The Sweetener in Every Diet Soda — Pulled From Every Shelf in 1969

For nineteen years it was the sweet in every diet soda in America: Tab, Diet Pepsi, Fresca, the pink tablets in the handbag, the canned fruit for diabetics. On the morning of Tuesday 21 October 1969 it was no longer allowed in any of them. This is the life of cyclamate and the page that ended it: how a sweetener found by accident in 1937 came to be in a billion dollars of food a year, what sixty rats in a bladder study did to it in one weekend, the 340 words filed in Washington at 9:50 on Monday morning that took it off the list, and what the bottlers, the grocers and the people who drank it did on the days that followed. The rest of that morning's Register is here too, the ordinary business of a Tuesday in 1969, because the page did not come alone. The pages on screen are the real pages, quoted exactly with the page number every time. Chapters 0:00 The pink packet 0:58 The Sweet 1:02 The fingers, 1937 2:44 Everywhere, 1952 to 1968 6:52 What nobody knew 10:10 The page, 21 October 1969 12:22 The morning it was gone 15:53 Still on the shelf Sources Every claim in this episode is from the record: the one page that did it, quoted with its page number, and the sources listed below for the life of the thing before and after. • Federal Register, Vol. 34, No. 202, Tuesday 21 October 1969, pages 17057 to 17091, Library of Congress — https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services... • FDA, "Cyclamate (Cyclamic Acid, Calcium Cyclamate, and Sodium Cyclamate), Commissioner's Decision", 45 FR 61474, Docket No. 76F-0392 — https://www.fda.gov/files/food/publis... • Thomas H. Jukes, "Cyclamate Sweeteners", JAMA, Vol. 236, No. 17, pp. 1987–1989 — https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama... • Time, "Toxicology: HEW Bans the Cyclamates" — https://time.com/archive/6637684/toxi... • New York Times obituary, "Michael Sveda", as carried by SFGate ("By New York Times") — https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/M... • Escanaba Daily Press (Escanaba, Mich.), Monday 20 Oct 1969, front page, AP wire stories, OCR text on the Internet Archive — https://archive.org/stream/escanaba-d... • J. M. Price, C. G. Biava, B. L. Oser, E. E. Vogin, J. Steinfeld, H. L. Ley, "Bladder tumors in rats fed cyclohexylamine or high doses of a mixture of cyclamate and saccharin", Science 167(3921):1131–1132, abstract (PubMed PMID 5411626, fetched through NCBI E-utilities) — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5411626/ • IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Vol. 73, "Cyclamates", Lyon 1999, on the NCBI Bookshelf — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NB... • Environment and Climate Change Canada / Health Canada, "Screening Assessment: Sulfamic acid, cyclohexyl-, monosodium salt (sodium cyclamate) and Cyclohexanamine (cyclohexylamine)", Cat. No. En84-289/2022E-PDF — https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ecc... • Sweet'N Low (Cumberland Packing Corp., Brooklyn), "Canada" page — https://www.sweetnlow.com/canada/ • Sugar Twin Canada (B&G Foods Canada, ULC), "Sachets" product page — https://sugartwin.ca/product/sachets/ • EFSA, "Sweeteners" topic page (table of sweeteners authorised in the EU) — https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/... • European Commission, Scientific Committee on Food, "Revised opinion on cyclamic acid and its sodium and calcium salts", SCF/CS/EDUL/192 final — https://ec.europa.eu/food/fs/sc/scf/o... • Calorie Control Council (trade association), cyclamate.org, "Regulatory status" and home page — https://www.cyclamate.org/regulatorys... About the pictures The period pictures in this episode are generated. They show places, objects and unnamed figures, not real people, and they are not photographs of the events described. The pages shown on screen are the real pages, from the Library of Congress scan of the issue. The narration is synthesised.