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Aaah! Aaah! The Stupidity! . . . It Burns Us!! . . .
Posted by KTK

The New York Times  Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.

The problem is that Splenda came from nowhere 6 or 7 years ago and promptly whomped Equal and Sweet’nLow into nothingness; the newcomer now controls 2/3 of the market for artificial sweeteners, with the two former market leaders splitting the rest, which is pretty astounding. Arguably, some part of its success results from its patently bullshit marketing tagline: “Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” The other two companies are now suing to confiscate the profits from the sale of Splenda (nice work if you can get it!), on the grounds of false advertising: the active compound in Splenda is not sugar, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be made from sugar, so they are (supposedly) misleading consumers by both implying that it has sugar in it (wouldn’t that make people who are searching for an artificial sweetener not want to buy it?) and by claiming it is “made from” sugar when in fact it isn’t. The Splenda company is countering that they never said it literally had sugar in it, and that they do, in fact, synthesize it from sugar even though there are other ways to do it.

That all seems pretty straightforward and pretty dull. I don’t care who wins this fight, and I doubt anybody who isn’t paid to care does either. But the reporter, Lynnley Browning, seems to think this is some sort of incredibly complicated scenario, and that Splenda is going to have trouble explaining their position to the jury because there’s some sort of metaphysical problem at issue.

Splenda’s core ingredient is a nonnutritive sweetener that does not grow in sugar fields or appear elsewhere naturally. Rather, the core ingredient, sucralose, is manufactured in laboratories as a synthetic compound. Despite its similar-sounding name, sucralose is not the same thing as sucrose, the technical name for pure table sugar. . . .

McNeil says that the process it uses to manufacture Splenda starts with sugar, pure and simple. To make sucralose, McNeil adds three chlorine atoms that are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce to a molecule of sucrose. The sucrose disappears in the manufacturing process, but the result — sucralose — is 600 times as sweet as ordinary table sugar. Splenda then mixes two bulking agents, dextrose and maltodextrin, into the sucralose.

The chemistry is complex, and it may be baffling for a jury to hear about a process that starts out involving sugar but ends up lacking it.

Despite its use of sugar as the starting point for making sucralose, nowhere do the words “sugar” or “sucrose” appear on Splenda’s ingredient list. That is because under Food and Drug Administration regulations, it cannot list a substance that has vaporized during the manufacturing process.

In January 2005, in its answer to the lawsuit filed by Merisant that previous November, McNeil said that “the sweetening ingredient in Splenda is made by a multistep process that starts with cane sugar.” But it then added that “Splenda is an artificial sweetener that does not contain sugar” — presumably because the sugar disappears in the manufacturing process.

Man, this is stupid.

Browning seems to have no notion of how chemistry works. She seems to have some sort of essentialist idea about molecules - that a given compound is not just an arrangement of bonded atoms, but has some sort of inherent identity, and when the compound undergoes a reaction that changes its structure, it somehow “disappears”. (She must really freak out at getting her spark plugs changed - I wonder how she copes with the fact that her car disappears and another one with a similar-sounding name appears in its place.)

As for “chlorine atoms that are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce”, I don’t know where to begin. Every kind of atom (except some short-lived unstable isotopes) appears in nature, virtually all of them in food in one way or another. Nothing about being found in lettuce makes chlorine any better or worse. This is just weird.

She’s at it again with the FDA regulations. I defy her to find an actual regulation that explicitly stipulates you cannot list ingredients that have “vaporized”. Sugar isn’t listed as an “ingredient” in Splenda because there’s no sugar in the Splenda package. But they don’t say they put sugar in the package - they say they make the Splenda (sucralose) itself from sugar. (Does she expect to find manure and sunlight  - or chorine, for that matter - listed as “ingredients” of lettuce?) The problem here seems to be that she simply doesn’t understand the difference between an “ingredient” and a raw material, which goes far beyond scientific illiteracy to simple lack of vocabulary.

And what about this whole business is so hard to understand? See if you can figure out how it works. Here are the structures:

Sucrose

Sucralose

You don’t have to be an organic chemist to notice that the structures are virtually identical. Sucralose is nothing more than a tri-chlorinated sucrose molecule. I don’t know the synthesis pathway, but it obviously involves simply replacing the hydroxyls with chlorine ions - something you’d think would be explainable to a jury. (There are other pathways that start from non-sucrose precursors, but they apparently aren’t used - presumably because they would be more complicated and expensive.) In fact, a jury that’s had even a year of high-school level chemistry should have been introduced to the rudiments of organic chemistry and maybe done the classic “banana oil” synthesis for themselves. At the very least, they shouldn’t be mystified by the idea that you can take a molecule and, like . . . change it, or that when you do the new molecule is different from the old one. That’s really all you need to know to understand the relationship between sucrose and sucralose. It seems very strange to talk about anything “disappearing” - and if they are making sucralose by “vaporizing” sucrose and then doing some completely different process that results in . . . chlorinated sucrose . . .  I would have to say they’re going about it the hard way.

What’s worst about this is that, dumb as this all is, Browning is probably right that a jury won’t understand it either. Only a fraction of students take even a year of high school science of any kind; a tiny fraction take real lab sciences, and only some of those take chemistry. Fewer still take any real science in college. Without looking up the numbers, I would guess maybe 20% of the adult population has had even a year of serious science at the high-school level, and less than 10% at the college level. [Hmmm . . . it appears I was wrong (see Figures 1.2 and 1.5). This Council of Chief State School Officers report claims 60% of US high school students take introductory chemistry, and 31% take advanced-level science. That speaks well of the students’ interest, but not of their teachers’ ability, because we’ve still got a freaking ignorant population.] At any rate, we have a public that is perpetually puzzled by ordinary science, and bamboozled by those who distort science for their own purposes. It’s conceivable to me that a jury would be unable to understand that you could start with sugar, perform a chemical reaction on it, and get a product that is not sugar but has some of its properties. (That’s not to endorse the marketing claim that “it’s made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar”. Being made from a particular thing doesn’t guaranteed it will taste like that thing; if it did, most of what we eat would taste like crude oil. That marketing slogan is simply a lie.) It’s also conceivable that a lawyer could get them hung up on where the sugar “disappeared” to, or what happened when it was “vaporized” - which is, chemically, on the same intellectual level as the old math joke that proves 2=1, but how many of them will be able to spot the trick?

There is a lot of nonsense heard about science, much of it from either outrightly dishonest or ideologically stupefied people intent on misleading others about evolution, abortion, global warming, cancer, and other controversies. That surely contributes to the general lack of comprehension of science, and faith in superstition, that plagues the country. But aside from the overt disinformation prevalent in the public discourse, there is general lack of knowledge and understanding. You simply can’t give a simple, non-technical explanation of any scientific topic to most of the public, and if any important issue hangs on the understanding of such issues, the public is invariably ripe for exploitation because they can’t winnow the nonsense from the truth. When an educated reporter for the country’s most important newspaper - even from a non-technical section of the paper - can write an entire article on a scientific topic that is simply scientific gibberish, and can slot in nonsense (”chlorine atoms . . . are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce”) obviously taken from her own dim grasp of “natural” foods and nutrition without any real scientific meaning or relevance, and have that work edited and approved for publication by senior staff, there is clearly a huge hole in general public comprehension of the way the world works. When that kind of incompetence passes for news and analysis, and apparently does so in a way that meets the expectations of the reading public and the professionals who write to inform them, the standard of truth and sense that constitutes knowledgeable discussion of scientific issues has clearly fallen too low to grant a functional understanding of those issues.

As our world gets ever more technical, and technical industries encroach ever further into the environment and the economy, the opportunities for misunderstanding, and for exploitation of that misunderstanding, increase. The Splenda issue is a trivial one. The fact that the relatively simple technical grounds for this issue cannot be coherently communicated by a professional writer, or that - as I suspect - most readers won’t realize what they’re reading doesn’t make sense, is a huge problem. The impact of that problem will only increase, and the advantage that that gives to those who seek to mislead the public, for ideological or profit-minded motives, will also increase.

April 6th, 2007 General, Politics, School, Economics, Environment, Writing, Culture, Science, Health, Education, Media, Food & Cooking, Technology, News & Current Events, Math | 5 comments