Our friends at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (so hated by the food industry, by the way, that the chain restaurant industry created fake CSPI-style domain names to insult CSPI as the "food police") want Johnson & Johnson to stop advertising Splenda as "made from sugar."

Only 8 percent of the respondents correctly believed that it was made from sugar and chlorine. The sucralose in Splenda is, in fact, a synthetic chemical that contains chlorine, something that no natural sugar contains.

"Made from sugar," certainly sounds better than, say, "made from chlorinated hydrocarbons," or "made in a laboratory," or "fresh from the factory." Splenda's artificiality may present a marketing challenge, but that's not an excuse to confuse consumers and lead them to believe that Splenda is natural or in any way related to sugar. I hope that McNeil starts marketing Splenda honestly

Unfortunately for CSPI, Splenda actually is made from sugar that's processed with chlorine to replace three hydroxyl groups with chlorine. CSPI believes it's safe, but never objects to more testing.

My question: would it be OK to describe Splenda or sucralose as "chlorinated sugar?"