All About Artificial Sweeteners

If you want your food or beverage sweetened – although of course it’s best if you don’t – and you want to avoid sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) for caloric or other reasons, what are your options? And of these options, what are the down sides and things to watch out for? 

What exactly is considered to be an artificial sweetener? After all, some of the non-sugar sweeteners are from natural sources, even if these sweeteners are separated from their natural origins by a number of processing steps. On the other hand, HFCS isn’t found in nature; is it considered to be an artificial sweetener? A more accurate description of the sweeteners under discussion here would thus be non-caloric sweeteners, as distinct from caloric sweeteners such as sugar, HFCS, honey, and maple syrup.  

Some of the non-caloric sweeteners include aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, acesulfame K, sugar alcohols, and stevia. Any food that is labeled diet, light, lite, or sugar-free most likely contains one or more of these. One of the biggest sources of artificial sweeteners is diet sodas.

What are some of the down sides of artificial sweeteners in general?
People who are most likely to use these sweeteners are those who are trying to lose weight, diabetics, and those who recognize correctly that sugar and corn syrup are dangerously unhealthy. However, a number of studies are showing that these artificially sweetened products can actually contribute to the ailments they are designed to prevent by substituting for sugar: type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and heart attacks. 

Any non-caloric sweetener has the potential to confuse your body’s sugar-regulating mechanisms. When something sweet is tasted, the body prepares for the sugar that is assumed to follow. But when sugar doesn’t follow, your body learns that it can’t count on what to expect. It was found that animals that have experience with artificial sweeteners soon become unable to effectively regulate their blood sugar levels when they get real sugar. This is the definition of diabetes or metabolic syndrome.

In addition to the physical effects, one of the many down sides to using artificial sweeteners is psychological. For many people, they seem to be a license to eat other sweet or highly caloric foods. 

Aspartame
Aspartame is, like the food additive MSG, an excitotoxin, although aspartame also provides sweetness. Like MSG, it doesn’t so much change the flavor of the food; it changes your brain chemistry to make food taste more flavorful, not something the average person would want to mess with. 

People who habitually drink caffeinated or other beverages sweetened with aspartame are often more addicted to the artificial sweetener than to the caffeine. Eliminating or changing the sweetener may well eliminate the craving for the beverage.

Aspartame breaks down in the body, not into its two main constituent amino acids, but to methanol, which is further broken down to highly toxic formaldehyde. Here’s a bit of irony: regular exposure to methanol can cause irreversible blindness, as can diabetes. How much of the blindness associated with diabetes is due at least in part to the sweetener frequently used by diabetics? 

Sucralose 
Sucralose has the -ose ending, which makes it sound more like actual sugar. Their advertising boasts that it is made from sugar and so it tastes like sugar, yet has no calories. Technically, yes, it starts with sugar, but the sugar is chlorinated so it isn’t digested and turned into body fat.  

Sugar alcohols
Sugar alcohols such as mannitol, xylitol, and sorbitol – they end in -ol rather than -ose – technically contain calories but are listed as noncaloric because they are difficult to digest. However, they do feed the intestinal bacteria that cause bloat, gas, and diarrhea, common side effects of the use of these sweeteners.

Saccharin
Saccharin has been around for over a century. It was originally made from coal tar and is still made from related chemicals. It can cause allergic reactions in those who are sensitive to sulfa drugs.

Acesulfame-K
Acesulfame-K – the K refers to the chemical symbol for potassium, and the sweetener is sometimes called acesulfame potassium – is an artificial sweetener. Unlike some of the others, it is rarely used alone but usually in combination with other artificial sweeteners such as aspartame. 

Stevia
Unlike most of the other non-caloric sweeteners, stevia is usually considered natural rather than artificial because it comes from a plant. You can get the plant itself and taste one of the leaves; it is sweet and has the distinctive stevia taste. However, when you buy stevia at the store, it is a white powder or clear liquid, clearly quite a few processing steps from those green leaves. In its usual form for sale, it is as highly processed and concentrated as cane sugar.

The bottom line
As you can see, there is no type of sweetener, caloric or otherwise, that is without its down side, although some are worse than others. Stevia is likely the best, health-wise, followed by sucralose. There is no up-side to using sweeteners of any kind other than preferring the sweet taste. Sugar substitutes are, almost invariably and for different reasons, even worse than sugar.

Although sugar is certainly a stress on the body, as covered in another article, at least the body knows what to do with it; the same can’t be said for these sweet-tasting chemical concoctions.

It’s far better to break your dependence on sweetness in the first place, after which the natural sweetness in fruits and even vegetables will be more evident and just as enjoyable.  

A great place to start would be with the “Alchemy Cleanse.” It’s a 10-day metabolic detox diet, that will not only clean your body out down to the cellular level, it will also help remove yeast and fungus, which causes the body to crave more sugars and sweets.

Your health is a reflection of how you choose to live!