Splenda Questions

I take my coffee black — no cream, no sugar.

(Actually I don’t take my coffee at all at the moment. After two and a half weeks without caffeine of any kind, I’m back on the iced tea. But that’s a subject for another post.)

Xy, on the other hand, takes hers with enough sugar to kill a horse. She used to use a load of cream too, but she’s cut back on that recently.

We’re talking an insane amount of sugar, so that her coffee becomes more like a thick sludge than a liquid. I’ve encouraged her to use less, because all that sugar isn’t good for a person. She says she can’t live without it.

But this morning she tried Splenda for the first time.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she said, “but it’s not bad.”

Splenda is the trade name for sucralose. It has no calories at all. But is sucralose really a healthful alternative to sugar, or does it present dangers of its own? I understand that, even though it’s made from sugar, it’s chemically more similar to DDT. That doesn’t sound good. So what is the truth about Splenda?