Is the sugar substitute Splenda unhealthy due to the chemicals used to process sugar into Splenda?
It’s true that Splenda is made using chlorine, which sounds scary; the sugar industry warns that you’re “actually eating chlorine” when consuming sucralose, the chemical sold as Splenda. Plain sugar is transformed into sucralose by substituting three chlorine atoms for hydrogen, creating a substance that is not digested by the body, so it’s effectively calorie-free, and that’s 600 times sweeter than sugar. But there’s no evidence that the chlorine atoms in sucralose are any more dangerous than they are in sodium chloride, which is ordinary table salt. Before giving sucralose the OK, the United States Food and Drug Administration reviewed more than 110 human and animal studies demonstrating its safety.
