Little Known Facts About Artificial Sweeteners

Confused about whether or not to but artificial sweeteners in your coffee, tea or baked goods? First things first, what exactly are artificial vs. natural sweeteners? Artificial sweeteners are just that- man made and usually prepared using some kind of chemical process. Natural sweeteners are made from natural elements (think about sugar from beets or sugar cane). There has been much controversy and many misconceptions about these sweeteners in the news and media. I’m sure you’ve all heard of them, and are certainly getting them somehow, through the food you eat or the drinks you consume- you might be asking the same questions we all are- are they really safe?

First of all, the most widely used sweeteners are saccharin and aspartame. Aspartame is sold under the brand names NutraSweet®, Sugar Twin®, and Equal®. Typically it’s found in breakfast cereals, soft drinks and chewing gums. Now, I’m sure most Americans believe that aspartame contains fewer calories than sugar- this statement is in fact, wrong! Teaspoon for teaspoon aspartame contains the same amount of calories! Why is Aspartame a weight loss tool? Because aspartame, like all artificial sweeteners is much sweeter than sugar- 200 times sweeter. So you need much less of it to sweeten up your coffee or tea. There have been many studies linking aspartame to cancer however the official conclusions of these studies have been inconclusive- basically only extremely large amounts of Aspartame have been linked to cancer. Now, I don’t know about you- but this sends up a red flag in my eyes.

Similar studies have arisen with the second most commonly consumed artificial sweetener, Saccharin, which is sold under the name brands Sweet’N Low®, Sweet Twin®, and Necta Sweet®. Saccharin is 200-700 times sweeter than sugar. A lot of artificial sweeteners don’t give the same effect as sugar once baked, but Saccharin can- it’s found in baked goods and jams as well as soft drinks and chewing gums. Saccharin gave rise to the initial cancer scare. It all began with studies on laboratory rats in the 1970's that first linked saccharin with the development of bladder cancer. Because of this, Congress made the call to mandate further studies of saccharin to be performed and to require all labels on food containing saccharin bear the warning label “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.” However, because the cause of bladder cancer in rats is due to a mechanism not relevant to humans and because there was no clear indicator that it caused cancer in humans, it was taken off the list in 2000 from the US National Toxicology Program’s Report on Carcinogens, where it has been listed since 1981. This eventually led to the repealing of the warning label requirement for products containing saccharin.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for making the call of whether certain foods are safe to last a lifetime of consumption- now we know that no one is perfect and they’ve made some mistakes in the past, but they’ve currently given the ‘thumbs up’ to five artificial sweeteners that can be found on the market today, Aspartame, Saccharin, Acesulfame-Potassium, Neotame and Sucralose. The latter three are only permitted for use in the US. With our history of consumer protection regarding food this concerns me the most. Acesulfame-Potassium (or ACK) was approved by the FDA in 1988 for use in specific food and beverage and was later approved for general purpose. Sucralose (or Splenda®) was approved by the FDA as a tabletop sweetener in 1988 and general purpose in 1999. Lastly Neotame (similar to Aspartame) was approved by the MDA as general purpose in 2002. What exactly does this mean? The FDA reviewed more than 100 safety studies that are conducted on each sweetener, including its link to cancer. Clearly they found nothing ‘conclusive.’

Remember, this means that not only are there inconclusive results about the negative effects of these sweeteners, there is also no conclusive results that these are create positive reactions in the body. Anything unnatural strikes our bodies as just that- and even though our bodies are amazing machines, they are simply not equipped to digest alien substances. Think of the rise of diabetes rates in the US- if a foreign substance is causing our blood sugar to spike, without our bodies knowing why exactly it could lead to the misconception of what exactly the body needs to break down, resulting in confusion and the eventual failure of the body’s ability to break down any glucose.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a few questions that immediately arise from not only the speediness of approval of these sweeteners, but also the amount in which we as a nation are consuming them. Yes, you would have to consume an extremely large amount of these sweeteners by themselves in order to have a link to cancer but if they pose some sort of a threat to your body shouldn’t we steer clear? Not only that, but shouldn’t they have more conclusive evidence of the long-term affects of these sweeteners? People are using tablespoon upon tablespoon of these non-nutritive sources in everything they put in their mouths under the impression they are calorie free. This is simply not true. In order to label something zero calories there must be less than five calories per serving, which means that instead of using a small amount of a natural source of sugar you’re dumping packet after packet of Splenda® in your coffee, you could be doing just as much (if not more) damage to your body.

In short, I’d think twice about putting more artificial substances in our bodies- there is too much ‘inconclusive’ evidence out there for me, I’d much rather take a few extra calories in my morning coffee (or scratch the coffee in total) than fill up on something so unknown. Don’t we already involuntarily ingest so many foreign substances day by day? Why not control the amount of a voluntary one.

Sources

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/artificial-sweeteners
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/weightkoch/15739/artificial-sweeteners-safe-to-sweeten-up-your-day