THERE'S AN epic battle shaping up between the makers of Splenda and Equal over Splenda's advertising claim that it's "made from sugar." That line has helped Splenda sales soar:

Equal had once dominated the market, finding its way into more than 6,000 consumer products like Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, the two biggest buyers of artificial sweeteners in the world. But since Splenda was introduced in late 1999, Equal has steadily been elbowed aside and Splenda is now No. 1, with 62 percent of the market in the United States.

So is it really made from sugar?

McNeil says that the process it uses to manufacture Splenda starts with sugar, pure and simple. To make sucralose, McNeil adds three chlorine atoms that are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce to a molecule of sucrose. The sucrose disappears in the manufacturing process, but the result — sucralose — is 600 times as sweet as ordinary table sugar. Splenda then mixes two bulking agents, dextrose and maltodextrin, into the sucralose.

It's definitely not "made of sugar." But it sounds like it's "made with sugar," and "made from sugar" doesn't really seem like too much of a stretch.

But the KC still prefers Sweet'n Low.