Interesting Facts

The artificial sweetener saccharin derives its name from the Greek word "sakcharon" and "saccharine", meaning "sugary". (A coal tar product, it is the oldest artificial sweetener, first produced in 1879, by Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist working on coal tar derivatives in Ira Remsen's laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University, but it didn't achieve commercial success until sugar shortages during World War I. It is about 300–400 times sweeter than table sugar, with effectively no calories.)

According to a study by Dr. Honglei Chen, an investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, there is a link between soft drinks and depression. (Participants in the study who drank more than four servings of fizzy drinks per day were 30 percent more likely to develop depression than participants who didn't, but it's not just fizzy pop, people who stuck with fruit squash had a 38 percent higher risk than people who didn't drink sweetened drinks. And it's not just sugary drinks, the research also showed that people who drank low-calorie diet drinks, iced teas, and fruit squash were at a slightly higher risk of depression too, and the artificial sweetener aspartame may be to blame. It does make me wonder though: do sugary drinks cause depression, or do depressed people try to cheer themselves up with a sweet drink? The good news is that drinking unsweetened coffee can lower the risk of depression. I'm a happy go lucky person, guess what I d