The mak­ers of Equal are suing the mak­ers of Splenda in what may be a con­tentious court bat­tle. At stake: whether Splenda is really “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.”

Of course, Splenda isn’t made from nat­ural sugar. But at the start of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, it is syn­thetic sucrose. Then it is chem­i­cally con­verted to sucralose, which is appar­ently 600 times sweeter. The eso­teric details of the argu­ments for both sides are pretty funny.

Who drinks this stuff? A lot of peo­ple, appar­ently. The biggest use of arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers is the man­u­fac­ture of diet soft drinks, which have never appealed to me. Ordi­nary sugar is per­fectly tasty, and your body can actu­ally extract nutri­ents from it. I can’t rea­son why any­one would delib­er­ately con­sume an indi­gestible sub­stance, as it makes eat­ing kind of pointless.