Sucralose and why Natural is Important

First of all, is "sucralose" just a made-up word? I know scientific words are technically made up whether for natural things or synthetic.

Sucralose as it is branded and sold as a 0-calorie sweetener is NOT really a sugar (despite the sugar-sounding name ending in -ose).

Instead it's a chlorocarbon. Three OH ions in the sugar molecule are replaced with three Cl¯ ions. The resulting chlorocarbon is in the same family as carbon tetrachloride (carbon tet used to be used in dry cleaning but wasn't safe) and DDT. The current PERC (perchloroethylene) C2Cl4 would also be a chlorocarbon. This family of chemicals are known to be carcinogens.

I don't know which is worse, aspartame or sucralose.

There is a sweetener from a plant called stevia. The sweetener comes from the leaves and is processed similar to making tea with leaves.

I don't know the extraction process. I'm hoping it is nothing like the high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) process which reused fungi until they stop "processing." HFCS starts as mostly glucose and is concentrated into fructose. I wonder if this causes much more incidence of diabetes than sucralose ("table sugar").

Even natural things in excess can be bad, but when you start messing with nature, you just have to wait and see what happens, and disturbance is usually not karmically so good.

Flex Fuel Vehicles, Where's the Ethanol

My dad has a Flex Fuel pickup truck. It's a 2001 Mazda. For all intents and purposes it's a Ford before Ford bought Mazda.

The truck will burn gasoline or ethanol. The problem is there wasn't anywhere to buy ethanol. Even now, the closest station is about 60 miles away.

Here's a link to find alternative fuel stations close to you:

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/locator/stations/

The cheapest source of ethanol would presumably be processed from corn. Supply and demand would seem to make it cheaper if much more were produced. If many people used ethanol to fuel their cars gas demand would go down and could cause its price to drop. That would be good but could curtail efforts to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

So mass production of corn into ethanol would likely make for cheaper ethanol which would be replacing the use of gasoline.

So 8 years later, why are we still not seeing ethanol on every corner along with gas as long as gas would still be in demand?

Is there not enough profit to be made from corn? Is it not insanely cheaper to grow and process corn than to drill, pump and refine oil?

Interestingly enough, corn is SO cheap that it is processed into a substitute for sugar. The US government subsidizes a large amount of corn farming (which means tax dollars pay for it). Over-processed High Fructose Corn Syrup seems to be perfectly fine for consumption, even processed with a genetically modified enzyme and a fungus that gets reused until it stops giving results to get maximum profit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup.

So it sounds like the only reason we are still dependent on foreign oil is that we want to be.

Channing H.