Saccharin

Saccharin is an artificial sweetener named for the word "saccharine," meaning "sugary." The sweetener may have contributed to the increasing use of "saccharine" in a derogatory sense of "overly sweet" or "cloying." More than three hundred times as sweet as sucrose (refined white sugar), saccharin is used in such small quantities as to have a negligible calorie count. The first widely adopted artificial sweetener, it enabled the introduction of a large and profitable cottage industry of diet food products, but fell out of favor because of its bitter aftertaste and a since-disproven link between saccharin and cancer. Though it remains in use as a food additive, it is more commonly used in medicines and toothpastes. Competing sweeteners and displaced Saccharin in the diet food market, but it remains commonly available under the Sweet’N Low brand or in the pink paper packets meant to evoke the distinctive trade dress of that brand.

Background

The chemical name of saccharin is benzoic sulfimide, and it was first discovered in 1879 by chemist Constantin Fahlberg, working on coal tar derivatives at The Johns Hopkins University. He filed several patents for the substance under the name saccharin, beginning in 1884. Despite Fahlberg's quick move to monetization, it was not several decades later, when the first World War caused sugar shortages, that saccharin became well known. In the intervening time, the US Food and Drug Administration had declared, in 1912, that saccharin was not harmful. The decision was not easily reached. Harvey Wiley, a chemist and activist instrumental in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the first commissioner of the FDA, clashed with President Theodore Roosevelt over the safety of saccharin, insisting that sugar substitutes were intrinsically fraudulent. Wiley resigned over a number of issues the same year saccharin was declared safe and became a prominent activist against soft drinks and other products to which caffeine was added.

For a time, saccharin coexisted with cyclamate, a sugar substitute discovered in 1937, and the two were even blended together in a Swiss product called Assugrin. Still, other than in times of sugar scarcity, saccharin remained obscure—much like margarine or "oleo," in its role as a butter substitute, it was available but not commonplace. The diet industry changed this. While products for "slimmers" had been popular since the nineteenth century, they had tended to focus on exercise, special apparatuses, supplements (or medications like diuretics, for losing water weight), and meal replacements. People who were interesting in altering their diet to lose weight didn't usually buy special products sold for this purpose, but rather made obvious choices like reducing portions, eating low-caloric foods like lettuce and celery, and avoiding fats and sugars. Recognizing that sweetness, as one of the five basic tastes, is a thing the body naturally craves, the diet industry in the 1960s began to promote low-calorie products made with saccharin.

Saccharin Today

Saccharin's rise owed much to the 1969 ban of cyclamate in the United States and many European countries following studies showing that it might be carcinogenic. Ironically, similar research proved saccharin's downfall, at least for a time. Studies in the 1970s found a link between saccharin and the development of bladder cancer in laboratory rodents, which led to the requirement that saccharin products be labeled accordingly from 1977, when the Saccharin Study and Labeling Act was passed, until the end of 2000, when the warning label requirement was repealed following the discovery that the saccharin-cancer link was due to uniquely rodent features of body chemistry, and did not indicate a carcinogenic risk for humans. Cyclamate has similarly been found to be safe after all, and its ban has been lifted in most countries other than the United States.

Saccharin has been removed from the major national and international lists of hazardous food additives, and countries like Canada that had banned it outright have repealed those bans. Biases against saccharin persist, perhaps in part because of the bitter aftertaste, but it is also true that the popularity of saccharin had never entirely faded. Indeed, many saccharin fans prefer it either for its taste or because of the health risks caused by alternatives. While aspartame and sucralose have both overtaken saccharin in popularity, for instance, aspartame is a possible dietary trigger of migraines, and although reliable studies do not support the claim, a popular belief persists that aspartame is linked to neurological or psychiatric symptoms, especially in children.

Most saccharin products are beverages or candies. Saccharin is unstable when heated, and so proved unsuitable for use in baked goods like cakes or cookies. However, using saccharin instead of sugar in products where sugar would ordinarily provide most or all of the calories, as in soft drinks, allowed manufacturers to sell food products that were essentially zero-calorie. Whether zero-calorie means the same thing as having no impact on nutrition or weight is actually uncertain. Some studies indicate that artificial sweeteners still trigger the same insulin response as sugar, which can result in weight gain and contribute to the development of adult-onset diabetes.

The first diet soft drink was Diet Rite, a diet cola introduced by the RC Cola company in 1958. It originally used cyclamate, but was reformulated with saccharin in 1969. Diet Rite added NutraSweet (a brand of aspartame) and eliminated saccharin in 1987. Acting as a sort of bellwether for sugar substitutes, Diet Rite was reformulated yet again in 2000, replacing aspartame with Sunett-brand Acesulfame potassium and Splenda-brand sucralose, becoming the first nationally distributed diet soda with neither aspartame nor saccharin. Coca-Cola introduced TaB, its first diet cola, in 1963, for dieters who wanted to "keep tabs on their weight." It was formulated with saccharin, and instead of being reformulated after cancer concerns were raised, Coca-Cola introduced the aspartame-based Diet Coke as its flagship diet cola in 1982. Tab remained in production, and is available in nearly a dozen countries. With the subsequent introduction of Coca-Cola Zero (sweetened with aspartame and Acesulfame potassium, and marketed to men), Coca-Cola became the only major soda producer with three separate diet colas using different sugar substitute blends. The sweetener blend in Coca-Cola Zero varies by international region, and some countries' versions use saccharin as well, while some use the cyclamate banned in the United States in the 1960s.

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