Ages ago, I used to work for the company that made Splenda, a popular artificial sweetener that is basically sugar that’s chemically altered so that it mostly passes through your digestive system instead of being absorbed. My job at the time was to read over and sometimes respond to all sorts of consumer complaints. And as such, I got to see depressing examples of how even adults can be grotesquely ignorant of everything from chemistry to basic material physics.
For instance, we got all sorts of people writing in horrified that Splenda contains chlorine, which is dangerous and caustic gas!!!!! Now, personally, I have no idea whether Splenda is 100% safe healthwise (but then, I have no idea whether natural sugar is 100% safe healthwise either). But I do know that the hysteria over it containing chlorine, which is still being pushed by alt-med “naturopaths” (i.e. people who irrationally believe that chemistry done by human beings is somehow different and more dangerous than chemistry done in nature), is pure poppycock. Our standard response at the time was “well, while it’s true that there are chlorine atoms in the sucralose molecule, the exact same atoms, in a far higher proportion by weight, are found in salt (NaCl)!”
Today, I still just stand in amazement that anyone could be so ignorant of basic chemistry as to think that molecules somehow necessarily have all the same properties as the atoms they contain. Heck, most of the basic atoms found in organic molecules are extremely toxic in ionized or pure elemental form: raw potassium or sodium, for instance, explode when they get wet. Heck, the very things which the chlorine atoms replace in the sugar molecule, Hydroxyl groups, would be crazy bad for you en masse in their free-floating ionized form.
For goodness sakes: the whole takeaway point of molecular chemistry is that the affects and properties of molecules and elements depend crucially on their exact configuration and the sorts of bonds they can make or break. I can understand most people not remembering the exact details of things from high school chemistry, but you’d think they’d at least retain some sense of the the basic idea.
Anyway. The second most common Splenda complaint was from folks who were utterly outraged that their box of Splenda didn’t weigh pound for pound like sugar. Now, it says pretty clearly on the box that Splenda measures “cup for cup like sugar,” and this is done so that people can directly substitute it for sugar in a recipe (Splenda, unlike most other artificial sweetners, holds up taste-wise in baking applications pretty well). Since the Splenda molecule is far sweeter on the tongue than sugar, it takes far less of it to match the same sweetness. This means that it would be flatly impossible for Splenda to match sugar along all three important variables at once: sweetness per volume per pound. The solution was simply to make Splenda exactly dense enough to match sweetness and volume.
Unfortunately, by law, the package also has to say something like “equivalent sweetness to 2 pounds of sugar.” People were apparently looking at that statement, looking at the actual listed product weight, seeing that they were different, and then concluding that they had been ripped off. Somehow, the phrase “equivalent sweetness” never made them stop and think about an alternative explanation.
Of course, having to explain things like the difference between weight and volume to adults is embarrassing no matter how politely you try to phrase it. Sparing their feelings, we mostly just offered to send people more free Splenda.
Speaking of which, my favorite consumer complaint was from a guy who wrote in threatening to sue us because we had sent a free sample of Splenda to his house, addressed to his then ex-wife. His current girlfriend got pissed off when she saw it and supposedly left him.
Not knowing what else to do, I simply wrote back our standard form letter response, which was basically “Well, we hope you at least enjoyed your Splenda, and we’d be happy to send you more Splenda!“
September 16, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Natalie Angier, in her most recent book, The Canon, has an excellent chapter on chemistry, which I found highly informative about just those aspects of chemistry that you mention, and I either ignored or forgot in high school. Molecules vs. elements. Covalent bonds, ionic bonds, etc. Good stuff. So is the rest of the book (so far, I’m still reading it).
September 17, 2007 at 12:37 am
I always get crazy headaches eating stuff with Splenda in it, so I avoid it. It sucks to hear that people bug you about the chlorine atom, though. :(
Also, I know the pain of explaining weight vs. volume. Oh, mom. Why did they let you out of high school? :(
September 17, 2007 at 6:23 am
Headaches are one of the oddest symptoms in medicine and testing of food products. Pretty much everyone gets them no matter what they eat, but we still aren’t sure exactly what causes them physiologically, though we know a few things that can lead to them.
In terms of the fears about Splenda (and most artificial sweeteners), when people develop so many diverse symptoms, all of which tend to be of the self-limiting and subjectively attributed, as well as matching the claimed effects of chemically very different substances (like aspartame), I tend to get skeptical of exactly what is going on: is it really the product itself, or is something else going on that’s either correlated or creating a false association? Human bodies just aren’t that different from each other that so many people should have so many different and non-overlapping reactions to the same substance (let alone having the same constellation of fears around several very chemically different substances), and the pooling of all sorts of different things into the same claimed pattern is a good way to count only coincidental “hits” while ignoring coincidental misses.
Still, nothing is 100% “safe” or non-reactive, and regardless of the cause, there do seem to be people that react badly to this or that. Medicine still has a lot to learn.
September 19, 2007 at 9:12 am
I wish people weren’t so flippant about artificial sweeteners. They are effecting so much more than you realize. My husband and I are big wine drinkers and we’ve noticed that recently all the wines we buy are starting to taste overly sweet (raisin). We asked a wine maker why when we went to his vineyard and he explained that all of the artificial sweeteners in peoples diets are dulling their sensitivity to sweet. To compensate they are letting grapes almost turn to raisins on the vine to get the most sugar out of them. Not only that but these chemicals stay on your tounge (hense the dulling) so that you no longer taste any of your food correctly. People also think that they are saving themselves calories by not using sugar, but because your body reacts differently to them you will consume (on avg.) 100 more calories before your brain gets the signal that you are satiated…so it doesn’t work! If you want to loose weight eat more real food and stop loading yourself full of crap. It’s so hard to find anything healthy for my children to eat that doesn’t have hfcs, aspartame, or splenda in it because all of the overweight people want to blame their childrens obesity on the food companies. When in fact the people who consume these alternatives are fat, the people who cut them from their diet are not…
I will now step off my soap box
September 20, 2007 at 7:46 am
You’re right: artificial sweetners, especially alone, aren’t going to help anyone lose weight. Weight is still primarily about carolies in vs. calories burned, and nothing can change that. But there are a lot of people that, for instance, have diabetes and for whom cutting down on sugar does help overall. I don’t think it hurts to have as an option provided that, like any tool, people understand what it can and cannot do and what the downsides are.
But I’m a little skeptical about the idea that the use of artifical sweetners is dulling people’s sensitivity to sweetness though: there are lots and lots of alternative reasons why sweeter wines might sell better.
September 20, 2007 at 7:54 pm
you missed the one that aspartame started as a bug killer:
http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/antpoison.asp
Of course, I would know that one :D
September 20, 2007 at 8:27 pm
” Aspertame is neuropoison.”
Wow.
October 1, 2007 at 10:51 am
It’s amazing how much science people don’t know, sin’t it?
“Weight is still primarily about calories in vs. calories burned, and nothing can change that.”
Actually, no, it isn’t, and it never has been, although that simple model seems like it should work. For a good general overview, try Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin
October 1, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I disagree: weight really IS still about calories eaten vs. burned. There are lots of complications insofar as you try to apply that model to dieting and staying on a particular diet, yes, and that’s primarily what Rethinking Thin shows, but it is still true that you cannot keep on weight if you burn more than you eat, and you cannot gain weight unless you eat more than you burn. It’s just not physically possible. The reason “eat less, exercise more” doesn’t work for most people is that they can’t actually do it, or they go overboard too fast, and send their bodies into metabolic shutdown. Anyone that tries to lose lots of weight fast, especially by dieting, is almost certainly dooming themselves to failure and misery.
By and large, my experience is that dieting, by which I mean fad dieting, is a complete waste of time. Only exercise can make a real difference, and only a serious amount of exercise can help: making a truly serious commitment to some extended physical activity as part of your life. You just cannot tell your body that you want to lose weight by changing the amount of food you eat (though in general, it’s good to eat reasonably and healthy for other health reasons), because it resists that directly as part of its metabolic strategy.
November 18, 2007 at 9:56 pm
[...] chemical ingredient just doesn’t matter, or that more of a good thing is always better. Not long ago, I complained that even if people don’t remember much from high-school chemistry, they should [...]
May 23, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Bad, you are clearly very intelligent, but I have a very hard time with the calories in/calories out equation. While what you are saying is technically correct it is not practically correct. People interpret it as you can not gain weight unless you eat more then everyone else. This is patently false. While your statement that “..it is still true that you cannot keep on weight if you burn more than you eat, and you cannot gain weight unless you eat more than you burn.” is true, we all burn calories differently, and there in lies the problem. We really don’t have a strong grasp on how to make a fat person permanently thin, or a thin person permanently fat.
May 23, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I don’t know what you mean by “everyone else” here. The only relevant person is yourself: whether your body burns more or less or about even of calories consumed. So I don’t see what’s patently false in that statement. Sure, people burn and intake calories at different rates. But the basic balance is the same.
Where it gets hard is when you take into account all the apparent things the body and mind do in response to various changes in things like changes in caloric intake, more exercise, and so on. There seems to be lots of evidence that there are all sorts of mental and physical triggers that can get thrown out of whack, and thus frustrate attempts to change one’s body: sometimes to the point of having counter-productive effects (like huge, unavoidable cravings that lead to binging six months down the road from rapid weight loss).