A Tale of Two Sweeteners: Part 1 — Splenda

By Amy Campbell Recently, I've received some questions and comments about artificial sweeteners, especially Splenda. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to write about Splenda and also to highlight a fairly new sweetener to the market called Nectresse (I'll do that next week). Before I get started, I should mention that Splenda and Nectresse are two nonnutritive sweeteners manufactured by the company McNeil Nutritionals. McNeil Nutritionals is a Johnson & Johnson company and its mission is "to give people the ability to actively manage their own health." They also sell Lactaid (a line of lactose-free dairy products) and Viactiv (a brand of soft chew calcium and multivitamin supplements). Splenda Splenda is a brand name for sucralose, a popular nonnutritive (noncaloric) sweetener that was approved by the FDA in 1998 and is used worldwide in more than 4,000 foods and beverages. Interestingly, sucralose is made from chlorinated sucrose (sugar). We think of chlorine mainly as a chemical for pools, but it's needed in the body to help maintain acid-base balance. (Many of the foods we eat contain chlorine, by the way, including sodium chloride (salt), cocoa powder, hot dogs, and frozen pizza). The chlorine in Splenda helps to give this sweetener its intense sweetness: Splenda is 600 times sweeter than regular sugar. This sweetener provides no calories because, although it tastes like sugar, it's not broken down in the body. In fact, it passes through the body pretty much unchang...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs