It’s hard to imagine sitting down at a café table and not seeing that cheerful array of pastel paper packets: pink, blue, yellow—a sweetener for each color of the rainbow. Perhaps you have one friend who bakes with Splenda, another who sucks down Diet Cokes all day long, and a third who reaches for the Sweet'N Low simply—she says—because it dissolves easily in iced tea. Where do these loyalties come from, and who is right? Can artificial sweeteners really help you lose weight? Do they, as some people claim, cause cancer and other medical problems? Are we better off with sugar, after all? I recently caught up with Carolyn de la Peña, a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis and the author of the fascinating book "Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda," to get her take on our national obsession with sweet.
Why sweeteners?
I grew up in the 1980s in a house with a lot of substitutes. We had Egg Beaters, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, No Salt, Crystal Light and Diet Pepsi. I wanted to know where these products came from, and how people like my mom—who was always watching her weight—had come to think of them as healthy options. And of course what impact this way of eating, which was entirely new really, has had on us as Americans. It is odd, when you stop and think about it, that “diet” and “low fat” became synonymous with good health, especially considering that all of these products relied on chemicals made in lab, most of which had not even existed just decades before. I thought there must be more to the story than “diet foods make diet people”—especially since these healthy substitutes rose in sales in a way that pretty much parallels the rise in what some people call the “obesity epidemic” that’s occurred in the last few decades in the U.S.
What role did early sweeteners play in the culture of dieting?
You would think that when people substituted artificial sweeteners for sugar they did it primarily to cut calories. But that’s only part of the story. Several years ago I started collecting saccharin containers on eBay. Sold as early as the nineteen-fifties, these pretty little decorative cases (sometimes in animal shapes, typically jeweled) were a popular hostess gift of the post-war era. Yet why would a guest arrive with a gift that could only be interpreted as an invitation for the host to lose weight?
The more I looked into the history of these objects, and artificial sweetener in this early era, the clearer it was that cutting calories was not the only attraction. During the war, sweeteners stood in for unavailable or rationed sugar. But later, when sugar was available again, many women continued to prefer these pills and powders, and to put them in these nice containers. It’s interesting to think of dieting like this—it wasn’t just a way to weigh less, it was a chance to focus on yourself. In order to consume them, one had to pass these containers back and forth, open them delicately, pinch, grab, and release a pill with tiny tongs. It attracted attention. This was very different than sugar, at the time, with its associations with baking and caring for family members through kitchen labor. Today’s diet-product advertisements still communicate this message of self-emphasis, totally apart from any actual weight loss that might (or might not) take place.
Women weren’t just consuming sweeteners; they were also marketing and selling them. Do you think this influence was the key to making the sweeteners popular to female consumers?
Absolutely. Tillie Lewis was a Stockton-based canner and founder of the nineteen-fifties Tasti-Diet line of food, and Jean Nidetch founded Weight Watchers. Along with countless women’s page recipe promoters and advertising copy writers, they fundamentally changed the meaning of “diet” between the early fifties and the seventies. It used to mean doing without; it came to mean doing with. Through stories in newspapers and magazines, diet clubs, and recipe sharing, these entrepreneurs taught a generation of American women that losing weight was about making the right choices in the marketplace. Rather than eating a high-calorie dressing, drink, or dessert, they instead needed to choose one “decalorized” with artificial sweetener.
They key was empathy—these women presented the problem of weight gain and food desire not as “your problem”—but rather as their problem too. Behind all of this, powerful food, pharmaceutical, and media industries stood to gain if Americans consumed more than they needed. What consumers saw, however, were these savvy women who said they could have their cake and eat it too.
I’m fascinated by your section on the “saccharin rebellion” of the nineteen-seventies. What does it mean to be able to “pick your poison,” and what does the government have to do with it?
The most surprising thing I found while doing this research was how millions of Americans fought their government in order to keep saccharin-sweetened products on the market in 1977. One veteran congresswoman said it was the single-most protested issue in her decades-long career in congress, a career that spanned the Civil Rights legislation, Vietnam conflict, and Watergate. When I went through the letters that people sent to the Food and Drug Administration, it was clear that they wanted the right to face the minor risk that saccharin might pose because when life was “one big cancer risk,” as one put it, at least some of that risk better be pleasurable. Countless writers detailed the significant carcinogenic risks posed to their health by things beyond their control like polluted water and second-hand cigarette smoke. They then juxtaposed their minimal saccharin consumption to these very real risks they confronted daily. Many chided the F.D.A. for its faulty science, explaining that it would take a bathtub of saccharin soda, consumed daily, to cause any real risk of cancer.
It’s important to note that these letter writers did more than hold up a sign, or write a short letter saying “you’re wrong” to the F.D.A. or “don’t touch my saccharin.” In two- and three-page letters they detail their lives, their risks, and often, their unsuccessful struggles to lose weight. If the problem was risk, who better to evaluate acceptable risk than those who faced it most often? I have to imagine that their victory, when saccharin stayed on the market, encouraged tremendous product loyalty.
How will a backlash against high-fructose corn syrup figure into the ongoing battle between different artificial sweeteners and table sugar?
It’s interesting that while sugar industry research was showing that artificial sweeteners were bad (and vice versa), and artificial-sweetener brands were suing one another over which one was more natural, and the government was publicizing the carcinogenic risks of vast amounts of sweetener ingestion, corn syrup silently entered most facets of the American food supply. Today, corn syrup adds back the calories that we remove through our zero-calorie sodas and “diet” desserts.
Now, of course, most of us know about the problem with corn syrup and its ubiquitous sweet calories. There’s enough of a backlash, in fact, that corn syrup has had to produce its own pro-industry advertisements. At the same time, recent polls show that most Americans consider artificial sweetener unhealthful. Local school districts are banning bake sales to try to cut down on sugar consumption. It’s tempting to say that we have finally reached a point where we cannot just vilify one sweetener or another, or wait for the next magic bullet to come. Maybe now that we seem to have no “safe” sweetener we will have to examine the larger problem—our fixation on sweetness in the American diet and an accompanying industry that has made soda cheaper than water.
But this is unlikely. “Artificial sweeteners” may become less “artificial,” but it’s not likely we will soon get rid of low-calorie foods and beverages. It is not possible to dispose of all the food we produce and market as a society without forms of “dietary credit” like artificial sweeteners. To produce and desire less of that food would take a major revolution in our food system.
Has your research caused you to change your own eating habits? What do you take in your coffee?
The biggest change in my eating patterns is that I’m eating less—and going to the gym less. I saw a similarity between “diet sweets”—and their promises that you could consume all the time without consequence—and my own habit of burning two hundred calories on a machine before breakfast. If I’m paying for a membership so I can burn off calories from eating more food than I need, that’s probably great for the gyms and food companies, but maybe not for me. It’s been nice to slow down and take a walk, off the treadmill.
With coffee my tastes are unchanged: strong with half and half. Some things should not be sweet!
