Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

by Michael Moss

The no-calorie sweeteners that millions of us are consuming now in our drinks and our food are also still poorly understood. The companies that make these sweeteners staunchly defend their products. They point to the studies that found no toxicity, and to studies that found people lose weight using them. Sucralose, for one, is being produced and used by us as a sugar substitute in more than four thousand products and in such mammoth quantities that since its invention more than forty years ago, nineteen million tons of sugar could have been taken out of the human diet, saving us seventy-seven trillion calories, says Tate and Lyle, which manufactures sucralose under the brand name Splenda.