Sweetly worked
a low-calorie sugar substitute, neotame, is awaiting clearance from the Union ministry of health and family welfare (mohfw) to enter India. The Coca Cola Company and NutraSweet Company, which holds the patent for neotame, have written to mohfw seeking approval for the sweetener. Little is known about how safe the product is that Coca Cola wants to use in its soft drinks. Neotame is derived from aspartame, another sweetener produced by NutraSweet, which is suspected to have adverse health effects. Neotame is being used in the us after it got approval of Food and Drug Administration (fda) in 1997.
In response to the application, the Central Committee for Food Standards (ccfs) of mohfw asked the Industrial Toxicology Research Centre (itrc), Lucknow, to study the health effects of neotame and other sweeteners being used in India: aspartame, acesulfame-k, sucralose and saccharine. While saccharine has been around for several decades, mohfw approved the use of sucralose in carbonated soft drinks and aspartame and acesulfame-k in food products such as mithai (sweets), on June 25, 2004. The use of aspartame and acesulfame-k in soft drinks had been approved in 1997.
Taken to court Artificial sweeteners originated in the west, where natural sugar is expensive (see box: Common sugar...). But these chemicals have always been suspect. Take the case of aspartame. On September 15, 2004, Joe Bellon, a lawyer, slapped a us $350,000,000 lawsuit on NutraSweet, American Diabetes Association (ada) and Monsanto Company amongst others. Bellon filed the case in California alleging the accused were deliberately manufacturing, marketing and promoting "toxic aspartame' despite the various health problems it can cause such as arthritis, asthma, brain cancer, diarrhoea, hypertension, memory loss and vision loss. The ada was blamed for endorsing aspartame, knowing it could worsen diabetes. Monsanto was the previous owner of NutraSweet. It was also the original patent holder for saccharin. By 2000, it sold off all its interests in sweeteners for over us $1,000 million.
Dubious past Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by g d Searle and Company of the us . For its first safety test in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin, seven infant monkeys were given the chemical with milk
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