Word: saccharine
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nationwide flurry and concern was touched off last week by a Food and Drug Administration announcement that it was taking first steps toward halting sales of saccharin, the only noncaloric artificial sweetener approved for use in foods and beverages in the U.S. since the banning of cyclamates in 1970. Acting FDA Commissioner Sherwin Gardner emphasized that he saw no immediate hazard to public health from the chemical. Thus his agency will not immediately stop the manufacture of products containing saccharin (which account for at least $2 billion annually in sales) or recall those already on the shelves. But, Gardner insisted...
...proposed ban, expected to go into effect in July, is based on a study by the Canadian government's health-protection laboratory in Ottawa. For three years, researchers fed rats daily doses of saccharin that amounted to 5% of their diet by weight. In the first generation of rodents, seven out of 38 developed bladder tumors, three of them malignant. In the second generation of rats-which had developed in the wombs of saccharin-fed mothers, were nursed on their milk and later given the chemical themselves-twelve out of 44 had tumors; eight of them were malignant. That...
...overreacted," snapped a spokesman for the Calorie Control Council, an Atlanta-based trade group. "The physiology of a rat or mouse isn't the same as that of a human," protested William Inman, vice president of Sherwin-Williams Co. of Cleveland, the sole U.S. producer of saccharin, whose output accounts for 65% of the 8 million lbs. consumed yearly by Americans. Researchers pointed to the enormous quantities of saccharin fed the test rats-equivalent to consumption by a human of some 800 cans of diet soda each day over a lifetime. Said Duke University Biochemist Henry Kamin: "The dosages...
Though the FDA admitted there was no evidence that saccharin had caused cancer in humans during the 80 years the sweetener has been used in the U.S., the agency had no choice but to seek the ban. Under a 1958 amendment to the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, sponsored by former New York Representative James Delaney, any food additive-no matter in what quantities-that causes cancer either in humans or lab animals must be prohibited. The same law may yet be invoked in other bans in the months ahead, though the FDA is clearly not happy with the amendment...
...since animal tests in the early '70s renewed concern that the chemical might be a carcinogen, the FDA has been slowly moving toward a ban. By 1972 it had taken the sweetener from its "generally recognized as safe" list and warned food and beverage companies to limit the saccharin levels in their products...