Sickly Sweet?

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we’re getting ready for Valentine’s Day with a look at a persistent and sometimes pernicious role of sweets in American history. In 1878, a chemist in Baltimore made an unexpected discovery while experimenting with coal tar derivatives. He licked a white powder off his finger and found that it was sweet. He named it saccharine. It was the first artificial sweetener.

Today artificial sweeteners are a restaurant staple thanks to calorie-conscious dieters. But when saccharine was first discovered, low calorie was not a term of praise. Consumers liked sugar because it had calories, because it was pure and deliver a quick energy fix.

Many Americans at the time saw saccharine, by contrast, as a chemical adulterant, even a poison. But that began to change during World War II when sugar was strictly rationed. Carolyn de la Pena has written all about this. She told me that many American women began experimenting with saccharine out of necessity.

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: Some of the research that I did was looking into advice columns in local newspapers, what do I do? I need to stew tomatoes and I don’t have enough sugar? I really want to make a treat. And women started giving each other advice about, well, you can go get these little pills in these bottles.

Because other saccharine was vilified in the progressive era, it was kept on the market as something you could use if you’re a diabetic. So you could find it in the Five-and-Dime.

ED: Now to be honest. Were they slipping some of this into their coffee as well?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: Sugar was something that had to be for everybody else. Sugar was for soldiers, and that’s why you rationed it. Sugar was for your husband because he needed a sweet treat. Sugar was for your kids because they needed the caloric energy and the happiness. And it wasn’t for you.

Women actually wrote to each other through these advice newspaper columns and said, well, what do I use? Where does my sweet come from? And found in artificial sweetener something that they could have for themselves that didn’t really have value for anybody out.

ED: Does that continue after World War II?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: After World War II, we get the first real national set of commodities that are artificially sweetened and that are called diet. And for that I think the story is really well told around a brilliant entrepreneur, one of the first to see the potential in saccharine, and that’s Tillie Lewis.

Tillie ran a company called Tillie Lewis Foods. It with a canning company. What Tillie did was she saw these fliers from pharmaceutical companies that had developed these products and we’re looking for markets. And she began to add them to her line of jams and jellies and tomatoes.

She came up with what she called the 21-day diet with sweets campaign. She went across the country, and she was featured in women’s newspapers sharing that there wasn’t a need for will power anymore. You could actually indulge yourself in all of the saccharine-laced sweet products you want it and you would lose weight.

And that message was one that was picked up by other entrepreneurs, most importantly Jean Nidetch at Weight Watchers, and that’s when saccharine really became the primary way you could make a good choice, a diet choice.

ED: Things were going fine for the saccharine industry and for a products that we’re using it, yet we know that in the 1970s saccharine developed a bad reputation. What happened?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: The FDA attempted in 1977 to ban saccharine. They had gone research in that suggested that in large quantities saccharine could cause cancer, and so they set up a period of public comment, and consumers revolted. Millions of consumers wrote directly to the FDA and to Congress and to the President and said, don’t you touch my saccharine. I can’t live without it.

In these letters, when you read them, they’re mostly written by women. A lot of them are on flowered stationery. A number of them say, I have never in my life protested anything. This is 1977. We’ve come through the ’60s, and we’ve come through Vietnam.

ED: Right.

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: And at this moment, this is the moment that they’re going to protest. And during that period public comment, people at the FDA remembered that they never in their career and ever would again receive such fervent letters in protest of their recommendation as the massive defense of saccharine that American consumers embarked on.

ED: Where did this come from? What was this a spontaneous response? Was this the saccharine lobby that was drafting these letters for these folks?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: There actually were little ads that you could cut out in most major American newspapers that were sponsored by something called the Calorie Control Council, which was a–

ED: It sounds like something under Obamacare.

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: It was a group of artificial sweetener manufacturers that worked together to help market expansion. So, yes, consumers were directly educated by those who stood to gain by selling more saccharine that this was an infringement of their rights, that this was the government stepping on their toes, that they needed to fight back.

But I don’t think that fully explains the story. I think you also have to realize in the 1970s there were very popular books about the health effects of sugar, that sugar causes disease. Sugar causes attention deficit disorder. Sugar is the primary bad thing in the American diet and must be eliminated.

And on the other hand, you had organizations like Weight Watchers that were giant industries based on telling women, you have a craving for sweets. You can’t control your craving for sweets. You can control it by using our substitute food products, and these substitute foods will keep you safe.

It’s a society where a significant number of people are addicted to sweet, and they believe that the only kind of sweet that will allow them to have how health is artificial sweetener, and the fear of cancer cannot combat that.

ED: What comes of this battle? Who wins?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: Consumers win, if that’s a win for consumers. The period of public comment is extended and extended. The letters keep coming in, and eventually the decision is made by Congress to continue to keep saccharine on the market.

ED: I want to just ask you. We’re in the midst of an epidemic that some people feel is fueled by the over consumption of sugar. Weren’t these people kind of right?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: Unfortunately, we don’t have research that shows us that consuming artificial sweetener leads to weight loss. We consume more sugar as a nation now then we used to consume, and we consume artificial sweetener, and we consume corn serve on top of it.

Artificial sweetener is much sweeter, whether it’s 200 times or 500 times sweeter than sugar. So as we acclimate to these diet products, we also developed more of a taste for sweet. And our whole pallet has been sweetened. And certainly the addition of artificial sweeteners has helped do that.

But I think also we have to think maybe our bodies are smarter than we think. And when we take in sweetener, that’s not attached to calories that we go looking for those calories later in craving carbohydrates. Research that’s emerging now actually shows that artificial sweetener leads more frequently to weight gain than weight loss unless it’s in a very controlled environment.

ED: Why did you write this book?

CAROLYN DE LA PENA: I wrote this book for my mother. I grew up in a house in the 1970s and 1980s that had substitute everything, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Crystal Light, Mrs. Dash, diet sodas. I think my mother and along with a lot of women from that generation just really heard the message that your desires are out of control, and you can trust yourself, and so we’re going to change your food, and then you can trust your food.

I wrote this book so we would understand that maybe we’re not full, that maybe all that artificial sweeteners in our diet it’s a quick fix, but that it might just be OK to go back and look at caloric sweeteners and have a little now and then.

ED: Carolyn de la Pena is a professor of American studies at the University of California Davis. She’s the author of Empty Pleasures, The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharine to Splenda.

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