it’s not about you

Equal sues Splenda. Splenda says “nanny, nanny, boo, boo” in a sing-song voice, while sticking its thumbs in its ears and waggling its fingers at Equal. Equal sticks out its tongue and then says, “I know you are, but what am I? Jinx! No backs for all infinity!”

McNeil says that the process it uses to manufacture Splenda starts with sugar, pure and simple. To make sucralose, McNeil adds three chlorine atoms that are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce to a molecule of sucrose. The sucrose disappears in the manufacturing process, but the result — sucralose — is 600 times as sweet as ordinary table sugar. Splenda then mixes two bulking agents, dextrose and maltodextrin, into the sucralose.

The chemistry is complex, and it may be baffling for a jury to hear about a process that starts out involving sugar but ends up lacking it.

Despite its use of sugar as the starting point for making sucralose, nowhere do the words “sugar” or “sucrose” appear on Splenda’s ingredient list. That is because under Food and Drug Administration regulations, it cannot list a substance that has vaporized during the manufacturing process.

Maybe if they go to court, the judge and jury will rule they both have to cease and desist creating either product. They’re both creepy. That and the fact that the sugar business is lucrative to the tune of $10 billion a year - well, it all just scares me.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Activist, News and Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.