THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES Read Online Free PDF Page B

with glucose, and he had looked into the problem of coloring cheese with lead salts. Now Wiley worried about the extensive use of formaldehyde, benzoic acid, and boric acid as preservatives. Since they poisoned bacteria and molds, could they also poison humans? He decided to find out.
    The hallmark of Wiley’s crusade for safer food was the establishment of the celebrated Poison Squad. Wiley recruited twelve healthy young men, asking them to meet every day for lunch and dine on foods prepared with a variety of additives. If the men developed any unusual symptoms, Wiley would move for a ban of the additive. In retrospect, this was a primitive system, because it revealed nothing about exposure to small amounts of chemicals over the long term. Still, Wiley’s work publicized the need for food regulation, and his efforts finally culminated in the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, which for the first time gave the government some teeth with which to bite food and drug adulterers.
    Dr. Wiley became a food-safety zealot, and he caught saccharin up in the net he cast to catch chemical culprits. He vigorously attacked saccharin as a “coal-tar by-product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health.” Unfortunately for Wiley, President Theodore Roosevelt had been prescribed the sweetener by his physician, and he loved the stuff. “Anyone who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot,” Roosevelt proclaimed, and he decided to curtail Wiley’s authority. The president established what he called a “referee board of scientists” — ironically, with Ira Remsen as its head — to scrutinize Wiley’s recommendations. The board found saccharin to be safe but suggested that its use be limited to easing the hardship of diabetics. That suggestion had no legal bearing, and it was soon forgotten in the face of massive industry maneuvering to satisfy the public’s demand for nonnutritive sweeteners.
    The saccharin bandwagon rolled happily along until 1977, when a Canadian study suggested an increased incidence of bladder cancer in male rats fed the equivalent of eight hundred diet drinks a day — male rats whose mothers had been dosed with the same amount of saccharin. Though the study was ridiculed by saccharin promoters as irrelevant to human subjects, the Canadian government banned saccharin as a food additive but allowed its continued use as a sweetener that consumers added themselves. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (the descendant of Wiley’s bureau) also proposed a ban, but a massive public outcry prompted Congress to permit the sale of saccharin pending further studies. Its continued use as an additive was allowed, but a warning label on the familiar little pink packets stating that saccharin was known to cause cancer in laboratory animals was mandated.
    Subsequent research failed to clear saccharin of all blame as a carcinogen, but human epidemiological studies have shown that if there is any risk at all, it is a very small one. In fact, in 2000 the U.S. government removed saccharin from its official list of human carcinogens, and President Clinton signed a bill eliminating the requirement for a warning label on the product. Canada still does not allow saccharin as an additive. But you don’t have to purchase it stealthily in back alleys. You can buy it legally in pharmacies. Diabetics are certainly grateful for that.
    Ira Remsen, I’m sure, could never have imagined where his little experiment with nitric acid would eventually lead. And why was there nitric acid in the doctor’s office in the first place? Because in those days, silver nitrate was used as an antiseptic and was generated by nitric acid “acting upon” silver.

Aspartame: Guilty or Innocent?
    There is an important aspartame story to be told. I’m just not sure what it is. Is this artificial sweetener the chemical from hell that is responsible for causing multiple sclerosis, brain tumors, seizures, and lupus,