(“The Bitter Truth About a Sweetener Scare,” The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999 — by Dr. Elizabeth Whelan)

The recent death of Michael Sveda, the chemist who discovered cyclamates, an artificial sweetener, and worked on other industrial chemicals including DDT, brought me back to the pivotal day in my professional career.

On Oct. 18. 1969, holding a can of TaB, I watched Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch tell the nation that because the sweetener posed a risk of cancer it would be banned. Just a few days before, I had seen a Food and Drug Administration scientist on television holding up deformed, sickly chicks that had been injected with cyclamates. At the time I was pursuing a doctoral degree in public health and knew that no sweeteners or other food additives had ever been cited as a possible factor in cancer causation. Why all this attention for a phantom risk? Why were we banning safe, useful products under the guise of cancer prevention? I have pursued an answer to those questions ever since.

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