Harvard Dining Halls End Use of Cyclamates Today

The Harvard dining halls are phasing out their use of fruit drinks containing calcium cyclamate-an artificial sweetener which has been suspected of causing cancer in rats.

William H. Echols. manager of College Dining Halls, said that starting with last Thursday's beverage purchase, no fruit drink shipments will contain cyclamates. The remaining stocks of cyclamated beverage will be exhausted today.

Most fruit drinks served here use sugar as a sweetener, but some flavors, such as lemon-lime, were available only with a cyclamte base, C. Graham Hurlbut, director of the Food Services Department, said yesterday. He added that cyclamates had been used at Harvard in no foods except the fruit punch.

One glass of this beverage contains 2/10 gram of cyclamate. It would take almost 20 glasses to reach the old Food and Drug Administration daily limit. "They would have a case of internal drowning before coming up to FDA levels," Hurlbut said.

The Food Services Department announced its policy of using only sugar sweetened drink on October 15th, several days before the Food and Drug Administration revoked its earlier approval of cyclamates.

"The mere fact that we had the decision out a week before they did was no act of brilliance on our part," Hurlbut said. The furor over cyclamates "was coming to a head" at that time, and "if sugar-based drinks were available, why not use them?" he said.

Weight watchers and diabetics have used cyclamates as a sugar substitute since the early 1950's. But several researchers have claimed that cyclamates produce changes in the testes, kidneys, adrenals, and livers of laboratory animals. Others have found that a cyclamate breakdown product raises blood pressure and causes chromosome damage.

But many of these researchers used higher doses of cyclamates than humans would receive. No direct evidence has yet shown that cyclamates harm human beings.

After weighing the arguments, The FDA decided to ban the use of cyclamates by February 1.