing new, of course — most processed foods contain more than one artificial flavoring, emulsifier, coloring, or gelling agent — and sugar substitutes are among the most-studied additives in the world. Yet rumors of their side effects persist, and their escalating potency demands attention.
"There are a lot of people who have been looking for the perfect sweetener for a long time," says Eric Walters, a biochemist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. Walters himself has studied artificial sweeteners for nearly 25 years, so he's well aware of the central irony of his field: The most successful sugar substitutes have all been discovered by accident. Saccharin was invented in Baltimore about 130 years ago by two chemists at Johns Hopkins University who were experimenting with coal-tar derivatives. Aspartame was found in the 1960s by a medical chemist in Illinois who was investigating a drug for gastric ulcers. Sucralose was discovered in 1976 by a graduate student at King's College London. His head researcher had told him to test some compounds, but he misunderstood and tasted them instead.
