12-3+The+issues+of+saccharine

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media type="custom" key="7684985" align="left" media type="custom" key="7685099" Saccharinis an artifical swetener. The basic substance, benzoic sulfilimine, has effectively no food energy and is much sweeter than sucruse, but has an unpleasant bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. It is used to sweeten products such as drinks, candies, biscuits, medicines, and toothpaste.

History
Saccharin was first produced in 1878 by Constanting Fahlberg a chemist working on coal tar derivatives in Ira Ramsen laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University. The sweet taste of saccharin was discovered when Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste on his hand one evening, and connected this with the compound which he had been working on that day. Fahlberg and Remsen published articles on benzoic sulfimide in 1879 and 1880. In 1884, now working on his own in New York City, Fahlberg applied for patents in several countries describing methods of producing this substance that he named saccharin. Fahlberg would soon grow wealthy, while Remsen merely grew irate, believing that he deserved credit for substances produced in his laboratory. On the matter, Remsen commented, "Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him." Although saccharin was commercialized not long after its discovery, it was not until sugar shortages during World War I, that its use became widespread. Its popularity further increased during the 1960s and 1970s among dieters, since saccharin is calory-free sweetener. In the United States saccharin is often found in restaurants in pinkpackets; the most popular brand is "SweetNLow". Saccharin was delisted by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) of the California Environmental Protection Agency from the list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer on April 6, 2001. It had been added to the list in 1989.

Government regulation
Starting in 1907, the USDA began investigating saccharin as a direct result of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Harvey Wiley, then the director of the bureau of chemistry for the USDA, viewed it as an illegal substitution of a valuable ingredient (sugar) by a less valuable ingredient. In a clash that had career consequences, Wiley told then President Theodore Roosevelt that "Everyone who ate that sweet corn was deceived. He thought he was eating sugar, when in point of fact he was eating a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health." But Roosevelt himself was a consumer of saccharin, and in a heated exchange, Roosevelt angrily answered Wiley by stating, "Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot." The episode proved the undoing of Wiley's career. In 1911, the Food Inspection Decision 135 stated that foods containing saccharin were adulterated. However in 1912, Food Inspection Decision 142 stated that saccharin was not harmful. More controversy was stirred in 1969 with the discovery of files from the FDA's investigations of 1948 and 1949. These investigations, which had originally argued against saccharin use, were shown to prove little about saccharin being harmful to human health. In 1972 the USDA made an attempt to completely ban the substance. However, this attempt was also unsuccessful and the sweetener is widely used in the United States; it is the third-most popular after sucralose and aspartame. In the European Union saccharin is also known by the E number (additive code) E954.The current status of saccharin is that it is allowed in most countries, and countries like Canada are considering lifting their previous ban of it as a food additive. The concerns that it is associated with bladder cancer were proved to be without foundation in experiments on primates.

Warning label removal
Studies in laboratory rats during the early 1970s linked saccharin with the development of bladder cancer in rodents, resulting media type="custom" key="7685043" align="left"in the United States Congress mandating that all food containing saccharin bear a warning label. However, in 2000, the warning labels were removed because scientists learned that rodents, unlike humans, have a unique combination of high pH, high calcium phosphate, and high protein levels in their urine. One or more of the proteins that is more prevalent in male rats combines with calcium phosphate and saccharin to produce microcrystals that damage the lining of the bladder. Over time, the rat's bladder responds to this damage by over-producing cells to repair the damage, and this leads to tumor formation. This does not occur in humans, so there is no bladder cancer risk. The delisting of saccharin led to legislation, which was signed into law on December 21, 2000, repealing the warning label requirement for products containing saccharin.

media type="custom" key="7685187" align="left"source : http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2004/April/saccharine.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharin http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art15448.asp

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