Dani bought some Coke with Splenda last night. I decided to do a little research about Splenda to see what I might find out. In Google, the first result is the offical Splenda website.
http://www.splenda.com
On their product information page, there are a few bulleted items of things the Splenda people would like to point out. The first is that Spenda is "made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar".
In a Google search for Splenda, the 2nd to 4th results are sites that warn about the dangers of Splenda. I decided to read some of those sites as well.
I learned that Splenda's chemical name is sucralose. This name was chosen for marketing purposes because it sounds like sucrose, the chemical name for sugar. Sucralose is created from sugar by using chemical manipulation to replace 3 hydroxyl groups with chlorine atoms. This turns sucrose into a chlorocarbon. The Splenda site says that chlorine is naturally present in many of the foods we eat. What they fail to mention is that the chlorine in food is not present in a chlorocarbon form.
The Splenda website says that over 100 studies of Splenda have been performed. They don't mention that only 6 of them have been performed on humans. Toxicity testing on animals may not be sufficient because some substances prodoce a much greater toxicity in humans than in rodents. Of the 6 human trials of Spenda, only 2 of them were completed before the FDA approved sucralose for human consumption. Those 2 trials had a total of 36 people, and lasted 4 days or less.
The longest human trial of Splenda lasted 3 months. In other words, nobody knows if Splenda adversely affects health after long term use. I will probably try to stay away from Splenda. If you consume it, I would advise you to research it for your own sake.