roses are red; violets, blue

Sugar is sweet, and so is Splenda. And that makes the Sugar Association, well, bitter.

Splenda, an artificial sweetener enjoying surging sales growth, is marketed by the McNeil Nutritionals unit with the line: "Made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar."

The Sugar Association and several consumer organizations say that the marketing pitch does not accurately represent the end product, as the sugar used to make Splenda is converted to sweetener, using chlorine.

Furthermore, The Center for Science in the Public Interest can't count.

To understand how consumers perceived Splenda's slogan, last April CSPI commissioned a national Internet survey that included 426 people who had used Splenda. Only 57 percent of Splenda users correctly believed that Splenda was an artificial sweetener. 47 percent of Splenda users incorrectly believed it was a natural product. 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.

57 + 47 = 104. Go figure. Or don't.

I'd like to think that the Internet users polled were simply deconstructing the distinction between "natural" and "artificial." Sing along, cavepersons: Natural good! Artificial bad!