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Splenda is the trademarked brand name of a sucralose-based artificial sweetener which is several hundred times sweeter than ordinary table sugar (sucrose). According to legend, the discovery of sucralose was (like that of another artificial sweetener, aspartame) something of an accident that occurred by happenstance during the course of unrelated research: After gaining approval by regulatory agencies in the U.S. and Canada (and other countries) in the 1990s, sucralose-based Splenda overtook aspartame-based Equal and NutraSweet and saccharin-based Sweet'N Low as the leading brand in the U.S. artificial sweetener market. The advantages of sucralose over regular sugar are many: it is so sweet that it can be used in much smaller quantities than sugar, it contains no calories, it has no harmful effect on teeth, it can be safely consumed by diabetics, and it is heat-stable and therefore suitable for use in baked goods. In the years since then, sucralose has (like aspartame before it) become the target of false claims that it is unnatural and therefore unsafe: Such rumors, as UC Davis professor Carolyn de la Peña noted in her history of artificial sweeteners, have been fomented in part by the sweetener industry itself despite the established safety of those products: As is typical in Internet-circulated food health warnings like the example reproduced above (which was largely cribbed from a seventeen-year-old article originally published on the questionable mercola.com web site), all of the information it presents is inaccurate, misleading, and/or outdated. The notion that sucralose has not been subjected to a reasonable and sufficient amount of safety testing is, in particular, woefully inaccurate. Sucralose has, across the span of many years, been subjected to extensive batteries of short-term and long-term studies in both animals and humans (more than a hundred of which were reviewed during the FDA approval process for sucralose), and none of them has demonstrated any significant risk to humans associated with the consumption of sucralose in normal amounts. A human tolerance study published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology in 2000, for example, found no indication that adverse effects on human health would occur from frequent or long-term exposure to sucralose at the maximum anticipated levels of intake: The chapter on sucralose in the textbook Artificial Sweeteners also surveys the extensive body of safety testing that has been performed on sucralose, including those involving long-term exposure and doses far in excess of recommended amounts: The most frequently cited study supposedly documenting the harmful effects of sucralose was one (conducted with rats, not humans, and funded by the Sugar Association) published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health in 2008 that reportedly found Splenda might contribute to obesity, destroy 'good' intestinal bacteria and prevent prescription drugs from being absorbed. However, even that study was refuted by one published the following year in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology which reported that an Expert Panel had found that the previous study was deficient in several critical areas and that its conclusions are not consistent with published literature and not supported by the data presented: The reference to sucralose's being a molecule that does not exist in nature, one that the body does not metabolize or digest is both inaccurate and relatively meaningless. The fact that the human body does not metabolize sucralose for energy is a positive: it's what makes sucralose non-caloric and therefore ideal as an artificial sweetener. Most sucralose is unabsorbed and therefore passes harmlessly through the body; a relatively small amount (~15%) of consumed sucralose is absorbed but is excreted via urination with no harmful effects: As is also typical with Internet-circulated food health warnings, the accompanying laundry list of reported symptoms should be taken with many grains of salt. Self-reported adverse events are simply anecdotal raw data; there is no certainty that the reported events were actually due to the product consumed, much less that they demonstrate a causal relationship between the product and the reported events (especially after consumers are influenced by reading anti-sucralose reports that list what symptoms they're supposed to be experiencing). Such determinations cannot be made until reports have been investigated, evaluated, and analyzed, and no studies have confirmed that the symptoms listed are a common reaction to sucralose. As Dr. Joe Schwarz observed in his work on food myths and misconceptions: There is one thing this piece did get right, although it's both outdated and irrelevant to the issue of the safety of sucralose: the manufacturer of Splenda was indeed sued (nearly fourteen years ago) by a competitor over their slogan made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar, which falsely implied to consumers that Splenda in some way actually was sugar, but with the calories stripped out: After the lawsuit was settled, Splenda debuted a new slogan: Just What's Good — it's made from sugar. It tastes like sugar. But it's not sugar. On 11 March 2016, numerous news outlets reported that an Italian study (published in January 2016) purportedly documented a link between Splenda and cancer in mice. The International Food Information Council (IFIC), a non-profit group aimed at providing science-based evidence with respect to food safety, addressed the publication of the study in an article that criticized the study's methodology and dissonant findings: IFIC concluded that the safety and effectiveness of sucralose (and other low-calorie sweeteners in foods) is incredibly well supported, and added that you shouldn't hesitate to swap them into your diet in efforts to reduce caloric intake. On 11 March 2016, Splenda issues a statement via their Facebook page referencing the IFIC article and asserting the Italian study's conclusion was an outlier among dozens to the contrary:
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