5 ms·

You can buy pure sucralose (the stuff in splenda) online for $10/ounce. It's around 600 times as sweet as sugar, so that's equivalent to paying about 25¢/lb of

You can buy pure sucralose (the stuff in splenda) online for $10/ounce. It's around 600 times as sweet as sugar, so that's equivalent to paying about 25¢/lb of sugar. The upsides are that there are no documented negative health effects, it tastes pretty much like sugar, and it has no calories. The downsides are that it doesn't work like sugar chemically (you can't caramelize it or use it to activate yeast), and that you have to dilute it (I like to just make a very sweet sucralose+water solution to sweeten things with, but you could easily cut it with some other powder like maltodextrin).

olliesaunders 14y ago
And what happens after you eat this stuff for 50 years or so?
- klausjensen 14y ago
  You might be dead. Then again, I expect to be dead in 50 years regardless...
  - olliesaunders 14y ago
    What about your children?
    - mistercow 14y ago
      That's pointless speculation, and you can play that game all day until you're arguing that nothing is safe. How can we really be sure, after all, that trace compounds from sea salt aren't causing slight DNA damage that will turn our descendants 150 generations down the line into eight-legged mutants? The fact is that there is no more reason to believe that sucralose will have some as yet unobserved negative health effect than there is to believe that it will have some as yet unobserved health benefit.
- mistercow 14y ago
  It has been extensively studied (it's been around for 36 years), and there's no reason to believe anything will happen to you whatsoever. Keep in mind that you only eat one six hundredth as much as you would sugar. Conversely, imagine if sugar were a newly discovered sweetening compound, seeking FDA approval. They wouldn't get past one safety trial before "serious concerns about long term effects" knocked it out of the running. Analyzing the relative risks of sugar and sucralose, there is just no case to be made for sugar being the safer bet.

olliesaunders 14y ago

And what happens after you eat this stuff for 50 years or so?

klausjensen 14y ago
You might be dead. Then again, I expect to be dead in 50 years regardless...
- olliesaunders 14y ago
  What about your children?
  - mistercow 14y ago
    That's pointless speculation, and you can play that game all day until you're arguing that nothing is safe. How can we really be sure, after all, that trace compounds from sea salt aren't causing slight DNA damage that will turn our descendants 150 generations down the line into eight-legged mutants? The fact is that there is no more reason to believe that sucralose will have some as yet unobserved negative health effect than there is to believe that it will have some as yet unobserved health benefit.
mistercow 14y ago
It has been extensively studied (it's been around for 36 years), and there's no reason to believe anything will happen to you whatsoever. Keep in mind that you only eat one six hundredth as much as you would sugar. Conversely, imagine if sugar were a newly discovered sweetening compound, seeking FDA approval. They wouldn't get past one safety trial before "serious concerns about long term effects" knocked it out of the running. Analyzing the relative risks of sugar and sucralose, there is just no case to be made for sugar being the safer bet.