Is Splenda bad for you?

Splenda is a food product approved by the FDA which is probably the most stringent body of its type in the world. In addition to passing the FDA, the product has been in use by millions of people for, what, a decade?

In addition to the bureaucrats at the FDA being completely anal about the approval process, we in the US have attorneys that are voracious beyond imagination. My point being that if it were conceivable to find a problem with Splenda, there would be class action law suits in the works.

Between those two, it's a pretty good bet that Splenda is OK to use for the vast majority of the population.

One caveat, though, is that when you put a substance into enough people, eventually someone is going to have a negative reaction, whether it's a man made substance or a "natural" substance (they're all chemicals, regardless of where they come from).

A good example is sugar - give me a Twix bar and my body will handle it OK. Put a Twix bar in a diabetic? Ouch.

Heh, what about something natural? Sure. Most people handle a bee sting OK. Some folks choke to death.


There is no doubt that "the system" is fallible. I vaguely remember the issue with thalydamide and we in the US barely escaped that mess. OTOH, I also remember how completely wrong "the experts" were over, to name just two items, saccharine and silicone breast implants.

Saccahrine was put on the "no fly" list decades ago but it was reinstated when it was finally shown that the lab rats/mice were fed so much saccharin that it would be impossible for a human being to consume that much soda that contained saccharine (something like the equivalent of 13 gallons a day?). And even the negative results in the lab rats/mice could not be correlated to a negative effect on humans with any reasonable degree of confidence.

Silicone breast implants - complete hype and scare stories that caused serious financial loss to manufacturers in law suits but for which there was no hard medical evidence that the breast implants themselves caused harm.

I'm a big believer in the expression "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data' ". It's not necessarily a popular outlook (most people want to believe what other people believe) but I live in Southern California and I'm so inundated by pop culture that, when I'm told by someone that they've never felt better in their life since they started taking "xyz", my response is "Oh, I'm glad that's working so well for you."

My take on this is that if it's on the shelf in a grocery store or a drug store there's a good chance that it's good for me or, at the very least, that it won't harm me.

That's my $0.02

"I disagree that the FDA is effective. Just because the process may be a pain in the neck does not mean that it is effective. There are food recalls or outbreaks all the time!"
No question. One reason is because the people in the FDA are…people and, as a human institution, it is possible that there will be bad actors, oopsies, and decisions made based on personal and political reasons.
And the FDA does not control the food chain from germination to ingestion. The recent problem with tainted ground beef is good example of how things can go wrong. Factor in the incidence of problems versus the hundreds of billions of pounds of food eaten in the US and I'm pretty happy with the job that they're doing (wow - me praising the Federal gov't for doing a good job?!)


"This article here talks about how the FDA did no long term testing on Splenda and the tests that were performed had an extremely small sample. http://www.womentowomen.com/healthyweight/splenda.aspx"
I'll save the link.

"I try to avoid all artificial sweeteners. The extra calories are worth the piece of mind to me even if it means that it is going to take longer for me to lose this weight."
Certainly can't go wrong doing that! :-)