Why most Americans have never had this sweetener

Died at the completely sincere delivery of "nice work" after describing how Ayds avoided a PR crisis

Allegedly, Sveda actually discovered it when he went on his cigarette break. He had put his cigarette down on the lab bench and got some chemicals on it without realising, and then was really confused when his cigarette tasted sweet. Health and safety apparently wasn't a top priority amongst grad students in 1937.

Not to mention rats are pretty much the worst animal to test the carcinogenic ability of chemicals in because they are just little cancer factories normally

My Dad was a peach farmer. The cannery he sold to went under because they put cyclamates in their products. He lost a lot of money that was owed to him and was angry about it until he died.

I had a feeling from the begining this was going to be a "Big American business wanted to get rid of the competition" story. Not really surprised since that seems to be the status quo for things banned in the US but are legal in Europe or elsewhere.

Got to love the FDA. Years ago my doctor prescribed me a drug that was legal in most of the world but had not been FDA approved so I had to buy it from Canada. The FDA approved drug that worked similarly had horrible side effects so we avoided that one.

Meanwhile there's so many other additives like certain food dyes that studies have shown to negatively effect children and people in general but are still used in the US while it's discouraged or banned in the UK.

I remember cyclamates! The adults in my family drank a lot of diet soda with cyclamates and I drank enough Funny Face to collect lots of FF merch, like mugs and weighted walking toys. On the day before the ban went into effect, I went with my grandparents to the local Canada Dry factory (or was it Shasta?) and they bought many, many cases of diet soda! Later, they wished they had bought more as cyclamates tasted so much better than saccharine. Our family doctor said you'd need to drink a crazy amount of diet soda (like hundreds of cans a day) to consume the equivalent of what the rats were given.

"The tried and true but seldom used method of willpower" You found a great clip of a reporter talking about it

"Up-Beet" as a magazine title for a trade magazine for beet growers is actually really cool. However nothing beats the title "Pumper", the trade publication for porta-potties!

I think this video is a great example of why being scientifically literate is important. If the people who saw headlines also read the study to see just how much the rats were given, a different outcome would’ve happened!

I grew up on a sugarbeet farm, and these kinds of issues really make me think about the interaction between farming and science. My parents always told me to avoid artificial sweeteners because they give you cancer, even though with my science background I now know that's not really the case! This is also true of climate change and (in places like California) the water used by farms to make a profit. Farmers are single issue voters, unfortunately: what is good for business is the only important thing, even if it causes climate change or obesity or cancer. FFS, some of the biggest lobbyists in DC after the military-industrial complex are literally farm interests!

The BIG question, which you skipped right over, is why was saccharine approved while cyclamates denied? They got rats to get cancer from saccharine, from force feeding them something like 3000 times what a normal human would consume, by body weight. I don't recall why it was deemed safe while the attempts to appeal the cyclamate ban failed.

Ah, classic trick of wrong dosing while testing. That really brought out the political side of the story. If they tried the same method with water, maybe they'd ban it too, but I'm sure companies selling water wouldn't like that :) Thanks for the interesting video again, Phil!

I remember being given a packet containing a sodium cyclamate sweetener on my first flight to Europe in 1990. I knew what it was and I was very curious to try it. It was great in my coffee! I tried some different sugar-free sodas while I was there and they were so much better than saccharine-sweetened and aspartame-sweetened sodas. I went into a grocery store while I was there and bought a box of cyclamate tablets to bring home. I probably broke some law by bringing it home with me, but I wasn’t stopped in Customs upon my return so I enjoyed sodium cyclamate in my coffee and tea for months!

What’s even more infuriating is that there are instances where the FDA plain refuses to disclose why they took a decision to ban a drug that’s approved in many other countries. An example of this is Dynastat.

5:59 I wasn't watching the video, only listening and heard "AIDS could've had a huge PR problem but totally avoided it. Nice work." 😮 I had to rewatch that part

SOMETHING'S working to kill me. Something I eat, drink, breathe, or touch and there's no unbiased source of info to guide me through that labyrinth. I remember when coconut oil in my popcorn was gonna make my legs fall off. Then, suddenly, it becomes this elixir of immortality that I need to put in my coffee or my legs will fall off. I just cover the basics and do the best I can, trying not to stress over it (which is FAR more more likely to kill me.)

I remember when this happened. My mother ranted about the massive amounts needed to cause cancer in rats. This was at the beginning of the hyper-sweetened breakfast cereal fad that has become the norm and lots of folks from our background were very concerned about the sheer amount of sugar entering children's diets.

I'm Hungarian, my grandma always put these in her coffee and would let me taste one every time I visited. It's been years since she passed away and now I've almost forgotten the taste, but it's also been ages since I've ever seen any on store shelves (though to be fair the only place I've ever seen it was in my grandma's shelf so I guess I should look harder)