Artificial Sweeteners
Welcome back to another episode of naturopath's corner.
I'm Maya, as you know, and today I want to talk about one of the questions that I get asked the most often in clinic and that is, what about artificial sweeteners? Why should we avoid them? Do we need to avoid them?
On the surface Artificial Sweeteners have great potential, right?
Because instead of 140 calories in our can of drink we get zero. Yay! It's like the perfect diet food. Right?
If you ask me the answer is probably not.
The first thing is for me, it's in the name, it's an artificial sweetener, it isn't known in nature. As a general rule, we want to limit the intake of artificial foods, you can refer to them as ultra processed, and most of us already know that these are the kinds of foods that we should be avoiding.
Artificial sweeteners are a lot sweeter than sugar. They can be about 600 times sweeter than sugar. That's why the diet version of a drink is sweeter than the actual version of the drink. If you're drinking these artificial sweeteners on a regular basis, what's actually happening is that you are creating a new threshold for sweetness. And in this new threshold, fruit just doesn't measure up. So we just want to have more and more and more sweet things.
A weird animal study found that sweeteners are potentially highly addictive. And when rats get the choice between saccharin and cocaine, they went for this saccharin. So this isn't great news.
When it comes to the safety of these sweeteners, studies are inconclusive. But what I can say is that we really don't know what the effect of large amounts of these chemicals have over many years.
I'm also concerned by the fact that some trials have shown that consumption of diet drinks can put you at a far higher risk of developing conditions like metabolic syndrome and type two diabetes, and mostly we choose the artificially sweetened drink because we want to reduce our risk of these things.
Artificial Sweeteners appear to change the host microbiome, basically what it means is that it's affecting your gut bacteria which is basically in charge of everything in your body. So that's got the potential to not be great news.
Another thing that it can do is it can lead to decreased satiation which means that you you require more food in order to feel full.
Another thing is it can alter glucose homeostasis, which can be the cause for insulin resistance, which is associated with increased caloric consumption and weight gain.
So even if the research isn't conclusively against it, I suggest to err the side of caution, so I don't recommend people use artificial sweeteners, I do recommend avoiding them whenever possible.
And if you would like to find other alternatives, personally, I would say drink more water. If you don't like water, you can add fruit to your water, actual literal fruit, not fruit flavoured waters. Those just include either sugar or artificial sweeteners. Drink herbal tea, that's what I do. I drink herbal tea, it works. It's delicious. And it's sugar free. I have found that a knowing all of this really does make you drink less, another option is to go from one to half, to quarter to none, usually works better than trying to go from hero to zero.
So these were few reasons why in my mind, artificial sweeteners don't live up to the hype and why we should try and avoi
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Maya x