Word: saccharine
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...things that could one day kill you, a diet soda should not be high on the list. Twenty years ago, however, diet soda seemed like lethal stuff--or at least the saccharin it contained did. According to studies at the time, saccharin was a direct cause of bladder cancer. Of course, in order for the sweetener to do you harm, it had to make up at least 3% of the gross weight of food you ate every day--no easy task for a substance consumed by the quarter-teaspoonful. Oh, and it also helped if you were a laboratory...
Nonetheless, in 1981 saccharin was added to the government's official list of cancer-causing agents and dropped from most products. Last week, having never harmed any known human consumer, it was formally cleared of carcinogenic charges. In the ninth edition of the federal list, saccharin was omitted, along with a lesser-known manufacturing chemical...
...review the candidates to determine which indeed deserve to be considered carcinogenic and where on the list they belong. Getting dropped from the list works the same way, except that the push for removal may come from industry groups eager to redeem what they consider a wrongly condemned substance. Saccharin's exoneration, for instance, was championed by the Calorie Control Council, a dietetic-food-and-beverage manufacturers' group...
...that long, scientists have tried to speed up the process by feeding huge amounts of suspect chemicals to laboratory animals such as mice. Typically they are given what is known as the maximum tolerated dose, an amount just below the lethal level. In the case of the artificial sweetener saccharin, mice were given the equivalent of hundreds of cans of diet soda a day; similarly, a person would have had to eat thousands of apples a day to get the maximum tolerated dose of Alar, a fruit-ripening chemical used by growers until it was withdrawn from the market because...
...detoured to Washington, first as a science adviser to Gerald Ford, then as Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Jimmy Carter. In the latter role, he was a strong public-interest spokesman, opposing use of ozone-damaging fluorocarbon sprays and favoring regulation of such cancer-linked substances as saccharin and sodium nitrate...