Seriously, they not only taste bad, but they’re bad for you, and don’t help with weight loss. But they’re big business.
13 thoughts on “Artificial Sweeteners”
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Seriously, they not only taste bad, but they’re bad for you, and don’t help with weight loss. But they’re big business.
Comments are closed.
I blame Rumsfeld.
Not much evidence from some experiments on fruit flies and mice.
1) We know that sugar causes serious negative health consequences, in the quantities that people ingest it. Does sucralose? (Not according to the FDA, not so far. There have been many studies, pretty much no results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose#Health.2C_safety.2C_and_regulation)
2) If we do find that sucralose has confirmed consequences, are they worse than sugar’s? If not, we should be encouraging people to use sucralose.
The article treats as gospel the now-discredited notion that increased caloric intake inevitably causes weight gain. This is known to be false for humans, is likely false for mice as well and may even be false for fruit flies.
I’ve been on a very-low-carb diet for four years. I am 45 pounds lighter now than I was then. This weight loss has come despite having given up what little exercise I did previously because of an unrelated medical condition. Now that said condition seems nearly resolved, I anticipate resuming at least modest exercise before year’s end.
I consume sucralose as a manufacturer-included sweetener in diet soda and sugar-free candy, and as a self-added minor ingredient in homemade cole slaw and chicken salad dressings – commercially prepared dressings tend to be full of high-fructose corn syrup and other horrors. My diet these past four years has been dominated by fat and secondarily by protein. I eat a lot of meat, chicken, eggs, fish and cheese. I also eat a lot of low-carb green vegetables such as collard greens and green beans. My carb consumption tends to be 5% or less of my daily food intake.
Nothing about my diet makes me crave more food than formerly. On the contrary, I eat only when I get sufficiently hungry and that seems to average about every 12 hours now. Within a month or two of starting on my current diet, I noticed I no longer felt hungry most of the time. The intervals between hungry-enough-to-eat occurrences quickly stretched to six hours and continued to increase to my current average of 12 over the first two years of my new regimen. When I was still a carb-scarfer, going even four hours between meals was a lot more difficult than it is now for me to go 12.
Sucralose is not a major component of my diet; it’s essentially a spice, not a food. My consumption of it is naturally limited by a certain sensitivity I seem to share with a fair number of people. Early in my use history with the stuff, I discovered that, above a certain fairly modest level of daily consumption, sucralose acts as a laxative. It seems to be the sugar-free candy that does it; I’m able to drink all the diet soda and eat all the cole slaw and chicken salad I want with no effect. If I keep my daily sugar-free candy consumption down to just a piece or two, I have no problems with the stuff at all.
That’s my story. It stands in pretty much direct contravention of everything our government, the medical establishment and the quack “nutritionist” camp have been dinning into our heads since the end of WW2. YMMV needless to say.
But that works both ways. There are doubtless people out there who would achieve even better results than I have. I probably would have myself if I’d started my regimen 10, 20 or 30 years sooner. Poisoning oneself with unsuitable food for the first 60 years of one’s life produces a certain amount of irreversible battle damage, unfortunately. I consider myself fortunate to have wised up when I did.
I go all day without eating, usually, unless I’m traveling, and do it for social reasons. I’ll have a couple cups of coffee in the morning, drink some (but not a lot) of water during the day, and have dinner at night.
For a time I used sucralose, aka ‘Splenda’, in tea several times a day. But somehow I lost my “taste” for it, and stopped using it. That brought on withdrawal symptoms that lasted for a month or so – not particularly extreme, but certainly bothersome.
Over several years my carbohydrate consumption has asymptotically approached zero. Cream alone provides all the sweetness I want in my coffee or tea. For the few things I sweeten, 1/2 tsp. each of stevia and xylitol usually suffices.
The obesity epidemic went into high gear not long after the cyclamate ban. Coincidence?
The post mentions artificial sweeteners in general, but the study only looked at sucralose. In fact the SA article also mentioned “sugar substitutes” generically, while including a photo of Sweet’n’Low packets.
So this post and the original article are to a degree dishonest. it is not valid to claim “artificial sweeteners” are generically bad based on a single study of a single sweetener.
Saccharin is -or should be- a good example of bad research. Studies in the early 1970s claimed links to bladder cancer, which upon further research were found to be without basis.
In fact artificial sweeteners are very good for diabetics, saccharin especially so.
I make my own soda using a SodaStream machine with an adapter that lets me use a 24oz paintbal tank. I can make about 35-40 liters of soda water for just $5. I mix my own cola mix instead of the SodaStream mix using concentrated snow cone flavorings. I take 64 mg of snow cone flavor concentrate and add enough water to top off a 500 mg container. Then I add a concentrated sucralose solution that is used for sugar free candy making; tastes just like sugar to me. I also use Stevia from time to time but it far more expensive than the sucralose. It only takes about 7 mg of the NuSweet solution to sweeten the soda drink mix which is enough to make about 12 liters of soda. In all it costs about .15 cents to make a liter of soda that tastes just like Coca Cola. If I mix about a teaspoon of sour salt (used in canning) to it, it tastes more like a Pepsi. At any rate I drink about 1-2 liters of this self-made soda a day.
I eat a low carb lifestyle and generally find my appetite levels are fairly on par with what many people’s experience seem to be when on a low carb diet. I walk around a lot at work and do get hungry around lunch time due to the energy expenditure. But otherwise on the weekends I often don’t eat all day till dinner time. I don’t find drinking a couple liters of diet soda has any effect on my appetite. I weighed 290 a couple of years ago and stepped on the scale today and weighed 215 (I’m 6′ 4″). Although, last weekend I treated myself to a pint of Ben & Jerry’s after working an extra 20 hours of overtime that week. The next day I felt hunger pains that I hadn’t felt in quite some time. So, I know for a fact the diet soda isn’t doing anything at all to my appetite in comparison to the sugary ice cream.
You are The Man, Dude!
I don’t think we really know much about it. The body is so complex, with so many feedback paths, and every person has a different mix of metabolic machinery. For some people, it may be just right, and for others, death crystals.
IMHO, anecdotal evidence and studies that seek to prove an a priori conclusion lead us into these endless cycles of good food/bad food, with the players continuously changing sides. Add in a good dose of naturalistic fallacy, and you have the current state of nutrition science, such as it is.
You’re quite right about human variability. That’s why more choice is always a good thing and why the U.S. government’s longstanding ban on cyclamate sweeteners is a bad thing. People with PKU can’t consume aspartame, for example. Even people without PKU have experienced negative effects ranging from serious to relatively trivial in consuming aspartame. There may be people who have an equally diverse spectrum of problems with respect to sucralose. I am, myself, one of those who has a minor problem with sucralose.
I’m not attempting to pass off the entirety of my recent personal experience as necessarily normative, but it certainly contradicts the reigning nutritional orthodoxy. And, as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is data. As we learn more about the dodgy nature of the early “research” that allegedly supported the “fat is evil” agenda, we see that the blatant scientific rot readily apparent in the climate science community has precursors in other areas.
Ya know how we have soy milk and all the other kinds of “non-dairy creamer” out there? That isn’t so you can reduce your waist line. It’s because some people can’t eat dairy. Same thing with artificial sweeteners, you insensitive clod.