Why most Americans have never had this sweetener 

Died at the completely sincere delivery of "nice work" after describing how Ayds avoided a PR crisis

Not to mention rats are pretty much the worst animal to test the carcinogenic ability of chemicals in because they are just little cancer factories normally

Allegedly, Sveda actually discovered it when he went on his cigarette break. He had put his cigarette down on the lab bench and got some chemicals on it without realising, and then was really confused when his cigarette tasted sweet. Health and safety apparently wasn't a top priority amongst grad students in 1937.

I had a feeling from the begining this was going to be a "Big American business wanted to get rid of the competition" story. Not really surprised since that seems to be the status quo for things banned in the US but are legal in Europe or elsewhere.

My Dad was a peach farmer. The cannery he sold to went under because they put cyclamates in their products. He lost a lot of money that was owed to him and was angry about it until he died.

Meanwhile there's so many other additives like certain food dyes that studies have shown to negatively effect children and people in general but are still used in the US while it's discouraged or banned in the UK.

Got to love the FDA. Years ago my doctor prescribed me a drug that was legal in most of the world but had not been FDA approved so I had to buy it from Canada. The FDA approved drug that worked similarly had horrible side effects so we avoided that one.

I remember cyclamates! The adults in my family drank a lot of diet soda with cyclamates and I drank enough Funny Face to collect lots of FF merch, like mugs and weighted walking toys. On the day before the ban went into effect, I went with my grandparents to the local Canada Dry factory (or was it Shasta?) and they bought many, many cases of diet soda! Later, they wished they had bought more as cyclamates tasted so much better than saccharine. Our family doctor said you'd need to drink a crazy amount of diet soda (like hundreds of cans a day) to consume the equivalent of what the rats were given.

I grew up on a sugarbeet farm, and these kinds of issues really make me think about the interaction between farming and science. My parents always told me to avoid artificial sweeteners because they give you cancer, even though with my science background I now know that's not really the case! This is also true of climate change and (in places like California) the water used by farms to make a profit. Farmers are single issue voters, unfortunately: what is good for business is the only important thing, even if it causes climate change or obesity or cancer. FFS, some of the biggest lobbyists in DC after the military-industrial complex are literally farm interests!

"The tried and true but seldom used method of willpower" You found a *great* clip of a reporter talking about it

"Up-Beet" as a magazine title for a trade magazine for beet growers is actually really cool. However nothing beats the title "Pumper", the trade publication for porta-potties!

I remember being given a packet containing a sodium cyclamate sweetener on my first flight to Europe in 1990. I knew what it was and I was very curious to try it. It was great in my coffee! I tried some different sugar-free sodas while I was there and they were so much better than saccharine-sweetened and aspartame-sweetened sodas. I went into a grocery store while I was there and bought a box of cyclamate tablets to bring home. I probably broke some law by bringing it home with me, but I wasn’t stopped in Customs upon my return so I enjoyed sodium cyclamate in my coffee and tea for months!

I think this video is a great example of why being scientifically literate is important. If the people who saw headlines also read the study to see just how much the rats were given, a different outcome would’ve happened!

5:59 I wasn't watching the video, only listening and heard "AIDS could've had a huge PR problem but totally avoided it. Nice work." 😮 I had to rewatch that part.

Ah, classic trick of wrong dosing while testing. That really brought out the political side of the story. If they tried the same method with water, maybe they'd ban it too, but I'm sure companies selling water wouldn't like that :) Thanks for the interesting video again, Phil!

The BIG question, which you skipped right over, is why was saccharine approved while cyclamates denied? They got rats to get cancer from saccharine, from force feeding them something like 3000 times what a normal human would consume, by body weight. I don't recall why it was deemed safe while the attempts to appeal the cyclamate ban failed.

What’s even more infuriating is that there are instances where the FDA plain refuses to disclose why they took a decision to ban a drug that’s approved in many other countries. An example of this is Dynastat.

I'm Hungarian, my grandma always put these in her coffee and would let me taste one every time I visited. It's been years since she passed away and now I've almost forgotten the taste, but it's also been ages since I've ever seen any on store shelves (though to be fair the only place I've ever seen it was in my grandma's shelf so I guess I should look harder)

I recall hearing at the time that the rats were fed a slurry of saccharin and cyclamate and cyclamate was was blamed for the rats' bladder cancer because "everybody knows" the older sweetener was safe. When saccharin was found to also cause the same problem in the early 80s it was dismissed as not being a threat due to the dosage levels used. What changed? Was it saccharin the problem all along? Today they allow Tylenol to be sold despite its incredibly high risk of liver cancer. What gives?

I remember when this happened. My mother ranted about the massive amounts needed to cause cancer in rats. This was at the beginning of the hyper-sweetened breakfast cereal fad that has become the norm and lots of folks from our background were very concerned about the sheer amount of sugar entering children's diets.

SOMETHING'S working to kill me. Something I eat, drink, breathe, or touch and there's no unbiased source of info to guide me through that labyrinth. I remember when coconut oil in my popcorn was gonna make my legs fall off. Then, suddenly, it becomes this elixir of immortality that I need to put in my coffee or my legs will fall off. I just cover the basics and do the best I can, trying not to stress over it (which is FAR more more likely to kill me.)

looks like cyclamate got beet 😏

I wonder if anyone tried to break that Clause by showiung a study that something really basic could cause cancer? Like Milk, or Corn Syryp.....

You could probably do a whole series on banned products that nobody really considered. I wonder what products we are using today that will get the same treatment

Edited: I was mistaken that saccharin is sodium cyclamate. Thanks David for setting me straight. For more information, see the replies. My Grandparent's had saccharin and used it to sweeten their coffee. This was in the 1980's in California. I didn't know they WERE BREAKING THE LAW🙂 Edited to add: I thought it tasted horrible. Sickly sweet with an unpleasant aftertaste.

I grew up in Japan with cyclamates. Americans are not missing much. They taste terrible.

You could do a cover on the state of sunscreens and the FDA - why is much of the world okay with many of the advances in sunscreen chemistry but the US is lagging so far behind?

I wonder if this is somehow at all connected to the US using corn syrup to sweeten almost everything. Here in the EU you'll be hard pressed to find any food item that contains corn syrup.

Cyclamates were used in the very popular Fizzies (imagine something like Crystal Lite that works like an Alka Seltzer) back in the 1960s. I used to have them all the time and they were great. After the ban they switched to saccharin but they weren't the same and they disappeared only to eb revived in the early 2000s only to go out of production again in 2016.

The most popular artificial sweetener in my country. My grandmother used it because she had diabetes, but I always hated it. It tastes so sweet and odd🥲🥲 It's so interesting to see how some things are banned in the USA but not anywhere else, but also how some stuff are banned here and fine in any other country (i hope i can try poppy seeds one day).

I've heard of thalidomide ban but not the cyclamate one! Certainly interesting to see how ostensibly good intentioned legislation, agencies and science can be warped in unforeseen ways.

I remember reading a paper from a medical doctor like a decade ago going through the history of the US ban on DDT, and it mentioned a lot of this kinds of politics in the decision process. Might be an interesting topic for a video... :)

Those AI animations are interesting here. Not sure how I feel about it versus just animating a 2-frame mouth on top, though of course I presume it’s faster. The first one worked very well (edit: presumably because it used a 3/4 view as the source), but the second one was creepier than Clutch Cargo techniques! I’ve got Opinions about the rest but everyone else has already said them at least once! There is a whole niche of products either exclusively banned in the US or exclusively available in the US and the reasons are always fascinating, sometimes a lot more frustrating than this too.

Sodium cylamate is cheaper than sugar for the same amount of sweetness, but it doesn't dissolve as easily as sugar. If it's not dissolved properly, it can have an odd aftertaste. It's easy to sweeten most beverages with it, but it's more of a challenge to cook with it and sweeten baked goods for example, in my opinion.

Good video. Loved the new lighting set up as well ❤

Cyclamate was banned in my country 🇵🇭 (where it is known as “magic sugar” for being much sweeter than sugar) until 2013.

Love the AYDS section of the video! Hahaha

You should consider a new series: 'Banned in America'.

I remember when I was a kid, my elderly relatives put a little pill in their coffee instead of sugar. (People used saccharin to get around sugar rationing.)

I remember those Sucaryl bottles, they had pointed tips so you could shake it out. Has anybody ever done a study where they give rats 100x the average amount of sugar?

When I was in Germany in 1996 as an Abbott Labs employee, I got to taste cyclamate sweetened diet coke. I didn't know there was an Abbott - cyclamate connection at that time.

The lighting is fabulous in your studio. Your blue shirt against the soft red lighting is 🔥 Lookin' good, Phil!

I think saccharine is banned in most European countries except a few ones like Germany.

As soon as I saw the tablet in the thumbnail, I knew exactly what it was. I don't know if this is one of those "cilantro tastes like soap" genetic things, but it tastes horribly bitter to me. I legit can't eat artificially sweeted stuff here. Thankfully we have real sugar sodas here so I'm having a lot better time with my metabolism while still satisfying my sweet tooth without HFCS (which, unfortunately, is in all the good Balkan Fanta)

I have diabetes and occasionally hear flack about using Sweet-n-low, etc. I explain to them how using their sweetener can kill me much quicker. I've een using alternative sweetners for more than 30 years now, I've yet to get cancer. Seems like I have everything else, though, but none of it related to sweetner.

Was literally just thinking about your videos today and here we go, a new one 🤩

9:20 Obligatory mention of Richard Nixon, always a favorite ritual of the channel.

Getting the store brand of the banned product. Very nice and financially responsible.

Great video as always

Brilliantly produced! Well done :)

“No bitter aftertaste” my eye! I live in Europe, and I find cyclamate to be nearly as bitter as saccharine. The only artificial sweetener that is truly palatable to me is sucralose. (Aspartame is… tolerable.)

4:17 "DDT is good for me-e-e!" oof that didn't age well

Any time I hear “Banned in the USA”but used everywhere else!? My brain immediately says “lobbying money”! Also you should have merch that says “Now with Cyclamate!”

Yeah. I've never really had the need to avoid sugar but when I was a kid Sugar Twin with cyclamates was a really good substitute that I actually liked. If we were out of sugar, my mom always had some Sugar Twin around. Even though I didn't need it, it was annoying when it was taken off the market. It hasn't been until recently that sugar substitutes without a bad aftertaste or flavor component for me have become available now that I'm trying to avoid as much high fructose corn syrup as possible. But I still wish they'd lift the ban on cyclamates.

It's fascinating that the exact same thing just played out in the W.H.O. in regards to Aspartame. I mean word for word, study for study, the exact same thing except this time not in the U.S.

This is super random but does anyone know the name of the font used inside UpBeet? At 7:24? I've been trying to find that font for a good year to no avail.

Great format! I really enjoyed the lightside/darkside, science/politics separation. Awesome presentation as always

Your vids must be one of the hardest to produce, but SO worth it!!

Sugar is a large commodity and the FDA makes a ton of money in sugar made from beets in the US.

I see and appreciate your added production value in making Sveda and Delaney "speak" 👍😊

Here is the thing, I recall the taste of that stuff and it was NASTY. I am a super taster and may not be representative of the average person, but for me, it tasted awful. Hopefully it’s been improved in the places it is still available. Currently I use liquid monk fruit to sweeten tea and I am quite happy with it. In my opinion, political and corporate motivations are a good reason to avoid food additives as much as you can. It’s hard to know who is paying for any publicized research and why they might be saying that it is safe, or not. It seems unlikely that your health is the main focus for the actions of the people involved.

I'm mind blown by the production of this video. First time viewer and immediately subbed in the first 5 mins.

Camera slider! 🎉😂 Great vid Phil!!

I'm old enough to remember what cyclamate flavored sodas tasted like. Better than saccharine, but still not good. Stevia has it beat all hollow, but still isn't quite right. Sugar imparts a texture to things that any of the artificial (or, in the case of stevia, almost natural) sweeteners lack.

Aspartame in my opinion is far more of a health risk than many of the other artificial sweeteners. In essence, no of them are good for you at all.

Before I even start watching... it's about the sugar, isn't it? I've known that big sugar pushed HARD to get taken off the addictive substances list and pushed just as hard to get included in virtually everything we eat.

My father tell me this story many years ago!!! Yes, here in Argentina!!!

We used to pick up cyclamate when on vacation in Canada in the 1970s. No law against that, fortunately. I still miss the only artificial sweetener that was worth a damn.

Nothing better than a Phil Edwards video on a sunday morning.

Congratulations 🎊 perhaps a part two, how and where cyclamates are created from, other countries regulation of the sweetener, any testing performed outside of the USA, posable links to health risks- you know a modern approach and less of a 60 + year old history with corporate conflict from the sugar lobby 😮

In Austria was a big fight about Stevia a few years ago as the goverments sugar monopolist did a very abuses ad campane against Stevia - sounds similar...

Diet soda had cyclamate in it when I was a kid. Then they banned it and saccarine replaced it in soda. Saccarine tested awful in comparison. Sort of a bittersweet in comparison. Cyclamates really tasted like sugar sweetener.

MSG is one of those things where food products are proud to be free of it, whilst it's not something very harmful to humans. This kinda reminds me of that

Kinder toys anyone? So I’m old enough to be just at the age that had to read Silent Spring for 7th grade science class. The case for DDT poisoning the environment was much less controversial. But I clearly remember the brou ha ha ha ha ha ha and marketing wars around cyclamates cyclamates surrounding enough to predict that this was going to be the topic of your video. It seemed to happen after the grape boycott and before the DDT fixes got in, Thank you for a well done report.

According to the Delaney Clause, salt and sugar both need to be taken off the market; both have been linked to cancer and one to diabetes. As well as a few artificial food colorants including red #40 and yellow #3. Of course, there have been a lot of deaths linked to excessive dihydrogen monoxide.

My brother was a type 1 diabetic since 5 years old. In '69 he was 17 and very angsty about being different. He used sucaryl daily for cereal and when it was banned and he had to switch to saccharin. He wasn't happy as the latter has a very noticeable after taste.

I like it that the coffee sweetener you used during the video is something I have in my kitchen cabinet for whenever guests would come over in case they want that in their coffee or tea etc, but that it's banned in the US... But in Europe we still widely use sugar as well. I always enjoy these old "this stuff is really bad, so we made this very chemical and untested alternative that is probably better!" solutions to usually made-up or rather exaggerated problems, they seem to be very prominent during the 20th century.

And to think, at the same time they were touting 0 calorie sweeteners(50s), doctors will still RXing amphetamine to housewives for energy and weight loss Also fun fact, with aspartame still causes your body to release insulin, and can still cause diabetes... Another great video Phil, always picking interesting topics I didn't know I was interested in until after I hear about them

In the US, all roads lead to corrupt lobbying

When I went to Germany I had a cyclamate sweetner in one of my coffees. It was so neat and convenient to have a sweetner in pill form, as opposed to a sachet. Didn’t know why I never saw one in the US until now.

0:38 It is banned because it expires on a date that doesn’t exist in the US.

As a canadian who loves poutine... It is avsurd to me that cheese curds are technically illegal in usa lol. You cannot make a proper poutine without cheese curds!

The real crime of artificial sweetener companies is making packets of the stuff with only 2-5% of the actual artificial sweetener and 98-95% dextrose and selling it at like 20$ a box.

I bet it's a lot safer than aspartame, you know, the one that breaks down into formaldehyde when digested or heated...

I hate that the US use so much aspartame. The bitter aftertaste is just gross.

my grandmother would always bring this special sweetener home from norway when she went home years ago as you could not get the sweetener here and she liked to use it in her tea and coffee instead of sugar

Reminds me of the corruption and lobbying that happened to get Cannabis banned in the U.S. even though we still have alcohol around which is medically proven to be much more harmful.

Sugar manufacturing groups being partly responsible makes so much sense to me. Sugar companies were also behind the low-fat craze.

Sweet video Phil.

So if they just have worded the results a bit different, cyclomates would be legal. "cyclomates don't give cancer up to doses higher than a 100 times more than one could reasonable consume"...

haha sitting here in Germany drinking a Coca Cola Light which is sweetened with sodium cyclamate whilst I watch this

You should do an video about PR of brands. How come Ayds went belly up, meanwhile Corona is still a popular adult beverage? The term aids is still a commonly used term for assistance. Hearing aids never had a PR issue.

My stepfather was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in 1967. After that, our family generally ate a diabetic diet-the only exceptions were desserts and sodas on holidays. My mother tried to include my stepfather by making diabetic-friendly desserts and buying diabetic-friendly sodas. Desserts were rare for us, but sodas were more common. The only diabetic-friendly sodas he liked were Tab and Fresca, and they had cyclamates. When cyclamates were banned, they were substituted with awful, bitter sweeteners. This took what little a little bit of normalcy from his life. That may seem like a small thing - but when you are diabetic, anything that helps you be a bit more normal is essential. It's disappointing to find out 50 years later that the removal was unnecessary.

In 2001, I found out that my mother who was living several states away was drinking an inordinate amount of Diet Coke. I told her she had to stop that yesterday. Within that year she was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis the very first question she was asked as for the cause of this disorder. Was whether or not she drank Diet Coke because aspartame had been linked to the onset of pulmonary fibrosis. Aspartame is not and never has been a safe chemical. Most artificial sweeteners also have the strange effect of increasing the output of insulin from the pancreas because it registers most of the chemicals as sugar and of course then produces insulin to deal with the sugars there are no sugars to deal with so you become insulin-resistant and therefore causes diabetes. But it still doesn't cause cancer. The question I have is what difference does it make which way it kills you. Now I don't know whether or not cyclamates caused this reaction with the pancreas or not. What is well-known that the sugar substitutes that we have in this country, save for possibly Stevia, do indeed pause this diabetes issue. Why do you think people who started to get a little bit higher evidence of diabetes in the early sixties it suddenly just ravage the country after the onset of many of these sugar substitutes? I'll leave you with this or salt or so where they were discussing the testing by scientists on laboratory animals not only did they conclude that the number one cause of cancer in laboratory animals was the scientists themselves. They also noted that if you force-feed a squirrel 700 lb of marijuana, they tend to play with their nuts rather than eat them!

Every time I hear something new about Nader; it's obvious he did not properly test and compare. Seemed more worried about being in the lime light than actual outcomes. The 'Vair was just as safe, or unsafe as any vehicle at that time and price point.

11:24 Yes, we have other sweeteners, but NONE that taste as good or are as safe and versatile as cyclamate. My experience goes way back to the 80s when I was trying to do Atkins (which of course was the most popular low-carb plan in the 70s and beyond). Atkins and other diet doctors bemoaned the loss of cyclamate, as it tasted great. I put up with saccharin for years but never liked it, but in the early 2000s when Atkins had a revival and everything was now online--Yahoo groups, bulletin boards, etc. for low-carbing--I found out I could order Sugar Twin from Canada which is sodium cyclamate instead of sodium saccharin as it is in the US. I ordered several boxes to make it worth shipping, and tasted it for the first time. It was just as good as "they" said. 🙂 People couldn't tell that it wasn't sugar, if I gave them something I made. I used Canadian Sugar Twin for years, and then found other options like those German tablets you show in the video. My mom went to England and liked the Natreen tablets which are very similar, and brought home a couple boxes, then English friends brought us more when we wanted them. I recently ordered the German "Mivolis" from Amazon, and also in a local ethnic grocery store I found a Brazilian product "Zero Cal" which is a liquid form of the same sweeteners. You can also order that from Amazon. I don't like that all of these mix cyclamate with saccharin, but at least the saccharin seems to be low enough to not affect the taste much. I've used stevia over the years as well, but honestly it has a worse aftertaste than any of the artificial sweeteners! And in commercial products they always use at least twice as much as they should. The sodas are horribly sweet, for example, and only have a chance to taste good if you mix them 50/50 with unsweetened seltzer. I can only tolerate stevia in iced tea if I very carefully dust a bit over the top, stir and taste, dust a bit more, etc. If you use JUST enough to have a bit of sweetness, there's no bitterness or aftertaste. Stevia is 300 times sweeter than sugar, so that's a substance to be handled with care! Sorry for the ramble! Maybe it will help someone who is looking for a good sweetener. Obviously the best option is nothing sweet at all, but I have found that when I am trying to break the sugar addiction, I can switch to artificial sweeteners for a while and it gets me through, and then eventually I lose my desire for the sweet taste. Those of us who have been in low-carb (now keto) groups for years have seen the debate about whether artificial sweeteners raise insulin, thus provoking sugar cravings and causing the body to store fat, and I've seen the experts come down on both sides of this issue so it's confusing. I think the last conclusion I saw was that it causes problems for some but not all of us. As always, things are more complex than we want them to be. 🙄

¡Gracias!

“In Europe and elsewhere” love it

There are SEVEN artificial sweeteners available almost EVERYWHERE BUT the US. The most popular one in the EU is fluorescent ORANGE, but sourced from plants then a chlorine atom is tacked on that turns it orange and makes it 60 times sweeter. The French call it "Sucure". It's been in use since since before WWII, because sugar became so scarce, it went from about 20 cents per 5 kilos to $8 dollars a kilo. Side effects: It leaves your tongue bright orange after having it in your tea or on your grapefruit! And your pee may be orange too!

Great video!