I'm irked at Dr. Mercola's playing fast and loose with public health issues to get hits on his website.
Incidentally, when I post in public forums, I have to play by the same rules as everybody else. No exceptions are made.
None. If you have any remaining suspicions, by all means, ask Skinner, Elad, or EarlG in
Ask The Administrators. The fact is, if I break the rules enough, they'll bounce me as fast as they'd bounce a Freeper and won't shed a tear doing so -- nor should they.
Your point about certain people being sensitive to Splenda has merit, but it loses its persuasiveness when it's evaluated along with more mundane chemical sensitivities. There are people who have actually died from smelling a few peanuts, but peanuts and peanut products remain on the market. People who are sensitive usually exercise caution -- they don't call on the FDA to ban the substance to which they are sensitive unless the sensitivity affects a large number of people. And Splenda sensitivity does not. The FDA has an Adverse Effects reporting system that all physicians are required to use. Several hundred products have been pulled from the market over the past decade alone because of adverse side effects. Splenda has not been associated with many reports at all. (See
http://www.fda.gov/cber/recalls.htm ,
http://www.fda.gov/cber/index.html and
http://www.foodsafety.gov/~dms/fs-toc.html)
I'm quite aware of the dangers involved with halogenated organic compounds, and the existence of chlorine in various substances. Ethylene Glycol, free of chlorine, is far more toxic than Splenda. As for Chlorine gas, yes, its dangers are well known. It's
almost as dangerous as Oxygen gas, and yet under the proper conditions, Oxygen is completely benign. It's not the "chemical", it's how the compound works. There are literally thousands of examples where a minor change in a molecule can turn it from a foodstuff into a deadly poison, something that would kill you much faster than using Splenda in your coffee.
Incidentally, sucrose and similar sugars are deadly cytotoxins. They depend on Insulin to transport them safely into the cells they nourish. Similarly, phorphorous compounds like ATP (adenosine triphosphate) allow deadly combustion-causing Oxygen to be used by the body without toxic effects.
Today's FDA and the US Public Health Service can not be compared with the group of people who ran the Tuskeegee experiments. It's like saying that because the USA once allowed slavery, that the Post Office is currently running white slaves to Europe and Asia.
I don't trust the government uncritically, but people like Joseph Mercola operate entirely on the basis of scaring people into changing their lives based on nothing more than "It's chemicals! The FDA is bad!".
YOU try to search for his source material -- it isn't there. Someone like Andrew Weil at least documents what he says, and a number of alternative healers actually do conduct experiments to check on whether they're on to something real. Mercola does none of that, except for a link to a quasi-professional sister site!
As I've written before, make your own mind up and stay informed. But Mercola is utterly without credibility, and he has no one to blame for it but himself. You can't expect anyone who makes it a habit to check out the statements of "experts" to believe him at all. The day he starts citing other scientists and public health workers, backing up his assertions with hard data, and looking at the situation as a whole, is the day he comes off my "unhelpful" list.
I don't accept unsupported assertion from physicians, from Skeptics, from the government, from holistic healers, or from anybody else. I'm sorry if you think that's a form of ridicule, but I consider it an essential practice to question anyone who is telling me what is good for me. You ask "where's the integrity?" -- where there is a dollar to be made, I assume there is no integrity whatsoever, whether the dollar is chased by alternative healers, the company that produces Splenda, or by anyone else.
--bkl