Are artificial sweeteners bad for our health?
Artificial sweeteners have been a heavily debated subject for several years. Many people buy diet drinks and foods with the idea of reducing the amount of sugar in their diets, thus leaving a more healthy life.
But are artificial sugars all that healthy or should we be steering away from them too?
Are artificial sweeteners bad for our health?
Dr. Christopher Gardner, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University in California, says that the smart use of non-nutritive sweeteners can help us reduce added sugars in our diet, therefore lowering the number of calories you eat.
Not all artificial sweeteners are created equal
The FDA has approved five artificial sweeteners: saccharin, acesulfame, aspartame, neotame, and sucralose.
What concerns medical practitioners is how our bodies and brains react to these elements.
One of the concerns is that people who use artificial sweeteners may replace the lost calories through other sources, by thinking that if you eliminate some of the calories from sugar you can add some from another source (maybe even one with hidden sugars in it).
There’s also the risk that these products change the way we taste food because of the fact that these non-nutritive sweeteners are far more potent than table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup and overstimulation of sugar receptors from frequent use of these hyper-intense sweeteners may limit tolerance for more complex tastes.
In other words, people who routinely use artificial sweeteners may start to find less intensely sweet foods, such as fruit, less appealing and unsweet foods, such as vegetables, quite unpalatable. This may lead to you wanting to consume mostly artificially flavoured foods that have less nutritional value.
And some animal studies even suggest that artificial sweeteners may be addictive. In studies of rats who were exposed to cocaine, then given a choice between intravenous cocaine or oral saccharine, most chose saccharin.
Aspartame is probably the best-known artificial sweetener and the one that got the worst press coverage. In 1996 a paper suggested that the increase in brain tumours might be linked to a rise in the popularity of aspartame. Fears continued, and other types of cancer began to be mentioned. There was so much concern that a vast study of almost half a million people was conducted by the US National Cancer Institute and published in 2006. It found no increase in the risk of brain cancer, leukaemia or lymphoma in people who consumed aspartame.
Do artificial sweeteners leads to an increase in appetite and weight gain?
Some people believe artificial sweeteners might actually increase appetite and promote weight gain. They think artificial sweeteners may be unable to activate the “food reward pathway” needed to make you feel satisfied after you eat.
This is believed because of their extra sweet taste and lack of calories found in other sweet-tasting foods, thus they’re thought to confuse the brain into still feeling hungry.
The truth is that several studies have found that participants have reported feeling less hungry and consume fewer calories when they replace sugary foods and beverages with artificially sweetened alternatives.
As far as weight control goes, some observational studies report a link between consuming artificially sweetened beverages and obesity, but surprisingly, at the same time, randomized controlled studies report that artificial sweeteners may actually reduce body weight, fat mass and waist circumference.
Choosing artificially sweetened foods instead of those with added sugar may reduce the amount of daily calories we consume and it even seems that replacing regular soft drinks with sugar-free versions can decrease body mass index (BMI) by up to 1.3–1.7 points.
Various studies ranging from 4 weeks to 40 months show that this may lead to weight loss of up to 2.9 lbs (1.3 kg).
