Please don't let Splenda products fool you.

I got really into to Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt recently. I was eating 2-3 a day.

Ummm... all that Splenda KILLED me. I cut it out two days ago and I'm still suffering the side effects.

Splenda is poison. Look it up on google. It's very harmful, and I don't recommend it in any form, except in serious moderation.

As with any other food additive or nutritional supplement, the sweetness of Splenda can still be enjoyed safely in moderate quantities.

Caroline W. Sham (2005) "Splenda - A Safe and Sweet Alternative to Sugar", Nutrition Bytes: Vol. 10: No. 2, Article 5.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclabiolchem/nu tritionbytes/vol10/iss2/art5

Original Post by kunfushuss:

I should write an article on it every day just to counteract the crazies.

 I find that a little harsh.  I'm not crazy just because Splenda gives me stomach cramps.  I don't think anyone else who has a bad reaction to it is crazy either.

"2 double-blind challenge studies report difficulty recruiting persons who claim an allergic response to aspartame and failure to reproduce the allergic reaction in controlled experiment conditions"

American Dietetic Association. Position of the American Dietetic Association: use of nutritive and nonnutritive sweeteners. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2004; 104(6):1013. 

 

(this says that it's a psychosomatic effect - a placebo effect - people THINK aspartame makes them sick, and so it actually happens... consider this my response, redkitty)

  

sorry.. i know stomach cramps and allergic reactions aren't the same... but scientific studies aren't finding any real side effects to any of them.  i'll grab some more.

Pshhh... whatever. Splenda is awesome!

"No adverse experiences or clinically detectable effects were attributable to sucralose in either study. Similarly, haematology, serum biochemistry, urinalysis and EKG tracings were unaffected by sucralose administration. In the 13-week study, serial slit lamp ophthalmologic examination performed in a random subset of the study groups revealed no changes. Fasting and 2-hour post-dosing blood sucralose concentrations obtained daily during week 12 of the study revealed no rising trend for blood sucralose. Sucralose was well tolerated by human volunteers in single doses up to 10 mg/kg/day and repeated doses increasing to 5 mg/kg/day for 13 weeks. Based on these studies and the extensive animal safety database, there is no indication that adverse effects on human health would occur from frequent or long-term exposure to sucralose at the maximum anticipated levels of intake."

 

McLean Baird, N.W. Shephard, R.J. Merritt and G. Hildick-Smith, Repeated dose study of sucralose tolerance in human subjects, Food Chem Toxicol 38 (2000) (Suppl 2), pp. S123–S129.

 

I drink it with my tea and although not a lot I was having a lot of headaches and am currently monitoring to see if Splenda is the issue.  I was having daily headaches and it seems to be related to the green tea with splenda.  If that is the case I will either use something else or try to get used to the tea without the sweetner in it.  I did accidentally get a flavored green tea that tasted pretty good without sweetner, I just don't recall which it was.

I use Splenda all the time, I've never had any reactions.  If you were eating 2-3 of the yogurts a day... first of all... thats a ton of dairy (I'm a big believer of everything in MODERATION), and like other people on here have said, I think you might have a lactose problem.  Although you said you've been tested and told that you have none, your ability to tolerate lactose decreases as you get older, and some people's tolerance decreases at a faster rate than others... Everyone's body reacts to things differently, and you shouldn't believe everything you read just because you found it through a search engine on the internet. 

 Another thing I want to ask is.. were u consuming enough calories?  what else were you eating while you were on your little yogurt kick?  And what type of yogurt did you eat in the past that didn't make you sick?  It easily could have been some other food causing you to feel so sick or maybe just the fact that you can't handle that much yogurt.  Anyway, I'm sorry you got sick and I hope you don't experience that again, but I think goin to the doc would be the best thing for you.

That's cool if Splenda works for all of you. I personally have the same severe reaction as the OP. Why is every one so defensive about Splenda? Some people have a bad reaction to it. I'm not lactose or dairy sensitive either, not in the least. Splenda messes me up bad. Obviously it doesn't do it to everyone because it's still on the market, but we're not lying when we say it effects us that way.

sorry, i know this is off topic but i just wanted to mention this...near the beginning  of this post you said this:

"Couldn't have been the dairy. That was basically the only dairy product I consume. Other than yogurt and a tiny bit of cheese here and there I'm practically vegan."

however, i know for a fact, that Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt is not even a vegetarian food. it contains gelatin, which is not vegetarian, and therefore not even vegan. sorry, just a little FYI

i agree in a sense i was eating sugar free foods like light yogurt jello etc. and about a month or so into it i began getting headaches which turned to migraines. and when i went to the dr. he told me it was due to the artificial sweetners. so i switched to regular yogurts and sugars and have not had a problem since

I think the reason people may seem to be defending Splenda/sucralose is because of this, from the OP:

"Splenda is poison. Look it up on google. It's very harmful, and I don't recommend it in any form, except in serious moderation. "

Just as some people may definitely have an adverse physical reaction to Splenda, other people have absolutely no noticeable physical reaction to it.

Perhaps it is "poison" to some, but so are peanuts, to those who are allergic.

Anyway, count me as one who consumes several packets a day (in coffee, oatmeal) as well yogurt and light ice cream, etc., that contain sucralose, and have never had a problem.

There is a lot of debate on artificial sweeteners. A friend of mine almost died from aspartame poisoning (which from what I know is basically the same deal as sucralose) .

I figure the few extra calories in real sugar is worth the peace of mind of not having to worry about the side effects that could happen.

"Sucralose was well tolerated by human volunteers in single doses up to 10 mg/kg/day and repeated doses increasing to 5 mg/kg/day for 13 weeks"

Thats a really low dose of splenda:

"11.9 mg of sucralose in a 1g retail packet of Splenda"


so of course that study is going to show no reaction. Its a VERY small amout. And when you induce a toxin slowly into the body it adjust slowly so you notice symptoms less. Also I had a reaction that takes a couple months of consumption to show. Right at that paticular studies cut off point. They manipulate studies to reflect what they want them too.

At the end of the stude they only would of been eating 38 pkts of splenda. Now when you add up a bunch of diet foods with that and your drinks as well...You easily go over that amt.

Just a heads up-- Splenda and artificial sweeteners might not be good for dieters- depending on their frame of mind. They can give you cravings for sweet, which can be the downfall of any diet.

 Keep in mind- margarine is one carbon away from being plastic... it (and a bunch of stuff like it) is in a lot of what we eat, and when it's not, we put it there.

There's a girl in my physician assistant class who gets migranes if she even chews gum with splenda (or similar products) as a sweetener. Gotta be careful, but if it works for ya, it works for ya

I had the same thing happen to me after eating Splenda, and milk products weren't an issue since I wasn't eating them at all. I talked to my doctor about it and he advised me to cut down on the Splenda intake.

I also know someone who used to get really bad migraines from it. They couldn't figure out why she was getting them all of a sudden, and once she stopped eating splenda and went back to sugar, the migraines stopped.

WOw---I'm REALLY glad I found this forum cause I actually just recently started my OWN post about a similar topic!
to be blunt---I've had "negative effects" i.e. diarrhea for the past 2 days now and the ONLY thing I've changed in my diet is the fact that in order to get down my 1/2 gal. of water a day, I add sugar free/zero cal pink lemonade mix---and I use A LOT OF IT a day---
now.-----I'm fighting diarrhea,..and head-aches......
I'm SURE that for some,........they haven't had ANY ill effects--but for me----yeah--
not fun---but I've GOT TO KEEP drinking the water somehow!! I can't go back to drinking as much diet coke as I had been!. Seriously, there wasn't even a TIME IN my day where I would actually drink WATER----it was just always diet coke from the machine at work!.....
       I also use splenda in my oatmeal every morning...and I use s/f maple syrup in a lot of things.
DID stop buying Dannon Light n' Fit and opted for Stonyfield lowfat plain instead.......didn't like all that gelatin and sweetener,..despite that the low cal. was a tempter :) WHO CARES :) I am trying to GAIN WEIGHT so it was just a "safe" food for me anyway :) MUCH HAPPIER NOW---(as soon as I can be rid of this SIDE-EFFECT THAT IS!! ha ha)

I don't use any artificial sweeteners. The way I figure it, the farther away from the plant or the animal or the earth, the more complications we introduce. The more processed something is the more additives need to be added to preserve, color and flavor, and the more likely there is to have reactions we would ve able to predict or sort. And comprehensive testing on these additives and their long term effects has very often not been done. It's plain, organic yogurt with fresh fruit in it for me. More calories? Yeah. I adjust elsewhere. I just feel gross when I eat food with too much extra stuff in it.

If I need to sweeten stuff I use cane sugar, honey, or real maple syrup or go without. I do feel that, whether there are any negative health effects or not, artificial sweetener both encourage an addiction to sweetness instead of teaching the body to lower its desire for sugar, and that they sort of fool the body into thinking it is having sugar and thus making it harder to lose weight (another kind of placebo effect!)

Also, I have worked in the scientific field for awhile now, and I agree about the hysteria... type "side-effects of...anything" into google and you will find a million pages of quackery for every well research paper. That said, a lot of times the research simply isn't there and I tend to err on the side of caution. There is also a lot of shallow and ineffective research, and also some just plain biased stuff. That's actually very common. I work at a university who's food science department is very well respected and turns out a lot of research. And they have a big building filled with shiny state of the art labs paid for by a major food product company. And I can tell you there's a lot of research that doesn't get done because it might stem the flow of grant money. It's the same in every field, and every university. Not that good research doesn't get done, but when you read a paper you have to look at more than what it tells you it says. You have to look at what it actually says (do the graphs match the text, do they have a large enough sample size, is the standard deviation huge, did they cut out too many inconvenient outliers?), who did the research, where they work, and most importantly WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM.

The first thing I learned when I started in science is that there is a lot of bad science out there. The second thing I learned is that there is very poor understanding of what science is and isn't. There is a tendency either to take a scientific paper too much on face value as gospel truth (when it is often just indicating a trend or supporting a theory later to be overturned) or to mistrust it far more than one should and give into hysteria and quackery.

Thanks for reading my little rant! Tracey

Original Post by drea99:

a food allergy causes panic attacks?

my ass.

 Try having Celiac's Disease. You ingest a tiny bit of gluten and your stomach cramps, you can't breathe, your heart starts pounding and you think you're going to pass out. To be fair, it's actually an auto-immune disease but don't assume you know everything.

Original Post by drumsareforgirls:

I got really into to Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt recently. I was eating 2-3 a day.

Ummm... all that Splenda KILLED me. I cut it out two days ago and I'm still suffering the side effects.

Splenda is poison. Look it up on google. It's very harmful, and I don't recommend it in any form, except in serious moderation.

 

   Odd.  I use about 2/3 of a cup splenda a day in my iced tea.  More in other applications.  Been doing this for a couple of years now.  If it were poison, one thinks that I might have noticed some ill effect by now.

   Yeah.  Odd.