Food: Cyclamates’ Sour Aftertaste

After the Government banned cyclamates, the diet-food industry last week began one of the fastest turnarounds in U.S. industrial history. Officers of firms in the $1 billion-a-vear diet market hustled to cut their ties with cyclamates, to find an acceptable substitute, and to redirect marketing efforts to preserve demand for their heavily promoted brands. From now on, many of the diet drinks will be sweetened by a sugar-saccharin compound that may contain 30 calories in eight ounces, compared with only one or two calories in a cyclamate drink and 105 in a cola sweetened with straight sugar. The revised drinks will, of course, be labeled “new,” and printing on the package will note prominently that they contain no cyclamates.

Terribly Intuitive. Coca-Cola officials, caught unprepared by the ban, worked round the clock, preparing advertising copy and arranging to start production of a saccharin-sweetened syrup for Fresca, which will contain only two calories in eight ounces. “This was a jumping joint,” says Charles W. Adams, senior vice president. “We got a lot of printers up in the middle of the night.” PepsiCo, which began marketing a new Diet Pepsi the day the ban was announced, attributed its switch to a burst of altruism. Big ads in newspapers noted solemnly: the “Pepsi-Cola Company cannot in good conscience offer its customers any products about which even the remotest doubt exists.” The ad urged that “other soft-drink companies . . . follow Pepsi-Cola’s lead in developing cyclamate-free beverages.” Mary Wells Lawrence, the adwoman whose agency had just completed a new campaign for Royal Crown’s Diet Rite when the ban was announced, claims that she had little trouble adjusting to a non-cyclamate new version being introduced this week. “Either we’re terribly intuitive or somebody up there loves us,” she said, “but the new campaign has nothing to do with dieting.”

Most of the producers of diet canned fruits have just completed their autumn packing, and are likely to be stuck with huge unsold stocks. David E. Guerrant, president of Libby, McNeill & Libby, which has a low-calorie canned-fruit line, called the Government ban “unwarranted.” He asked that the Feb. 1 deadline for withdrawing all items containing cyclamates be extended to Sept. 1. Meanwhile, the search for a palatable low-calorie formula goes on. Almost a dozen diet-food producers have approached Adolph’s Food Products, which manufactures a sugar substitute composed mainly of glycine, an amino acid.

Actually, the concrete evidence of the cancer threat in cyclamates came out of a private study commissioned by Abbott Laboratories, the major manufacturer. To its credit, the company immediately brought the results to the Food and Drug Administration. The Delaney Amendment, signed in 1958, requires the FDA to brand as unsafe any additive that has been shown to induce cancer in humans or animals. Last week New York Congressman James J. Delaney, the bill’s sponsor, warmly recalled the support he had received from Actress Gloria Swanson, now 70, who roused interest in the bill in a 1952 speech to congressional wives. “I was screaming at the wind until she came along,” said Delaney.

Fresh Doubts. The furor over cyclamates in the U.S. prompted Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Finland to ban the sweetener last week. The furor also raised fresh doubts about other food additives that are now listed by the FDA as “Generally Recognized As Safe,” or GRAS in bureaucratese. The agency is now taking another look at the list, especially at monosodium glutamate (MSG), which has been found to cause brain damage in infant mice. Last week major manufacturers of baby food said that they will stop adding MSG. As if the diet-conscious American had not enough to worry about, the FDA also announced that it was again assessing the safety of saccharin.