A sugar sweetener offered in campus dining halls contains ingredients that may cause cancer.

Sugar Twin, a sugar alternative, contains 3.68 percent of saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.

Saccharin is an artificial sweetener first discovered in 1879. The sugar packet sweetener contains the warning “use of this product may be hazardous to your health.” With that, some students have begun to express their concern.

“Why would they sell something cancerous to students?” said Sandra Hamer, a freshman marketing major.

Hamer noted the warning’s small print on the label.

“It is so small. I would have never noticed it,” she said.

Moreover, some students are disappointed with the lack of options available in the dining halls. Others feel they have little choice but to use Sugar Twin.

The dining halls on campus do, however, provide regular sugar and Equal, an artificial sweetener that does not list saccharin as one of its ingredients.

“It is not fair that [students] don’t have many sugar sweetener options available to us,” Hamer said.

Hamer feels there should be alternatives to the status quo of sugar sweeteners available to students.

“There needs to be more options, [and] some that don’t cause cancer,” she said.

Jaeson Wilkins is concerned about the effects the sugar could have on students with preexisting health problems.

“Some students already have diabetes. They don’t need cancer too,” said Wilkins, a freshmen textiles, apparel and merchandising major.

Although saccharin has been proved to cause cancer, its actual effects on the human body are still speculative.

“If there were a major risk, the FDA would have removed it by now.” said biochemistry professor Gary Baker .

Though sugar sweetener can cause cancer, the risk is no higher than attending tanning salons, he said.

Baker suggested students would be safest avoiding saccharin related products altogether.

“They are plenty of sweeteners that don’t have saccharin in them,” he said.