I don’t do Splenda.

There was a time when I had bought into the “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar” hype.

But then I found out the truth…

I found out that Splenda was actually discovered in the chemistry department of Queen Elizabeth College in London back in 1975. That’s when a grad student, Shashikant Phadnis, and his advisor, Leslie Hough, were attempting to create new insecticides by adding a highly poisonous chemical (sulfuryl chloride) to a sugar solution.

Hough asked Phadnis to test it, but the student misheard and “tasted it”.

Whoops.

The prospective insecticide turned out to be surprisingly sweet. Soon after, Hough and Phadnis began working with a British sugar company to create the ultimate chlorinated sugar molecule.

They called it sucralose. We call it Splenda.

Then I learned that Splenda’s chemical structure contains 3 chlorine molecules — no, not the chloride naturally found in food and salt, but the toxic chlorine found in swimming pools — and consuming it actually delivers this chlorine directly to the cells. Yikes.

And this…

Splenda is classified as an organochlorine — just like DDT (banned insecticide), Aldrin (banned pesticide), PCBs (banned electrical insulator), chloroform (banned), phosgene (banned), and other toxic nastiness.

Banned. Banned. Banned. Banned. Banned.

Splenda. Safe for human consumption.