Artificial Sweeteners: 3 Reasons To Rethink That Diet Coke

Care for some water? No way! Get me a Diet Coke, or a Coke Zero.

Water is for washing hands, not drinking. And regular soft drinks and juice are full of sugars and calories.

So you decided a long time ago to go with artificial sweeteners. After a while, you didn't even notice the slightly different taste compared to sugar-sweetened beverages. And diet drinks are zero calories. Win-win. Both taste buds AND body are happy. A no-brainer, right?

Not so fast.

A fascinating article - Artificially Sweetened Beverages Cause for Concern - recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), challenges the notion that artificial sweeteners are risk free.

The article's author, David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD, a Harvard professor and Founding Director of the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) clinic at Children's Hospital, Boston, makes three important points, especially in the context of artificially sweetened drinks:

1. Our body gets confused by artificial sweeteners - The dissociation between sweet taste and calorie intake may put the regulatory system that controls hunger and body weight out of sync, thus sabotaging weight loss plans. A study on rodents showed that those fed saccharin actually gained weight compared to rodents fed sucrose.

2. We're "infantilizing" our taste sense - Artificial sweeteners are a hundredfold sweeter than sucrose (table sugar). By getting ourselves used to so much sweet, normal sweet flavors, of fruit for example, become bland and so do other healthful foods such as grains and vegetables, thus reducing our willingness to consume them and ultimately compromising the quality of our diet.

3. Long term effects remain unclear - While there have been many studies on artificial sweeteners and diseases such cancer, very few focused on long term weight gain. A seven year study, (San Antonio Heart Study), showed a relationship between diet drink consumption and obesity, but the causation is not clear. Consumption of artificial sweeteners is growing yearly. According to Ludwig:

If trends in consumption continue, the nation will, in effect, have embarked on a massive, uncontrolled, and inadvertent public health experiment. Although many synthetic chemicals have been added to the food supply in recent years, artificial sweeteners in beverages stand out in their ability to interact with evolutionarily ancient sensorineural pathways at remarkably high affinity.

What to do at the supermarket:

Whether sweetened with sugar, or artificially, our body does not need any drink but water. And while switching overnight from a life without H2O seems impossible, you can opt for baby steps such as watering down juice, consuming soda only during predefined meals/weekly activities, and getting your sweet tooth filled with juicy fruits such as oranges, melons, pears, and apples. If money is your motivator - think about the $500 a year a family of four can save by just switching to tap water.

 

Follow Hemi Weingarten on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fooducate

Comments

[redyns]

01:15 PM on 01/06/2010

Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners cannot be digested by the human body. They confuse the metabolic process and actually preserve the fat molecules already present therefore preventing you from losing any weight. Nasty?

[Richard Murray]

10:43 PM on 01/05/2010

methanol (11% of aspartame), made by body into formaldehyde in many vulnerable tissues, causes modern diseases of civilization, summary of a century of research, Woodrow C Monte PhD, Medical Hypotheses journal: Rich Murray 2009.11.15
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.htm
Sunday, November 15, 2009
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1589

Methanol: A Chemical Trojan Horse as the Root of the Inscrutable U
Prepublication Copy; Medical Hypotheses -- 06 November 2009
(10.1016/j.mehy.2009.09.059)
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/S0306-9877(09)00693-8/abstract
Woodrow C. Monte PhD
Professor of Food Science (retired)
Arizona State University
corresponding author : Woodrow C. Monte PhD
470 South Rainbow Drive
Page, Arizona 86040
Key Words:
food epidemiology; diseases of civilization; methanol; formaldehyde;
aspartame; autism; multiple sclerosis; Alzheimer's; U-shaped curve.

[drvittoriarepetto]

06:24 PM on 01/05/2010

Thirty years ago I grabbed my friend’s coffee container by mistake; the wave of a sickly chemical sweet taste filled my mouth and I said, “how many packets of sweetener do you use”. “One,” she said and added “it’s not too sweet.”

Over the years and talking to patients, friends and friends of friends, I too have noted the
“infantilizing” effect that Hemi Weingarten talks about in this article. Advise someone who drinks diet soda to eat fruit as a snack instead of cake or change their sugar laden processed cereal for an organic whole grain cereal and you will hear “but it not sweet enough!” These people have trained their taste buds and their brains to want more and more sweets resulting in less insulin sensitivity

In fact, check out the new ads for Stevia on the television, and you will see a visual of pouring it on a bowl of berries. “What??”, my un-infantilizing brain shouts”, berries are sweet already.”

[redyns]

01:19 PM on 01/06/2010

Our brains and taste buds are being trained to prefer sweet over savory and "low-calorie" over whole natural foods. We are slowly being killed by the chemicals in our foods. But it's healthy because it's approved by the USDA... right?

[SarahJane RD]

04:49 PM on 01/05/2010

As a registered dietitian and consultant to the food and beverage industry, I follow the research regarding artificial sweeteners very closely. As a matter of fact artificial sweeteners (as known as low- or no-calorie sweeteners) have been confirmed as safe to use by more than 200 scientific studies. In addition to being confirmed as safe to use, they have also shown to be helpful with weight management according to data published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition and supported by the American Dietetic Association. Additionally, studies from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition have shown that a person's hunger reaction after drinking low-calorie beverages is no different than when he or she drinks water. With this data in mind, I feel that artificially sweetened beverages in moderation can safely be included in a healthy diet.

[dexxjones]

05:13 PM on 01/04/2010

can you people ever make a simple, declarative sentence? this DOES do this or this DOESNT. blootletting MAY cure cancer but it doesnt.

weasle words are why people tune out to the never-ending torrent of things that MAY be bad for you or COULD cause cancer.

cigarettes COULD make you thin.

[NickDearth]

08:02 PM on 01/04/2010

Such is the nature of most scientific study. Most cause and effect in science is attributed to likelihoods. There are very few absolutes.

[dexxjones]

08:53 PM on 01/04/2010

such is the nature of everything. but the house is either on fire or its not. i am not rushing out in the snow in my pantaloons because some say the house may be on fire.

[redplanet]

09:24 PM on 01/04/2010

I want the "may" words. They lead to research and information which leads to a better quality of life for all.

[NickDearth]

10:05 AM on 01/05/2010

Some people (typically conservatives) *need* absolutes. It doesn't matter if they are even possible, it's simply what they want. It makes their decisions simple. A=bad, B=good, no thought needed. The precautionary principle is lost on them.