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FDA Approves More Powerful Sugar Substitute

guttentag writes: "The FDA has approved a new sugar substitute from the people who brought you NutraSweet. It's 7,000 to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar and unlike NutraSweet (aspartame), Neotame apparently doesn't give rats cancer and is safe for people with phenylkeotonuria."

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  1. $%$##@ing chemists by Chris+Canfield · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?" Most sugar-free sweeteners are A: much less tasty than sugar and B: hideous chemical combinations designed to be unprocessable by your body. When I put something my VCR isn't designed to handle into the little slot in front, it generally voids the warantee. Why are we surprised when, say, Olestra / Olean gums up our little internal sewage systems?

    It says quite a bit about this culture that we'd rather be dead than fat, and we'd rather get cancer than think about what we are eating.

    Sugar only rots teeth if you eat it pure with a gum base and a coloring (AKA candy) and then don't clean them. Coke can dissolve a tooth overnight, a feat that sugar water can't replicate. How is Diet Coke supposed to protect your pearly whites? Even then viable replacements exist for people's teeth. I really don't know why everyone comes down on sugar these days (except for it's abusability as a cheap addition to many foods). It's natural, healthy in normal doses, and glucose / fructose is the basic ingredient for glycolysis, which is the body's ATP (a form of stored energy) production cycle. You can get fat from sugar because you are producing more energy than your body needs. In effect, your body will utilize the sugar given, and this is seen as bad. Nutrasweet isn't causing cancer in rats because it is too useful for them.

    Sorry to go on a rant, but it just p!$$es me off the kind of irresponsibly researched junk chemistry that is pushed upon the worlds population as "healthy." There is NOTHING healthy about Nutrasweet, Saccarine, Neotame, or the other laboratory sweeteners developed and patented with profit in mind. Many "healthy" and "diet" drinks consist of nothing but carbonated water, aspartame, and "natural flavors" (which consist of nothing but trace amounts of compounds developed from a base class of living ingredients but whose final output bares no resemblance to the source material). Maybe there should be an administration of some sort that would regulate companies producing the things we ingest... like food and... drugs? Geeze, I still have nights spent in the smallest room in the house thanks to the random unlabeled proliferation of Olestra into the foods we eat. Thanks FDA!

    I would be proud to burn a few karma here if anyone knows how to mod a comment down as "bitter"

    -Chris

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