ABSTRACT
The ability of saccharin to impart a sweet taste to food and beverages was discovered nearly 100 years ago. Much more recently, in the late 1930s, it was found that cyclamates also shared this property. Both of these substances were proposed as food additives and went through the normal battery of testing that was commonplace before the 1960s. These were mainly acute and subacute tests on laboratory animals to determine if these chemicals caused toxic effects after single-or shortterm exposures. They were not subjected to formalized testing protocols, although they were evaluated using generally accepted criteria for scientific validity that were followed by most scientists.
