In 1937, Illini graduate student Michael Sveda was working on trying to synthesize an anti-fever medication. Like all health-conscious individuals of the era, he was having a smoke whilst working. Laying it on the table for a bit, he picked it up and was surprised that the tip tasted quite sweet. That taste prompted him to do more research and seek a patent.
Eventually, he sold the patent to DuPont, which sold it to Abbott Laboratories. Abbott saw commercial potential to using the product as a low-calorie sweetener. So they went through the laborious process of getting FDA approval, and obtained said certification in 1950.
Initially, Cyclamate was prescribed as a drug for the obese. In 1958, it received approval as a food additive. By 1960, a sweetener called Sweet*10 was a big hit in the US. It would make food, drinks, etc. sugary sweet with practically no calories!
What's not to love?
Soon, Cyclamate was used for sweetening a host of products. Canned fruit, Jell-O, Funny Face drink mixes, and sugar-free candy were among the plethora of products that weight-conscious consumers, each having a sweet tooth, purchased by the boatload.
Moms loved it. The sugar rush that THEIR moms had long put up with from their children was now a thing of the past! Kids could drink a whole pitcher of sugar-free Kool-Aid and not be wired to the gills!
Not only that, but those same moms could enjoy a very sweet cup of coffee or glass of tea and not worry about the pounds that were being added to their frames.
In 1963, Coca-Cola introduced a Cyclamate-sweetened drink called Fresca. I loved it at first taste, and my mom was happy to see me taking in less sugar. Believe me, I was already wired enough!
Again, what's not to love?
Enter FDA scientist Jacqueline Verrett. In 1969, she appeared on NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report with photographs of malformed chicks who had been injected with large quantities of Cyclamate. The images were shocking, and viewers were immediately filled with doubts about the safety of the low-calorie foods that they had been scarfing down.
A few days later, a study was released (from Abbott Laboratories themselves) that showed that eight out of 240 rats that had been fed the equivalent of 350 cans of soda a day had developed bladder cancer.
Interestingly, the study involved feeding the rats both Cyclamate AND saccharine. The results weren't blamed on one sweetener over the other.
Anyhoo, the FDA reacted with a ban on Cyclamate on October 18, 1969. It completely caught the food industry off-guard.
Soft drink manufacturers scrambled to come up with another sugar-free solution. The most obvious, saccharine, left a bitter aftertaste that turned this life-long Fresca drinker into a Squirt fan. Funny Face started telling consumers that they would need to add sugar to their mixes (they did drop the price from 10 cents to a nickel for the trouble). Some added sugar (in smaller quantities) to their formerly Cyclamate-sweetened products. One bizarre example of spin was done by Coke with Tab. A TV commercial I remember well used a song to inform the public that Tab used sugar in order to taste better than it would have with saccharine. The tag line? "Tab tastes good enough for GUYS!"
I'll bet Gloria Steinem loved that.
Nowadays, we have Splenda to sweeten our diet drinks with no discernable aftertaste in the US. Hooyah, I'm drinking Fresca again! But in many industrialized nations, Cyclamate is still used. And no, bladder cancer rates (or any other of the other bad stuff that Cyclamate was accused of causing) aren't any higher than over here. The Cyclamate ban probably hurt the process of the banning of dangerous substances as a whole, simply because of the backlash that came from the public after learning of the truly astronomical amounts of the substance that test animals were given. Heck, Verrett's baby chicks would have looked like crap if they had been force-fed that much WATER!
But, for better or worse, it happened. And it's a memory that we Boomer kids can recall if we try, again, for better or worse.
Comments (3)
I remember it quite well, as my dad put in his entire career as a chemist for Abbott Laboratories. Though he wasn't personally involved with this particular product, he still gets angry about the poor methodology applied in the cyclamate ban.
I still think there was nothing like the taste of Fresca sweetened with cyclamates. Though I was a little young for diet drinks at the time, it was a special treat to taste my mom's favorite diet Fresca.
May I add that we almost never had soda in the house when I was a kid, only those little miniature glass bottles of Coke when we had a babysitter over, and that was considered a huge treat - but that's another subject for another day. When I grew up, it was strictly Kool-Aid and, for awhile, Funny Face. And one word for breakfast: Tang.
Speaking of Abbott Laboratories, this is only for those who grew up within a 10-mile-or-so radius of its big North Chicago IL plant... remember that unique Abbott smell? When the wind was right, it could just overwhelm, and we lived on the north side of Waukegan. When we used to complain about it, my mom would tell us that smell put food on our table. Guess I finally got used to it by the time I was a summer worker there in college.
Posted by Kenosha Mom | May 22, 2008 10:26 AM
Posted on May 22, 2008 10:26
350 cans per day!
Now isn't that scientific?
I wonder sometimes about all the so called studies that are being done.
Hopefully todays tests are not so ridiculous.
Posted by BearNaked | May 22, 2008 4:13 PM
Posted on May 22, 2008 16:13
my mom was happy to see me taking in less sugar. Believe me, I was already wired enough!
Still promoting the old “Sugar wires people and causes hyperactivity” myth, huh? No matter, but Splenda?, or sucralose is a synthetic molecule, which is basically sugar modified by adding chlorine atoms in place of some of the carbon atoms and was a product born of a failed attempt to make pesticides. Check this out Splenda Info
Anyway back to cyclamates: Just before Christmas 1969, I was a boomer with a band and we were requested to play a charity event for something or other. Free refreshments were provided once the admission was paid. These refreshments consisted of donated pastries and a huge supply of TAB diet cola which was donated by the local bottler as they had warehouses of the stuff and couldn’t sell it. After the gig was done, having played gratis, and the organizers stuck with 100’s of cases of TAB that hadn’t moved – even for free, it fell to the band to take a nominal “payment” in the form of cases of TAB. The band collected as many as they had room for and in my U-Haul trailer, I personally liberated 30 cases and as my mother was a despondent former TAB imbiber due to the ban, I lavished all 30 cases on her as a Christmas present. Fond memories of a cyclamatic Christmas.
Posted by Burt | May 28, 2008 12:08 AM
Posted on May 28, 2008 00:08