Everett Koop once estimated he’d have to drink four bathtubs full of diet soda to ingest the amount of cyclamates fed to lab rats.

That just happens to be half as much as my siblings and I consumed each week growing up in the ’60s.

The old man would lug home cases of ultra-cheapo diet drinks, and we’d guzzle ’em with gusto. It didn’t matter that they glowed in the dark and tasted as if they’d been mixed up in somebody’s septic tank. They were as close as we ever got to something not entirely unlike soda, and we loved them.

Then came the cyclamate scare of 1969, with its deformed chicks and tumor-ridden mouse bladders, and that was it – no more mutant soda for us. Cyclamates were banned, as one public-health specialist later said, at the drop of a rat.

Sugar scares people – it rots teeth, allegedly makes kids hyper, contributes to gobs of diseases, adds to the national glut of gut. But artificial sweeteners, most of them chemicals stumbled upon by chemists trying to create other things, have a history of scaring the public even more.

Who can ever forget the world’s most famous warning label?

“Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”

***IMAGING DEPARTMENT: PLEASE CLONE OUT WIRES EXTENDING FROM PACKETS**** JPM356 Several brands of sugar substitutes, including Sweet and Low, Splenda, Sweet Leaf Stevia and Equal, are profiled in the Health and Fitness section. Shot in the RMN studio on Wednesday morning, Sept. 21, 2005. (PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MAHONEY / ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS) ***IMAGING DEPARTMENT: PLEASE CLONE OUT WIRES EXTENDING FROM PACKETS****

Specifically, bladder cancer in rats. As a result of that study, the Food and Drug Administration tried to ban saccharin in 1977, creating such a public outcry that Congress blocked the agency – eight times, in fact – and slapped on the warning label instead.

“Back then, saccharin was the only artificial sweetener available,” says Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy group. “Some people really wanted it, and industry certainly wanted to continue making Tab. So saccharin was let off the hook.”

The FDA eventually abandoned the ban effort, and in 2000 the warning label was dropped as well – despite a National Cancer Institute human study that found an increased risk of bladder cancer in heavy saccharin users. This was one of the rare tests actually conducted by the government itself; in most cases, the industry submits its own test results to the FDA when it petitions for approval.

Jacobson’s group still considers saccharin unsafe, although the danger should be kept in perspective, he says.

“The risk to a given individual from having some saccharin-sweetened soda or coffee is really trivial,” Jacobson says. “It’s when you multiply that times 200 million people that the risk becomes much more significant.”

And what of cyclamates? That faux- sweetener saga began in 1937 with a discovery by chemistry graduate student Michael Sveda, who tasted something sweet on the cigarette he’d just stuck in his mouth while mucking about in the lab.

• The skinny on substitutes (12-25-05)

By the late 1960s, Americans were sucking down more than 21 million pounds of cyclamates a year. That ended after studies connected the substance with chromosome damage and those bladder tumors in rats.

“Sadly, in his lifetime he saw his contributions vilified and rejected as a result of antiscientific, technophobic witch hunts,” wrote Elizabeth Whelan, co-founder of the American Council on Science and Health and author of books including “Panic in the Pantry” and “The l00% Natural, Purely Organic, Cholesterol-Free, Megavitamin, Low-Carbohydrate Nutrition Hoax.”

The ACSH is a smidge hyperbole-prone. Often called industry shills, Whelan’s group grew directly out of what she considered misguided government regulation of a lot of absolutely dandy chemicals. Many substances labeled carcinogens “would more properly be called high-dose rodent carcinogens,” the group says.

“Listening to them, you would think they want studies done on humans,” Jacobson says, noting that every government agency in the world agrees that animal studies are the best we have.

Americans appear to have faith in test results, or maybe they just don’t care. According to a survey by the Calorie Control Council, a “light” food trade association, 84 percent of the U.S. adult population use low-calorie and sugar-free foods and beverages, and two-thirds of all Americans use such products several times a week or more.