Comments on: artificial sweeteners

By: Christopher Blizzard · and now a study on hfcs

Christopher Blizzard · and now a study on hfcs — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:05:12 +0000

[...] See also: similar results from artificial sweeteners. [...]

By: Marcus

Marcus — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:29:01 +0000

I guess you’ll enjoy the Jamie Oliver video on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html

It is a bit lengthy, skip forward to minute 10 for the more interesting part.

By: maxauthority

maxauthority — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:54:20 +0000

I am not saying that aspartame is unhealthy, and also the author’s post was rather about gaining weight by them. Even if you don’t gain weight by artificial sweeteners, but also don’t loose by eating them, why not just use natural ingredients like sugar which certainly tastes better?

By: DeKay

DeKay — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:29:17 +0000

P.S. From one of the comments in the article I linked:

“Aspartame is perfectly safe, at least in the dosage we are getting.

Aspartame: a safety evaluation based on current use levels, regulations, and toxicological and epidemiological studies. PMID: 17828671

“The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of existing evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a nonnutritive sweetener.”

There was no conflict of interest reported in this review.

The problem might more lie in the fact that product containing aspartame are highly processed.”

PPS. It is best not to use studies on rats as the gold standard when evaluating stuff like this. There are known differences in the way we metabolize food from them.

By: Andy Wingo

Andy Wingo — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:02:28 +0000

I’ve been enjoying your food posts quite a bit. I had seen links to the “bitter truth” video before, but yours happened to be the one to get me to watch it. Looking forward to checking out this one, and others :)

By: maxauthority

maxauthority — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:11:33 +0000

I just think, artificial sweeteners just takes so ugly, any time I try coke light/zero, it’s so disgusting. Why not just drink/eat “proper” things but less of it? All those glutamate, saccharin, artificial flavoring etc. is certainly not worth it, try proper food/drinks (when possible) and you’ll enjoy it much more.

Fortunately here in Europe we still have real sugar in most products, not HFCS or other sugar substitutes, although even here more and more products try to substitute sugar for (cheap) artificial sweeteners, so one has to be really careful what to buy.

By: Camilla Fox

Camilla Fox — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:32:34 +0000

There’s at least one example out there (xylitol in dogs) where the sweetener triggers insulin release (a dangerous situation, since ingestion can then cause blood sugar to crash). If it varies that significantly between dogs and humans (yes), then I expect that other animal models need to be evaluated for what the insulin response is to the sweetener, and whether that’s equivalent to the human one.

(I suspect the whole thing is going to come down to the subtleties of when insulin is released, since there’s some triggering for that that happens in the mouth, not the stomach.)

By: Rodney Dawes

Rodney Dawes — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:57:33 +0000

I love all the HFCS ads that the corn people are putting out. It’s sort of like all the cigarette ads that the tobacco put out in the 80s. History does seem to repeat itself. :)

By: Samuel

Samuel — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:15:53 +0000

I had the exact opposite experience. When I’m on a diet, I *need* to drink sugar free soda (diet coke). Just drinking a lot doesn’t help, I’ll get hungry as hell. Any day without diet coke is the hardest day of my diet.

It makes sense, too; coffein is a known mild appetite suppressant. Also, I lost more than 30 kilos just by switching to diet coke from water.