50 Years Ago

The cyclamate bandwagon has made farcical progress in the past week … The truth is that cyclamates have been banned because they are easy to ban, and the new evidence provides the slenderest possible scientific plank on which it is feasible for politicians to stand and claim easy credit for a blow against pollution … The evidence was about as solid as candy-floss … Not only had the rats been fed on doses of cyclamates which would sate the sweet tooth of a horse, but they had not even been fed on cyclamate alone; it was a mixed daily diet of cyclamates and saccharin that the animals had received. So was it the cyclamates or the saccharin, or synergism between the two, that had raised the malignant-looking cells in the animals’ bladders? … [T]he committees at last attained safe harbour in McPherson’s rule, an ancient tenet of Scottish law which holds that when two men have been drinking, one of them a known drunkard, and the other man starts a fight, it is always the drunkard that gets the blame. Applying this dictum to the bladder tumours, the committees found that since saccharin has been used for longer than cyclamates without apparently harmful effects, it must have been the cyclamate which caused the tumours.

From Nature 1 November 1969

100 Years Ago

The discoveries which in very recent times have been made as to the existence in certain foodstuffs of the remarkable substances known as vitamines and their non-existence in others must lead to a modification of our views concerning the whole question of dietary and health. The exact nature of the vitamines is at present unknown … All that can be said is that the amount present in any case is minute … Another line of work arises from the study of the question of the preservation of food by cold storage. It is now well known that the temperatures requisite in one case are not suitable in others; thus the cold required for meat and fish is not required for fruit, and even different kinds of fruit, such as plums and pears, cannot be shipped safely in the same chamber.

From Nature 30 October 1919