market, bought lampante (very cheaply of course, of course) in country X, brought it to Italy, cleaned it up and added a smidgen of Italian olive oil. A leading Italian manufacturer of olive oil, with a big U.S. Lampante can be processed so that it becomes clear and free of health problems. It is a foul-looking, smelly, unhealthy oil called 'lampante.' The name tells its story-it was burned in street lamps in years past. After repeated extractions, one can get from skin, pits and flesh the last bit of oil. You know extra-virgin, the highest grade from the first pressing, but let me tell you about the worst from the last. As the market demonstrates, the strategy works. It is clear that Splenda's makers and their advertising agency could not forgo the psychological advantage of manipulating our vulnerable minds with causal chemical logic (it's okay, I love us anyway), of evoking a caries-free, calorie-free yet sugary fantasy.

But as Terry Acree, my colleague, and a student of taste chemistry asks, could you imagine Splenda's advertisements saying simply and honestly, 'stimulates the taste buds just like sugar'? No, that won't do. It may well be that sucralose sells better because it tastes more sugar-like than aspartame. It's having your sweetness, and eating it too 'food' rather than food. The FDA allows a manufacturer to say 'none' when the amount is small.) That's quite a difference from sugar: a molecule modified to the extent that it can fool that supremely efficient machine for turning most anything ingested into atoms, bonds, and energy. (Actually, studies point to a maximum of 15 percent metabolism, so it does have a few calories. It holds no calories because it is not metabolized. The advertisements for Equal say it 'has a sweet, clean taste, like sugar,' or just 'tastes like sugar.' The advertisements for Splenda say 'made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.'Ī poet should be happy, for here significance is condensed into just a few words-the causal 'so,' the generative 'made of sugar.' What calling up of resonances, what evocation of innocent childhood pleasures, of cotton candy! Never mind that the change in properties upon simple chlorine substitution is enough to make sucralose noncaloric. But oh, do we want the quintessence of sugar, its natural goodness. We want it sweet (otherwise, why buy sweeteners?), but we don't want sugar's calories.

One way to view advertising is that it represents the best psychology, visual art and poetry that money can buy to cater to the internal illogic of our minds. Another argument that could have been made-that selective chlorination changes sucrose essentially, so that the properties of sucralose may not at all resemble those of sugar-would not fit in with Splenda's advertising. Its manufacturer tries to deal with this concern preemptively in the Web FAQ section: 'Chlorine is present naturally in many of the foods and beverages that we eat and drink every day ranging from lettuce, mushrooms and table salt.' Quite true. Sucralose is, of course, a chlorinated organic. Some people are upset by the proliferation of organic chlorine compounds in our environment-the insecticide DDT and industrial chlorofluorocarbons and PCBs are chief sources of worry. Some of these are 200,000 times as sweet as sucrose.Ī seemingly different but related concern is worked out, sideways, on the Splenda Web site. The world record is now held by members of an interesting chemical family, the guanidinoacetic acids. Incidentally, these are hardly the most potent sweeteners. Neither the exceeding sweetness of aspartame nor that of sucralose is related to the sweetness of sucrose they are consequences of the arrangements of atoms in these molecules and how the molecules bind to the sweet-receptor proteins in our taste buds.

Equal sucralose