The high dose of the nonnutritive sweetener saccharin that caused a very small increase in bladder cancer in laboratory rats was equivalent to the human consumption of 1,200 cans of diet soda in a day. Silly? I think so. And it should be added, as already discussed, that the body is capable of repairing much of the damage that low levels of natural chemicals cause. Second, this method assumes that a response in one species (e.g., rat) is equivalent to the same kind of response in a second species (e.g., human). This is called “species-to-species extrapolation.” And it’s a huge leap of faith.
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