DailyDirt: How Sweet It Is?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
We’ve been following diet fads for a while now — and seeing how sugar (in various forms) has been blamed for health problems. Artificial sweeteners are supposed to help us avoid consuming too much sugar (and be more healthy in the balance), but it’s probably not surprising that studies are starting to show that these alternatives to sugar also have their own side effects.
- Aspartame is being removed from Pepsi products, but it’s still in thousands of other items that people eat and drink. Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives, and there isn’t much evidence that it causes health problems such as cancer — although phenylketonurics should stay away from it (as well as phenylalanine or anything that turns into phenylalanine). [url]
- Sucrose (aka table sugar) is a reference on the sweetness scale with a value of 1.0, and other natural sugars such as fructose can be a bit sweeter (1.1-1.8). Other naturally-occurring compounds like chloroform and stevia are orders of magnitude sweeter than sucrose, but you probably don’t want to ingest chloroform. Lugduname is one of the sweetest compounds known, estimated to be over 200,000 times sweeter than sucrose, but it’s not approved as a food additive (yet). People throughout history have been poisoned by sweet toxins (eg. lead acetate), but hopefully we’ll avoid a similar fate. [url]
- Artificial sweeteners might reduce the calories a person consumes (depending on how much a person actually consumes), but these additives may also alter the microbiome in the digestive system, making some people less able to control blood sugar levels. It’s still uncertain what the net effect of artificial sweeteners might be on any particular individual, but it’s probably not as easy as you might think it is to eliminate all added sugar and artificial sweeteners from your diet. [url]
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Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diabetes, diet, food, food additive, lugduname, microbiome, phenylketonurics, stevia, sucrose, sugar, taste
Companies: pepsi
Comments on “DailyDirt: How Sweet It Is?”
All I need
My wife is the sweetest thing on the planet.
P.S. Please forward this to her next time I am in the dog house.
Re: All I need
I’ll tell her when I see her tonight.
My mother tried Stevia extract once. She put the recommended amount of one drop into her coffee and said she couldn’t taste any sweetness at all. She then put in several drops, but still couldn’t taste it. She gave up on it and switched to using Sweet-N-Low.
I tried Truvia once, a powdered sweetner made from Stevia. I was making a single packet of Kool-Aid, which makes about half a gallon. I put in five packets, but it wasn’t sweet at all. So I added another five, making ten total. It still tasted like plain Kool-Aid flavored water. Six packets of Splenda in the same amount of water is usually enough to give it a slightly sweet taste.
Re: Re:
Weird. My parents use stevia and I honestly think it’s much, much better than aspartame for instance (though I only use at their place because sugar is much better). Maybe some people are more sensitive to it?
Re: Re:
I think stevia is very, very sweet. Much sweeter than sugar. On the other hand, I don’t think of Splenda as sweet at all. It tastes very chemically, with a slightly sweet aftertaste.
Perhaps there is something genetic going on, like how lots of people think that cilantro tastes wonderful and lots of other people think it tastes like soap.
Re: Re: Re:
By itself, Stevia/Truvia tastes sweet to me, but when I add it to anything else, such as a drink or cereal, I can’t taste it at all.
Left Chondrite Sugar
Ban all artificial sweeteners – they’re deadly.
Force makers of sucralose admit that sugar alcohols have the exact same effect on blood sugar levels as regular sugar does.
If a company wants to reduce the “sugar” content, switch to all natural left chondrite sugar – aka Tagatose.
Left chondrite means left handed – ie – the sugar molecule is spun in a mirror image to normal right chondrite sugar.
The human body is not readily able to digest and process left chondrite sugar. Most bodies end up metabolising less than 15% of it, some less, some a bit more.
Overall, that reduces the sugar content without causing the body to react like it would to artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols.
Re: Left Chondrite Sugar
Yah. The problem with indigestible sugar is that it isn’t much sweeter than regular sugar — and the volume has to go somewhere….
Re: Left Chondrite Sugar
Ban all artificial sweeteners – they’re deadly.
How deadly? How many deaths per year are caused by, for example, aspartame?
Re: Re: Left Chondrite Sugar
In terms of acute toxicity, aspartame has an LD50 (the dose required to kill half of a population) of 5 grams per kilogram of body weight. The LD50 of other sweeteners vary widely, but they are all very high doses, far larger than you’d accidentally ingest.
Long term toxicity is a more difficult problem to quantify for a lot of reasons, but a couple have been studied long enough and intensively enough that something intelligent can be said about them. Perhaps the most famous one is saccharine.
In the long term, saccharine does not appear to have any toxicity associated with it above what we accept in all of our other foods and food ingredients. So, based on that alone, it is inaccurate to say that “all artificial sweeteners are deadly”. Saccharine is not, and it’s very likely that lots of other artificial sweeteners are not as well. Probably the overwhelming majority of them.
If you want to be extra cautious about them, the thing to do is to avoid the new ones and stick with the ones that have been around long enough that we have good data on long-term problems resulting from their use.