Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you have probably heard the debates surrounding the health risks or benefits of soybean.  There are some people who believe that soy is a superfood, containing components that lend protection from heart disease and cancer; and then there are others who consider soy one of the most dangerous products in our food supply.  The fats from soybean are a polyunsaturated fat, so it considered to be extremely “heart healthy” by doctors, nutritionists and the media.  The media and nutritionists are entirely convinced of the mythical properties of soy, but as far as doctors are concerned, I’ve  witnessed a bit of a double standard.

It is my hope to shed a little new light on this debate, based on my experience with the potential damage associated with soybeans.  After losing my intestines, I was kept alive on infusions of TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition).  TPN contains carbohydrates (dextrose) and protein (amino acids), but it is missing one essential macronutrient — fat.  To cover this problem, the doctors infused lipids every other day with the TPN.  Here in the U.S., hospitals use a liquid fat made from soybeans called “intralipid”.  Yet, the doctors all knew and warned me that prolong infusion of these lipids would ultimately cause cirrhosis of the liver, leading to its failure.  Parenteral Nutrition-Associated Liver Disease (PNALD), is the name given to this syndrome.  The mechanism by which the soy lipids destroy the liver is yet unknown, but it is known that until they can find a suitable replacement for soy, many more livers will die. [PubMed abstract]

At the time I was placed on these infusions, we didn’t know that intestinal transplants existed, so my wife and I were extremely concerned.  I was basically given two possible scenarios that would eventually end my life.  One would be the loss of access because of the damage to the arteries by the TPN [article here].  At that point, I would starve to death.  The second one was when my liver would give out due to the soy lipids, which doctors estimated could take about 2 years.

Fortunately for me, I received my transplant before any permanent damage was sustained by my liver, but a woman who I met in Jackson Memorial Hospital was not so lucky.  This woman had lost her intestines due to a blood clot in her mesenteric artery, cutting off the blood flow to the bowels.  The thrombosis was caused by a faulty gastric bypass surgery she underwent sometime earlier.  (A side point I’d like to cover; I was told by the transplant staff at Jackson Memorial that the number one cause of people losing their intestines and needing transplants are as a result of gastric bypass surgery, so if you’re considering that procedure, you might want to give some consideration concerning its safety).  At the time we met this woman, her skin and eyes were golden-yellow from cirrhosis.  The damage was caused by the intralipid she was receiving while waiting for a transplant.  The scary part was that she had only been on TPN the same amount of time I had been (about six months).  The exception was that her doctors had infused the lipids everyday, whereas I only received them every other day.  I guess that made the difference.

Because her liver had been destroyed, she was now in need of a multivisceral (multi organ) transplant.  She ultimately had every organ replaced in her digestive tract from the stomach to the rectum — seven organs in all.  She received a new stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver, duodenum, small and large intestines.  She is still doing quite well, amazingly.  The reason I’m covering her story is because she had conducted the same research we had and learned about another type of lipid infusion that’s used in Europe.  Doctors in the E.U. are able to use a lipid made from fish oil called “Omegaven”.  Omegaven has not only been shown to cause no damage to the liver of TPN patients, but has been clinically proven to actually reverse the damage sustained by the use of the soy oil.

Soy lipids contain a very high amount of linoleic acid, which is an essential omega 6 fatty acid,  but is extremely inflammatory.  Fish oils contain a percentage of omega 3 fatty acids which are very anti-inflammatory.  Humans need a balance of these fatty acids to offset the damage.  If you consume a lot of soy products, you are not getting a proper balance of fatty acids, which can lead to a lot of inflammation, including heart disease.  Unfortunately for vegans, animal products are the only reliable source of the proper omega 3 fatty acids.

Our research revealed one unbelievable fact — the FDA does not allow the use of Omegaven in the United States!  There is only one exception to this ban.  When children on TPN have already taken liver damage due to the soy based oil, the FDA will permit the infusion of Omegaven.  Many doctors that we spoke to admitted that they had seen remarkable results on these children.  Adults cannot get Omegaven, no matter how much liver damage they have sustained from the soy.  What in the hell is the politics behind this bullshit is still a mystery.  Could the soy lobby actually have that much influence over the FDA that they are willing to let people die of cirrhosis, including children?  It would seem so, beings I cannot think of any other reason.  Any doctor caught infusing Omegaven in the U.S. put their license at risk.

There’s absolutely no way they have to do further studies on the effects of using fish oil.  People have been consuming fish oil for millions of years and it has a wonderful track-record in Europe as an infused lipid.  If the FDA would continue to push the use of soy lipids, which is proven to cause liver damage in TPN patients, then how can we believe any of the other claimed health benefits of soy?  Soy oil is used in so many processed foods and cooking oils.

Crisco is pure soy oil and many fast food restaurants fry their potatoes, chicken nuggets and fish patties in soy oils.  Could it be the french fries and not the burger that makes fast food so unhealthy?

This woman had begun petitioning the government to allow the use of Omegaven as soon as her liver began to fail and was met with nothing but resistance.  My wife and I had petitioned the pharmacist at the Hospital in Orlando about getting Omegaven mixed with my TPN to preserve my liver until I could get a transplant.  The pharmacist knew of Omegaven and had administered it to children in the Arnold Palmer Children’s Hospital in Orlando and testified to the near miraculous results.  He had seen children rebound from late stage cirrhosis to near perfect liver enzymes, but he told us that he could lose his license and face possible imprisonment if he gave it to me.

Do you still trust your FDA?  If so, please leave a comment on this post explaining the reason for them to ban this proven nutrient.  I now avoid soy at all costs.  I will never knowingly eat this crap as long as I might live.  The part that burns my ass more is that doctors know that these soy lipids destroy the liver and yet still recommend soy-based foods and claim them as “healthy”.  Like I said in the “The Effect Of Sugar On The Arteries”, they’re either fucking morons or they want us to get sick.  And don’t give me that shit about the Asians eating soy and being so healthy and having extreme longevity, because the Asians have historically only consumed soy that was fermented (Miso, Tempeh, Natto and Soy Sauce) and only in small quantities (about 2 teaspoons) as a condiment.  Fermentation destroys many of the anti-nutrients contained in soy, such as phytic acid and lectins.  No culture has ever consumed unfermented soy in the mass quantities that we consume presently.  Why?  Because soy is cheap, government subsidized and pushed by the USDA.

In the last few decades, the U.S. has seen a substantial rise in cases of NASH (Non-Alcoholic SteatolHepatitis), which causes cirrhosis that was only seen historically in alcoholics.  People who have never had a drop of alcohol in their life are coming down with this disease.  Could the mass consumption of unfermented soy products be a contributing factor to this sudden rise?  It would seem likely, based on the effect of intralipids.  How could soy be such a healthy and wonderful food to eat, but is so unhealthy when infused that it can destroy that woman’s liver within six months?  Funny how the two cheapest commodities in the food supply — soy and wheat, are claimed to be the most healthy.  Where else in life is something that’s the least expensive also be the most desired?  Nowhere!  It’s because these products are so cheap, subsidized and have extend shelf-life that they are used as filler in everything, not because they’re healthy.  That’s just how they’re advertised to the gullible.

Every time a story breaks the headlines claiming that the results of some research has indicated that red meat or saturated fat is linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hemorrhoids, global warming, the war in the Middle East, murder, mayhem and mass genocide, you can bet your ass that 99% of the time the volunteers were buck-toothed little rats.  Are rats that similar to humans and are they a reliable analog for the effects of our food on our body?

Metabolically speaking, rats are very similar to human beings and many tests using them as subjects can be quite valuable.  My concerns have less to do with drug testing and more to do with dietary effects.  When looking at a rat study, I always take into consideration the digestive and dietary variance between humans and rodents, and how easily these experiments can be manipulated based on those differences.  Assuming that most research is rarely unbiased, can the experiment be constructed to achieve a desired result?

How are Mickey and Minnie different from humans?  Though nobody likes to vomit, it is often a life-saving technique evolved to rid the body of undesirable toxins, pathogens or just overindulgence.  Unfortunately for the rat, they lack that ability for three reasons:

1. Rats have a powerful barrier between the stomach and the esophagus. They don’t have the esophageal muscle strength to overcome and open this barrier by force, which is necessary for vomiting.

2. Vomiting requires that the two muscles of the diaphragm contract independently, but rats give no evidence of being able to dissociate the activity of these two muscles.

3. Rats don’t have the complex neural connections within the brain stem and between brain stem and viscera that coordinate the many muscles involved in vomiting.

   (For more details on why rats can’t vomit)

A study of food can be easily manipulated by feeding a rat an amount of food that a human would typically throw up.  Feeding high quantities of a particular nutrient, even essential ones, can cause serious and even deadly results.  This is no basis for vilifying a nutrient.  An example would be iron.  People who suffer from a gene mutation called, “Hemochromatosis” absorb iron at much higher levels than normal.  The human body has no mechanism to get rid of excess iron, so it begins to store the iron surplus in the joints and organs . This “iron overload” ultimately leads to crippling arthritis, heart damage and cirrhosis of the liver.

I could easily feed excessive iron to a rat and show definitive results that iron is a deadly nutrient.  We all know that a small amount of iron is not only healthy, but essential.  Without iron, we cannot make blood cells and become anemic (a life threatening condition).  This same principle is true with nearly every nutrient.  Sodium, potassium, zinc, copper, calcium are all essential for good health, yet are deadly in high concentrations.  So the first question is how much red meat or fat was force-fed to the stinking rats?

If you think they are wining and dining these varmints on prime rib, you’re sadly mistaken.  Every study I have read used highly processed meats in their experiments.  That is fine if your final conclusion is going to read that bologna is linked to colon cancer, but that is never what they report.  It will always proclaim that it was red meat that caused the problem.  The equivalent to the type of “meat” used in these research experiments are more similar to Spam than steak.  So the conclusion should read, “If you are eating Vienna Sausages for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, you may develop colon cancer”.  How many other compounds and chemicals are used in the processing of hot dogs, cold cuts or potted meats?  Maybe it’s the nitrates, nitrites, sulfur dioxide, monosodium glutamate, salts, sugar, cereal fillers or hydrogenated oils used in this embalming that triggered the disease.  But the final report will always single out the meat or saturated fat.

What about the fat?  This is the second piece of chicanery perpetrated by rat researchers.  Do you really believe they are slicing the fat from a nice T-bone for the rats?  Think again.  More often than not, when lard or coconut oil are used in rat experiments, they have historically been hydrogenated, creating a trans fat.  Trans fats have been proven to lower HDLs and raise LDLs.  Seed oils are liquid at room temperature and are hydrogenated to simulate saturated oils and make them solid.  Unlike seed oils, coconut oil and lard are naturally saturated and solid at room temperature.  There is no advantage to hydrogenate them, except to achieve a negative result.  So, the next time you hear that researchers have linked saturated fat and heart disease, remember that the rats were most likely fed the equivalent of Crisco.

Studies on dietary fat have other problems, namely the fact that rats have no gall bladder.  Rats do produce bile from the liver, but the absence of a gall bladder would suggest that they didn’t evolve on a high fat diet.  Herbivores and omnivores that exist on mostly plant dominated diets, have either no gall bladder or very tiny ones.  Meat-eating animals all have highly developed gall bladders to handle the load of fat in their diet.  This fact alone makes any study on the effects of animal fat on rats irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.  This explains why rats refuse to eat lard or other fats in these research experiments.  In order for the researchers to get the rats to eat high quantities of fat, they have to mix it with sucrose.  How are we to determine if the negative effects are from the fat or the sugar? Just another deception.

Another favorite slight-of-hand by rat researchers is the isolation of animal proteins such as casein, and force feeding huge quantities to the test subjects.  Any isolated protein can be toxic.  People who consume protein in the absence of fat or carbohydrates suffer from “rabbit starvation”, a life threatening illness.  I could certainly kill a lot of rats if I fed them isolated gluten from wheat, but we never see researchers test that one, because the target is always animal products.  Salt is a necessary nutrient, but isolating it and jamming large quantities down any animal’s throat would result in their extermination, but wouldn’t prove that we should remove salt from our diet.

Rodents are one of the few mammals that seem to do well eating grains.  All livestock mammals become sick when fed grains and need antibiotics.  There is mounting evidence that humans are more like the majority of mammals and become sick on grains, thereby making rodents a poor analog for humans in these experiments.  It is my belief that you could target any particular food and adulterate it, feed it to rats in massive quantities and make the them sick.  This is why it is so easy to poison rats.  They are extreme opportunist and will eat just about anything.  If what they consume is poisonous, they are unable to throw it up to reduce the amount of poison that will enter their bloodstream.

I think that most people believe that an equivalent amount of studies are conducted on the effects of other foods, such as grains, vegetable oils, or high amounts of sugar.  This is simply not true.  Animal products are far less profitable than grain commodities and processed oils, so it is much easier to get funded for any study that will further denigrate animal foods.  Laboratory research cost money and must be funded by someone with deep pockets.  Many times they are funded by corporations on their own products.  I certainly see no conflict of interest there.

Many other studies are funded by government agencies.  The USDA is committed to the marketing of grains.  The more people are frightened about animal products, the more they will replace them with cereal-based foods.  Gary Taubes, science writer for the New York Times wrote in his book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories”:

Scientists were believed to be free of conflicts if their only source of funding was a federal agency, but all nutritionists knew that if their research failed to support the government position on a particular subject, the funding would go instead to someone whose research did.”

There is an obvious bias, as a rule, in the majority of the research community.  The customer is always right, and in this case, the customer is whoever is granting the funds.  This is true in any occupation.  I have worked in the commercial arts.  I have had clients instruct me to do the most distasteful and hideous things to sculptures, but if I want to get paid, I did as they wanted.  Oftentimes, I am embarrassed by the results and would not add the work to my portfolio, but I happily spent the money.  So I can easily imagine that researchers also have mortgages to pay and mouths to feed.

In conclusion, I am always skeptical of any dietary study performed on rodents because they can be force-fed, can’t vomit, are naturally herbivores, but more so because they can’t tattle.  Though they may squeak, they can’t squeal… on their researchers, that is.  We’re never going to read a rat’s manifesto of their treatment as a research subject.  This leaves us to rely on the integrity of the researcher, or more accurately, whoever is funding the study.  I am way too cynical for that.  So when I read a headline touting a study not involving human subjects specifically, I always smell a rat.

“We could feed the world” is the anthem of everyone who supports the proliferation of massive mono-cropping of wheat and other grains.  Vegetarians and vegans use this phrase as if it were the exclamation point ending every sentence.  The theory is that if we didn’t feed so much grain to livestock, we could feed the world with those grains.  That’s fine with me, because I don’t consume products made from grains nor from livestock raised on grains.  All livestock animals, including cattle, sheep, goats and even chickens didn’t evolve to eat a grain based diet and their health suffers as a consequence.  Feedlot animals require antibiotics to stay alive and render inferior food products.  The reason grains are fed to livestock is simple – to fatten them up for slaughter quicker.  Yet, somehow TPTB have convinced people that these same “Heart Healthy Grains” that make livestock fat and sick will somehow make humans lean and healthy.  How’s that working out for us so far?

So if we were to allow livestock ruminants to thrive on their natural diets of grasses, would we truly feed the world with all that extra grain?  We actually produce enough food now to feed the world, even in spite of the grains fed to farm animals.  Excess grains are purchased to produce tons of processed foods, snacks and other confections.  Corn is processed into high fructose corn syrup for sodas, juices and a whole host of processed swill.  Wheat is used for the baking of snack cakes, cookies, pies, donuts and every other baked goodies you can think of.  Tons of grains are used annually in the brewing and distillation of alcoholic beverages.  Funny, I have never heard anyone reciting; “If we just gave up junk food, sodas and beer, we could feed the world.”.  And it goes far beyond edible products.  Grains have thousands of industrial uses.  Wheat is used to make industrial adhesives, soaps, cosmetics and many other products.

So much grain is produced in the world, that inventors stay up nights designing more products that can utilize them – we even burn them as fuel.  Why are they not being used to “feed the world”?  The answer is simple economics.  Selling grains to the impoverish is less profitable than selling Little Debbie Snack Cakes to people with money to burn.  We also have the problem of dictatorships.  Many starving people live in nations where their leaders are the cause of their starvation.  These dictators and warlords can use hunger as a weapon to control their populace or sell grains on the world market in exchange for weapons, fuel or any other commodity that will empower them, rather than distribute the food to their people.

When first world nations, such as the U.S., have sent tons of grains into starving countries, the cheaper cost of the imported grains only served to put the local farmers out of business.  The poverty-stricken farmers cannot afford the huge tractors, combines, irrigation, petroleum fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that make agriculture more abundant in the U.S., not to mention the government subsidizing, which lowers the cost.   They are often times driven out of work and have to abandon their farms.  This huge inflow of grains to the market has historically proven to only cause more starvation and disruption of the local economy.

Some people live in a fantasy world, where simply reducing or abstaining from animal products will somehow “feed the world”.  This is a pretty anemic effort which may somehow boost their self-righteousness, but does nothing to solve the problem.  If there is no profit in raising grain crops, growers will simply stop raising them and go into a more lucrative venture.  Plenty of U.S. Tax dollars go to shipping grains to third world nations only to make their governments fatter, not the people.  How is dropping meat from your diet going to change that?  Are those people suggesting that we overthrow every rogue government in the world and occupy their country?  Should we behave as an empire?  Truth is, such idealists have never given it enough thought to understand why there are starving people.  They are the masters of “soundbite recital” and it becomes that much more laughable when it comes from a rotund individual.

According to William Davis M.D., in his book “Wheat Belly”, geneticists created a new hybrid of dwarf wheat that could yield more grain per acre less than 50 years ago.  The mission statement of these scientists was the promise that it would “feed the world”.  They were successful in creating this frankenwheat and it increased the production of wheat in the western world.  Did it feed the world?  No, it only drove down the wheat prices and made flour cheaper and readily available for more junk food and confections.  It was also successful in creating new strains of gluten protein, causing a quadrupling in celiac disease and a multitude of other gluten related illnesses.  I’m not against feeding the world – it’s a great idea.  I just don’t believe that abstaining from meat and increasing grain harvests will accomplish that.  It will only create more products for consumption by the richer.

World hunger is more of an economic and political issue than the lack of food.  Excess production of grains only led to cheaper food prices which made it possible for people to gorge themselves into obesity.  Maybe we could liposuction all the fat from overweight westerners and feed it to the poor.  People are always more willing to give up their extra fat than their snack cakes and chips.  Hell, I imagine even saturated human fat is healthier than grains.  These foreign nations would most likely become more robust on human lipids than our lardbutt, sickly, grain-eating society and turn around and kick our ass.  As far as I’m concerned, we can send every last grain grown here to the starving people of the world – I have no use for them.

Splenda, that wonderful trick on nature that allows us to have our cake and eat it too.  Unlike its predecessor Aspartame (NutraSweet), it can hold up to cooking temperatures and not breakdown – It can probably hold up to a nuclear blast as I think nothing can break this crap down!  People claim it tastes just like sugar, but I think it taste like a sugar and aspirin combination.  I accidentally drank some in a beverage once and gagged and tossed the rest of the drink away.  But for those who like a little pharmaceutical taste with their confections or just love the taste of sweets so much they can tolerate the bitter after taste – Splenda seems like a real cheat on nature.  But is Splenda really that splendid in the larger picture?  Let’s take a look at what we know, and more importantly what we don’t know yet.

Splenda contains a man-made compound named sucralose.  Sucralose is about 600 times sweeter than sugar.  The amount needed to sweeten your coffee would be so tiny, that you wouldn’t be able to get it out of the little yellow packet because static would bind the dust to the side of the paper.  So to solve this problem, the manufacturer adds filler in the form of dextrose, sucrose or maltodextrin, which are sugars, giving each pack about four calories – even though they claim zero calories.  The manufacturer claims that Splenda taste like sugar, because it’s made from sugar.  So how much processing does sugar go through to become sucralose?  The following is the recipe for making sucralose.  Try to make it at home:

1. Sucrose is tritylated with trityl chloride in the presence of dimethylformamide and 4-methylmorpholine, and the tritylated sucrose is then acetylated with acetic anhydride.
2. The resulting sucrose molecule TRISPA is chlorinated with hydrogen chlorine in the presence of toluene.
3. The resulting 4-PAS is heated in the presence of methyl isobutyl ketone and acetic acid.
4. The resulting 6-PAS is chlorinated with thionyl chloride in the presence of toluene and benzyltriethylammonium chloride.
5. The resulting TOSPA is treated with methanol in the presence of sodium methoxide to produce sucralose.

Ahhhh… just the way grandma used to make it.  Hardly the idea that is suggested when the package states; “Tastes like sugar because it’s made from sugar.”.  Being made from sugar gives the impression of something that’s natural.  This is nothing nature would have the audacity to create, because it serves no purpose. I am confused as to why anyone would consume mass quantities of a substance that has no nutritional value and is not even a food by any definition of the word.

Sucralose is a sugar molecule that does not exist in nature.  Sucralose begins its journey as a sucrose disaccharide (meaning it’s made of two simple sugars or monosaccharides).  The two sugars in sucrose are glucose and fructose.  Sucrose is the sugar found in fruits, honey, cane, beets and syrups, including HFCS.  Through an elaborate chemical process that would make any mad scientist proud, the stereochemistry of the glucose molecule is changed, making it more resemble galactose.  A fructose/galactose disaccharide is not anything commonly found in food, so how is the body to deal with such a monstrosity?  The real secret to sucralose is that the final product replaces the three oxygen and hydrogen atoms at the end of the now deformed glucose molecule with chlorine molecules, making the compound a organochlorine.

 Organochlorines have historically had a bad reputation.  Usually only used as a pesticide, they would include a family tree containing chlordane, DDT, Agent Orange and PCBs.  All of these compounds were such a disaster, they have been banned from usage.  Sucralose was invented accidentally while trying to create a new pesticide.  The worse attribute of organochlorines is their resistance to biodegradation, causing an accumulation of the compound in the environment.  Supporters of Splenda’s safety will argue that the chlorine (a compound toxic to all living things) is of no threat to the consumer, because the human body can’t break down sucralose and release the chlorine into the tissues.  I am not going to follow along with the typical scare tactic of the chlorine causing health problems.  After all, the body cannot metabolize the sucralose, so the chlorine never reaches the cells.  Although, the FDA final report on sucralose states that 11 to 27% is absorbed by the human body and has a half-life in the blood of 3–5 hours.  The Japanese Food Sanitation Council found that the body can metabolize up to 40% of sucralose, which if true, could be a health risk to those who consume a lot of it. [link]  But until more information and studies are released on this, I will not use this argument.

The real problem with sucralose is the mechanism that makes it work as a sugar substitute – the fact that nothing living can break it down.  Studies done on rats have shown that the rodents fed sucralose had a 50% reduction in gut bacteria. [link]  This could be something to consider.  No human studies have yet been conducted, but I cannot see why human gut bacteria (which are mostly the same bacteria found in rat colons) would fare any better against this substance.  So anyone eating yogurt sweetened with Splenda in hopes of restoring gut flora are kind of like a dog chasing its own tail.

Whenever anything we eat is not digested or absorbed, the bacteria within the colon will attempt to feed on it.  Oligosaccharides (fiber) are also indigestible. When these natural carbohydrates reach the colon undigested, the bacteria begin to ferment and convert them to butyric acid, a short chain fatty acid used by the cells of the colon.  But, when sucralose reaches the large intestines undigested, the bacteria can’t deal with it in any way.  The rat study would suggest that the bacteria may die-off in the attempt to metabolize it.  So what happens next is that the sucralose passes out with the stool, unchanged.  The percentage of sucralose that is absorbed into the bloodstream, is filtered out by the kidneys and passes with the urine.  If you eat sucralose, then you are defecating and urinating sucralose with each trip to the bathroom.  You’re probably saying to yourself; “So, I have sweet tasting urine and poop and what’s wrong with that?”.

Studies have proven that modern waste treatment does not remove the sucralose from waste water.  Details on the study here.  So this sweet frankenfood is finding its way back into the water supply.  Sucralose breaks down very slowly, if at all, in nature and we have absolutely no idea of its impact on the environment yet.  I would imagine that in time, our water will begin to have a sweet (and aspirin) flavor.  Look, if someone insists on being the subject of a giant experiment by the food manufacturers and risk possible side effects because they can’t tame their sweet tooth, then fine.  But what about those of us who choose not be a corporate guinea pig and are suspicious of the safety claims of sucralose.  They’re telling us and every other animal on the planet, that they don’t give a damn and we will have to learn to enjoy their second-hand franken-sweets and share in whatever health risks that they’re willing to take to satisfy their never-ending lust for sweets.

Everyone bitches about second-hand smoke, but no one is contemplating the effects of second-hand sucralose.  What if the bacteria in the rat colons are an indication of what could happen to the bacteria in the top soil if sucralose builds up over time from irrigation?  How will crops be affected by high concentrations of sucralose in their water?  These are serious questions that no one has the answers to at this time, and unfortunately, no one seems to care.  Do we have to spend billions of dollars inventing and implementing waste water modifications just so some people can have an artificial sweetener?  Like I said at the beginning of this rant, the things we don’t know about sucralose may be the most alarming.   If someone can’t apply moderation when it comes to sweets, they should at least eat sugar, aspartame or better yet, stevia.  These can at least break down quickly and stop at the end-user.  Even though excessive sugar consumption can cause obesity, diabetes and heart disease, at least they won’t be pissing their indestructible organochlorines all over the rest of us who can practice self-control.   Then they alone are the one gambling a health risk, not the entire planet.