Last month, the federal government’s National Toxicology Program took saccharin off the Report of Carcinogens that it publishes every two years. The artificial sweetener had been categorized as a cancer-causing agent since 1981 and was nominated for “delisting” by the Calorie Control Council, which describes itself as “an international, nonprofit association of manufacturers of low-calorie, reduced-fat and light food and beverages.”
The whole matter leaves a bad taste with Dr. Samuel Epstein, a physician and professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been challenging the U.S. government and private industry about carcinogens and other toxins for four decades.
“I’m outraged,” said Epstein, whose 1978 book, “The Politics of Cancer” (an updated edition was published by East Ridge Press in 1998) was credited by U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) as a “treatise” for Congress to enact such landmark environmental laws as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts and the Toxic Substances Control Act. “(Dr. Kenneth) Olden was pressured into it by the Calorie Control Council.”
More Top Picks Best Spice Grinder
Olden, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program, said the decision to put saccharin on the list for nearly two decades was a “prudent, protective” decision based on evidence it caused bladder cancer in rats.
“However, our understanding of the science has advanced and allows us to make finer distinctions today,” Olden said in the report. “Studies now indicate that rat bladder tumors arise from mechanisms that are not relevant to the human situation. In addition, we have decades more data from observations of humans using saccharin that adds to our confidence.”
Those observations of humans using saccharin presumably include anyone who prefers Sweet’N Low in their iced tea because it dissolves while sugar drops to the bottom.
For what it’s worth, only one other substance was delisted. Ethyl acrylate, which is used to make latex paint and textiles, was removed after 10 years on the list. The lobby behind it was an organization known as the Basic Acrylic Monomer Manufacturers Inc. Meanwhile, secondhand smoke, tobacco smoking, smokeless tobacco, consumption of alcoholic beverages and exposure to the sun, sunlamps or sun beds all made the list as “known human carcinogens.”
Epstein doesn’t stand alone among scientists in his opposition to saccharin. William Lijinsky, a retired biochemist who worked as a contract researcher for the National Institute of Cancer from 1976 to 1991 and then the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for 18 months, studying more than 300 carcinogens, said no one precisely understands the “mechanisms” of how toxins cause cancer in the body.
“It’s all hypothesis,” he said. “I worked on studies in which carcinogens didn’t get into the nucleus of DNA, we could monitor it in the lab, yet animals were getting cancer.”
Olden and others would argue animal findings are not enough to prove saccharin causes cancer in humans. Their views have been endorsed by the American Cancer Society, American Medical Association, American Dietetic Association and American Diabetes Association.
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest and best known as America’s top “food cop,” said, “delisting saccharin sets a dangerous precedent for delisting other chemicals that cause cancer in animals, but have not proven to do so in humans.”
What worries independent scientists like Jacobson or Epstein the most is that children are likely to consume more foods with saccharin in the years ahead. Saccharin is no longer under patent and is a cheap alternative for sweetening processed foods and beverages, including regular colas at the fast-food counter, Epstein said.
“It will be widely used,” he said. “Don’t believe otherwise.”
One wonders if parents are willing to take the risk that the Calorie Control Council is right and he’s wrong.
———-
To contact Bob Condor or find an archive of his columns, visit chicagotribune.com/go/health
His e-mail is [email protected]