Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Artificial Sweeteners

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

In 1879, Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist at Johns Hopkins University, made an astonishing discovery. He was conducting experiments with coal tar when he forgot to wash his hands.  When he started eating lunch, he noticed something odd. His fingers tasted sweet.  Fahlberg’s discovery was the start of a century-long pursuit to create alternatives to sugar. Learn more about artificial sweeteners, how they were developed, and how they work on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1879, Constantine Falberg, a chemist at John Hopkins University, made an astonishing discovery. He was conducting experiments with coal tar when he forgot to wash his hands. When he started eating his lunch, he noticed something odd. His fingers tasted sweet. Fallberg's discovery was the start of a century-long pursuit to create alternatives to sugar. Learn more about artificial sweeteners, how they were developed, and how they work, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The very first artificial sweetener was probably something you would never want to consume. The ancient Romans created a story. substance that was known throughout history as salt of Saturn, guillard's powder, or lead sugar. Chemists today would call it lead acetate, and I guess you can figure out from the lead part why you wouldn't want to consume it. Lead sugar was one of the few sweeteners that the Romans had

beyond honey. They would create it by boiling grape juice in lead pots until it became a syrup. There have been several cases throughout history of lead poisoning from lead sugar. Pope Clement II died in the year 1047 of lead poisoning due to, to the consumption of lead sugar. Beethoven may have died from lead sugar used to sweeten his wine, even though by the time of his death it had been made illegal to use. Sugar originated in India, but was never traded in quantity to Europe. It wasn't until it became cultivated in the new world that its consumption exploded. In the 19th century, sugar beets were grown when sugar was embargoed during the Napoleonic Wars. The story of sugar itself will be left for another episode.

However, the important fact is, despite the high demand for sugar in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sugar was still relatively expensive. In 1879, Constantine Falberg was a chemist conducting experiments with coal tar. Coal tar is a type of creosote that's a byproduct of the creation of coke and coal gas. In particular, he was working with a compound made from it called benzoyic sulfamide. Before washing his hands, he tasted his fingers while eating lunch and noticed that that they tasted very sweet. He figured out that the sweet taste came from the benzoic sulfamide that he had been working with. He and his laboratory supervisor, Ira Remsen,

developed a way to synthesize the compound from O. Sulfamoyle benzoyle benzoyc acid. Falberg published an academic paper on his discovery and then began applying for patents around the world for a method of creating this substance that he called sacrin. In 1886, Falberg moved to Germany, where he began the production of saccharin on an industrial scale, in the process becoming a very wealthy man. Saccharine wasn't a simple substitute for sugar. Saccharine is actually 550 times sweeter than sugar, which means the amount of saccharine you need to achieve the same amount of sweetness as sugar is one 550th the amount. Saccharin also doesn't taste exactly like sugar. In its pure form, it has a metallic aftertaste. Most importantly,

saccharin can't be metabolized by humans. Hence, unlike sugar. it has no calories. In 1901, a company was founded in St. Louis, Missouri by John Francis Queenie, which imported saccharine to the United States from Germany. The company would then resell it to companies like soda manufacturers who use sugar. The name of this company, which Queenie named after his wife's maiden name, Monsanto. There was actually a fair amount of saccharine used in the first several years of the 20th century in the United States. Most people think of artificial sweeteners as something which was introduced in the later half of the 20th century, but saccharin was actually being used decades earlier.

The reason why it was so heavily used had nothing to do with calories, weight loss, or nutrition. It had everything to do with price. Sacrin was simply cheaper than sugar. The reason why no one thinks of saccharin being used this early is that the manufacturers who added it to their food never disclosed it. There was literally no labeling or disclosure requirements. requirements for food additives at the time. The publication of the jungle by Upton Sinclair increased public concern about food additives. In 1907, the Food and Drug Administration wanted to ban saccharin because they felt it was a deceptive practice of replacing a superior product with an inferior one,

and also because they thought that it might be toxic. The person who blocked the ban of Sackron was actually President Theodore Roosevelt, who said, quote, Anyone who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot. He, fired the FDA agent who proposed the ban. This was the beginning of a series of government flip-flops on sacrin. In 1912, the U.S. government declared saccharin to be an adulterated substance and banned it. And then that same year, they declared it to be safe. The ban lasted until the First World War where there was a shortage of sugar. Then in the late 1940s, the FDA conducted an investigation trying to prove that Sacron was harmful, but they couldn't

find any evidence that it was. Finally, in 1977, studies found that saccharine caused bladder cancer in rats. The FDA wanted to ban saccharine completely, but compromised on simply putting a warning on the packages that said, quote, use of this product may be hazardous to your health. The product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals. The warning was eventually dropped in the year 2000 when new research found that humans didn't react the same as rats to saccharin. While saccharin was the first artificial sweetener, it's hardly the only one. In fact, it's only the third most popular artificial sweetener in use today. The most popular brand of saccharin is sweeten low. The next major artificial sweetener which was discovered was cyclamate. As with

saccharin, the discovery of cyclimate was an accident. In 1937, a University of Illinois graduate student named Michael Sevda was working on synthesizing a drug when he took a puff of a cigarette that was sitting nearby, and it tasted sweet. Cyclomate is only 50 times sweeter than sugar, making it less potent than other artificial sweeteners. Cyclamate was approved as being generally safe in 1958, and it was soon followed by the first diet soft drinks. The first diet beverage was Diet Right Cola by the Royal Crown Company,

which was released in 1958. The sweetener was a mix of cyclamate and saccharin. In 1963, the Coca-Cola Company released their first diet drink called TAN, which also used cyclimate and sacrin. And that same year, Pepsi released their first drink called Patio, which was later renamed as Diet Pepsi. However, in 1969, cyclimate was taken off the market. A study tested the 10 to one ratio of cyclimate to saccharine used in many beverages and found that eight out of 240 rats develop bladder tumors when fed the human equivalent of 550 cans of diet soda a day. Today, cyclimate is banned in the United States,

but it's still approved for use in most countries around the world, including the EU. In 1965, Aspartame was discovered. Once again, this story is almost the same as the other sweetners I've mentioned. Chemist James Shatler was working on developing an anti-alter drug when he licksed his fingers to pick up a piece of paper and found that it was sweet. Aspartame is approximately 200 times sweeter than sugar, and of all the approved artificial sweeteners, has the taste closest to sugar. Technically, Aspartame doesn't have zero calories. It does actually have four calories per gram, but because

it's so sweet, the amount needed result in a negligible amount of calories used. Aspartame was approved for general use in 1981 and quickly became one of the most popular artificial sweeteners. It was the sweetener used in one of the most popular diet beverages of all time, Diet Coke, and Diet Pepsi switched to it in 1983. Aspertame has become one of the most tested food substances in history, and it's been approved for consumption in over 100 countries. And just as a side note, both Diet Coke and Coke Zero use Aspartame as their primary sweetener. The difference between the two beverages are other ingredients. Diet Coke contain citric acid, whereas Coke Zero has potassium citrate and asosulfame potassium. Asperetame is often sold by itself

under the brand name Nutrisweet. The final of the big four artificial sweetners to be discovered was sucralose. In 1976, chemist Leslie Howe and Shoshakant Fogniz at Queen's College in London were researching compounds of chlorinated sugar. These were compounds based on actual sucrose molecules. Howe asked Fogniz to test one of the compounds, but Fogniz misunderstood him and thought that he said to taste one of the compounds. Again, via accidental discovery, Fogniz found the substance to be extremely sweet. sucralose is the most potent of all the major artificial sweeteners. It is 1,000 times sweeter than sugar, three times as sweet as as aspartame, and twice as sweet as saccharin. Pepsi briefly switched from aspartane to sucralose between 2015 and 2018, but then switched back due to a drop in sales.

Sucurelose is most commonly sold under the brand name Splenda. These four artificial sweeteners, sacrin, cyclimate, aspartame, and sucrose. are by far the most popular artificial sweeteners in the world today. However, they're not the only ones. Tagetose, also known by the brand name Neutralose, is based on lactose, the sugar found in milk. Asa-sulfame, which I mentioned before is found in Coke Zero, is also a sweetener that can be found under the brand name Sonnet and Sweet 1. It has a stronger aftertaste than most artificial sweeteners, so it has a limited use. Stevia is derived from the stevia plant in South America. Technically, it isn't an artificial sweetener as it does come from a natural source. There is also a category of sweeteners known as

sugar alcohols. These are sucrose molecules with hydrogen atoms attached to them. Despite the name alcohol, they do not contain any ethanol and have nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. Sugar alcohols are often used in candies and gum and may result in intestinal problems as they're not digested in the small intestine, something to which I can personally attest. The one thing that many of you are probably wondering is, what about the health consequences? of artificial sweeteners. You can't make a blanket claim about every single sweetener, as they're all different chemicals and behave differently. That being said, collectively, these are some of the most tested food additives in world history. They have been given thousands of tests conducted

over the better part of a century by hundreds of governments and institutions. Furthermore, given the incredibly large number of people who consume them, there appears to be no evidence of any link to cancer, which is what most tests are looking for. That being said, One of the biggest concerns which has arisen in recent years has been the effect artificial sweeteners have on obesity. This is something that really no one expected, and there hasn't been much research on it, because the entire point of artificial sweeteners is that they have zero or fewer calories. And certainly if there are no calories, how could it cause obesity?

One theory that's been proposed is that even though these molecules are not metabolized like glucose, they may still create a similar response in the body due to either the sweet taste or maybe due to a reaction in the gut microbiome. This, however, is not a health podcast, and given the time constraints, it would be impossible to do the issue justice. And considering the current state of research, I'm not even sure if there's a conclusive answer which can be given anyhow. Artificial sweeteners have become big business. They can be found in a wide number of products, including some that you might not even realize have artificial sweeteners in them. It's estimated that artificial sweeteners are an $8 billion global business today. As big as it is,

it's still four and a half times smaller than the global sugar industry. While the sweeteners I've mentioned in this episode are the most popular ones today, you never know when some scientists, while in the middle of an experiment, will stick their finger in their mouths and discover a new one. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise.

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