Deadly sweet?

[OK, this is the THIRD time I am inputting this post (grumble grumble).... the first time I lost the file because Netscape froze; the second time, because I hit "refresh" which looks a lot like "undo" but definitely has the wrong effect.]

This morning I was searching for more information on a news story that skidded through the newscast, and stumbled on a press release about aspartame that reads like an X-file. Still, I thought I would look at what was in our non-aspartame sweetener packets, and saw this warning:

Contains sodium cyclamate. Take only on advice of a physician.

Huh? Does it strike anyone else odd that something which you can grab by the handfull at your local coffee shop is actually a controlled substance? So, I checked around (remembering the great saccharin scare of the 70's) and found that currently, cyclamates and their derivatives are prohibited for use in human food by the US FDA though there seems to be no clear indication that they are in fact hazardous to humans. They are approved for use in 50 countries, including Canada.

Still, it makes one pause. I am usually the first person to argue that sugar, being natural, is the best thing to put in your body... but since I drink about 3 mugs of coffee on an average day, and add roughly 2 tsp. sugar (32 calories) per mug, switching to 2 pkg. of sweetener (4 calories) would save me about 84 calories per day.. which is significant, if you're counting....

Of course I haven't mentioned Splenda (sucralose) ... mostly because the jury is still out on that one; there haven't been any studies of long-term effects in humans.