A Look at Artificial Sweeteners, Part 2

In yesterday’s article I gave you an overview of artificial sweeteners, saying that there were five approved artificial sweeteners. They are saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, sucralose, and neotame.

Each of these has some serious health concerns, and I will discuss each of these sweeteners at length.

Using artificial sweeteners can impact your health negatively, and is a big impediment to living a Low Density Lifestyle because of how it will adversely affect your health.

In yesterday’s article, I discussed saccharine.  Today I will discuss aspartame.

Aspartame was discovered in 1965 and approved by the FDA in 1981 for dry uses in tabletop sweeteners, chewing gum, cold breakfast cereals, gelatins, and puddings. It was able to be included in carbonated beverages in 1983. In 1996, the FDA approved its use as a “general purpose sweetener,” and it can now be found in more than 6,000 foods.

Aspartame is also known as Nutrasweet, Equal, and Sugar Twin. It does provide calories, but because it is 160 to 220 times sweeter than sucrose, very small amounts are needed for sweetening so the caloric intake is negligible.

The amount of aspartame in some common foods is:

• 12 oz. diet soda—up to 225 mg of aspartame
• 8 oz. drink from powder—100 mg of aspartame
• 8 oz. yogurt—80 mg of aspartame
• 4 oz. gelatin dessert—80 mg of aspartame
• ¾ cup of sweetened cereal—32 mg of aspartame
• 1 packet of Equal—22 mg of aspartame
• 1 tablet of Equal—19 mg of aspartame

Aspartame has been approved for use in over 100 countries and is one of the most controversial nonnutritive sweeteners, as it has been linked to many illnesses. Here is a list of some of them:

Aspartame disease: H.J. Roberts, MD, coined the term “aspartame disease” in a book filled with over 1,000 pages of information about the negative health consequences of ingesting aspartame. Dr. Roberts reports that by 1998, aspartame products were the cause of 80% of complaints to the FDA about food additives. Some of these symptoms include headache, dizziness, change in mood, vomiting or nausea, abdominal pain and cramps, change in vision, diarrhea, seizures/convulsions, memory loss, and fatigue. Along with these symptoms, links to aspartame are made for fibromyalgia symptoms, spasms, shooting pains, numbness in your legs, cramps, tinnitus, joint pain, unexplainable depression, anxiety attacks, slurred speech, blurred vision, multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus, and various cancers.

Headaches: One study confirmed that individuals with self-reported headaches after the ingestion of aspartame were susceptible to headaches due to aspartame. Three randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with more than 200 adult migraine sufferers showed that headaches were more frequent and more severe in the aspartame-treated group.

Depression: In a study of the effect of aspartame on 40 patients with depression, the study was cut short due to the severity of reactions within the first 13 patients tested. The outcome showed that individuals with mood disorders were particularly sensitive to aspartame and recommended that it be avoided by them.

Cancer: In an initial study, 12 rats out of 320 developed malignant brain tumors after receiving aspartame in an FDA trial. There have been other studies to support this finding.

Increased hunger: A study done with 14 dieters comparing the effects of aspartame-sweetened and sucrose-sweetened soft drinks on food intake and appetite ratings found that substituting diet drinks for sucrose-sweetened ones did not reduce total calorie intake and may even have resulted in a higher intake on subsequent days.

In another study of 42 males given aspartame in diet lemonade versus sucrose-sweetened lemonade, there was no increase in hunger ratings or food intake with the diet group. Weight loss results from consuming fewer calories than your body needs. When you replace a caloric beverage with a noncaloric beverage, you will be saving calories and could lose weight if it is enough calories to put you in a negative balance. For aspartame to increase weight, there would have to be something else going on.

So there you have it about aspartame. I hope by now you will make sure you never eat it in any form. If you do, you have the potential to do serious harm to your health.

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A Look at Artificial Sweeteners, Part 1

I told you about how high fructose corn syrup is toxic to your health in yesterday’s article.  But there’s a whole other category of sweeteners besides things like corn syrup.  And that category is the realm of artificial sweeteners.

If sugar in its “natural” state (though it’s hard to think of something like high fructose corn syrup, and many other sugar products, as something in their “natural” state) is detrimental to your health, then artificial sweeteners are even worse.

A diet laden with artifical sweeteners will cause all kinds of health problems, and will definitely not allow you to experience healthy living nor live a balanced life of health and wellness.

And it sure won’t let you live a Low Density Lifestyle.

So let’s take a look at the world of artificial sweeteners, or as they are also called, nonnutritive sweeteners.

Since the 1950s, when nonnutritive sweeteners came into existence, they have been seen as a weight-loss wonder that allowed people to have their sweets without the calories and cavities. Nonnutritive sweeteners are also referred to as intense sweeteners, alternative sweeteners, very low-calorie sweeteners, and artificial sweeteners.

In the 1970’s, the wonder of artificial sweeteners switched to concern when it was discovered that artificial sweeteners had a link to cancer.

The five FDA-approved nonnutritive sweeteners are saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, sucralose, and neotame. Each of these is regulated as a food additive. In regulating them, the FDA set an Acceptable Daily Intake (ADI) for each additive. The ADI is the amount of food additive that can be consumed daily over a lifetime without appreciable health risk to a person on the basis of all the known facts at the time of the evaluation.

Let’s take a look at the first artificial sweetener on the list: Saccharin.

Saccharin has been around for over 100 years and claims to be the best researched sweetener. Saccharin is also known as Sweet and Low, Sweet Twin, Sweet’N Low, and Necta Sweet. It does not contain any calories, does not raise blood sugar levels and is 200 to 700 times sweeter than sucrose (table sugar).

Saccharin is used in tabletop sweeteners, baked goods, jams, chewing gum, canned fruit, candy, dessert toppings, and salad dressings. It also is useful in cosmetic products, vitamins, and pharmaceuticals.

In 1977, research showed bladder tumors in male rats with the ingestion of saccharin. The FDA proposed a ban on saccharin, but Congress intervened and allowed saccharin to remain in the food supply as long as the label carried this warning: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”

But in 2000, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the National Institutes of Health concluded that saccharin should be removed from the list of potential carcinogens, and the warning was removed from saccharin-containing products.

But the safety concerns of consuming products with saccharin remain even with the removal of the warning. In response to the National Toxicology Program (NTP) removing saccharin from the list of potential carcinogens, the Center for the Science in Public Interest (CSPI) wrote a report, which said in part:

“It would be highly imprudent for the NTP to delist saccharin. Doing so would give the public a false sense of security, remove any incentive for further testing, and result in greater exposure to this probable carcinogen in tens of millions of people, including children (indeed, fetuses). If saccharin is even a weak carcinogen, this unnecessary additive would pose an intolerable risk to the public.

“Thus, we urge the NTP on the basis of currently available data to conclude that saccharin is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen, because there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in animals (multiple sites in rats and mice) and limited or sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans (bladder cancer) and not to delist saccharin, at least until a great deal of further research is conducted.”

Another claim made against saccharin is the possibility of allergic reactions. The reaction would be in response to it belonging to a class of compounds known as sulfonamides which can cause allergic reactions in individuals who cannot tolerate sulfa drugs. Reactions can include headaches, breathing difficulties, skin eruptions, and diarrhea. It’s also believed that the saccharin found in some baby formulas can cause irritability and muscle dysfunction.

So consuming saccharin products such as Sweet and Low is something that is not conducive to healthy living and can be very detrimental to your health.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with this discussion on artificial sweeteners, so don’t forget to tune in tomorrow.

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High Fructose Corn Syrup is Toxic to Your Health

In yesterday’s article, I told you how eating sugar in any of its variations is not good for you nor conducive to healthy living or experiencing health and wellness.

In other words, eating sugar does not promote a Low Density Lifestyle, and will contribute to a High Density Lifestyle.

One of the forms of sugar that I discussed in yesterday’s article that is especially bad for  you is high fructose corn syrup.

I discussed how high fructose corn syrup, which is found in so many products, is metabolized in the liver and increases the creation of fats that circulate in the bloodstream, which can then lead to fatty liver disease, cirrhosis of the liver, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The reason the use of high fructose corn syrup has proliferated in nearly all processed foods you find in the grocery store is two fold: because it was thought to be a cheap alternative to sugar, and because it gave farmers something to do with all the corn that was being grown. Instead of corn yields being decreased, the high fructose corn syrup industry lobbied hard to get it into our stomachs.

To compound the health problems that high fructose corn syrup cause, it has been discovered that many foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup contain mercury, left as a residue in the production of caustic soda, a key ingredient in high fructose corn syrup. And worst of all, the FDA and the industry have known about this potential toxin and has continued serving it up since at least 2005.

Where does this mercury go? Once high fructose corn syrup is eaten, the mercury embeds in the tissues of the body.

Before now, the greatest threat for mercury exposure was through fish, followed by mercury amalgam in dentistry and through vaccines, as it is sometimes used as a preservative. But a recent study estimates that exposure via high fructose corn syrup could be up to 50 times that of mercury amalgam exposure in children age 3-19, the age group that is the largest consumers of high fructose corn syrup.

Those with high exposure show signs of sensory impairment, sensation loss and lack of coordination. Just by choosing your food from the boxes and bottles in the center aisles of the grocery store, you could be exposing yourself to high levels of mercury, and in the process, poisoning yourself.

A recent study tested products directly from the supermarket. One in three tested positive for mercury residue. These included products like Smucker’s Strawberry Jelly, Hunt’s Tomato Ketchup, Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, Nutra Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars, Pop-Tarts Frosted Blueberry and Coca-Cola Classic – and this list of foods only scratches the surface of all the foods that are toxic due to their mercury residues.

So here’s the story: if you want to experience healthy living and be on the road to health and wellness and living a Low Density Lifestyle, then stay far, far away from high fructose corn syrup.

Read the labels carefully of all packaged foods you buy, and you will discover how many of them contain high fructose corn syrup.

In yesterday’s article I said Americans eat 170 pounds of sugar a year. High fructose corn syrup, being in so many foods, is a good part of the reason for that 170 pounds a year.

And just think how much of that 170 pounds a year might be dumping mercury in your body. It boggles the mind just to conceive of that.

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The Sweet Life is Not So Sweet

A Sugar Cube

Most people eat way too much sugar in their diet, and this is not a good thing. It can lead to health problems, and serious health problems at that.

Eating a whole foods oriented diet along with good health practices and healthy living are important components of living a Low Density Lifestyle, but eating lots of sugar does not constitute good health and nutrition practices, and will definitely derail you from experiencing good health and wellness.

In fact, if you eat a lot of sugar, you’ll end up living a High Density Lifestyle.

Over the next few articles, I want to talk to you about sugar and enlighten you on the subject. This may help you take inventory on how much sugar you are eating, and may help you start to cut down on it. This will help you stay on the path of health and wellness and healthy living practices in general.

On average, Americans eat 170 pounds of sugar a year. The rest of the world may not be too far behind that statistic.

The current recommendation is a maximum intake of eight teaspoons of sugars a day, which can be met by one 12-ounce can of regular soda or a 20-ounce bottle of VitaminWater.  That means you are at or over the limit before you’ve eaten a single cookie or container of fruit-flavored yogurt, or even some commercial tomato soups or salad dressings with added sugars.

Dr. George Bray, a specialist in obesity and metabolism at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center of Louisiana State University, has calculated that “the current epidemic of obesity could be explained by the consumption of an extra 20-ounce soft drink each day,” on top of the eight teaspoons of sugar a day that most people are easily meeting.

Among the most recent substances to have a finger pointed at it is high-fructose corn syrup, which has a lot of inherent problems.

But Michael Jacobson, director of the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that consumers should not think they are doing themselves a favor by turning to products with “real” sugar instead.

“If the food industry got rid of all the high-fructose corn syrup and replaced it with sugar, we’d have the same problems we have now with obesity, diabetes, and heart disease,” he has said. “It’s an urban myth that high-fructose corn syrup has a special toxicity.”

Neither ordinary sugar — sucrose — nor high-fructose corn syrup contains any nutrients other than sweet calories, and both are added in prodigious amounts to beverages and many foods that offer few if any nutrients to compensate for their caloric input.

“What consumers need to do is cut down on both,” Jacobson has said. “Sugary foods either add calories or replace other, more nutritious foods.”

But there are still unresolved health concerns about high-fructose corn syrup.

High-fructose corn syrup is made by converting the starch in corn to a substance that is about 90 percent fructose, a sugar that is sweeter than the sugar that fuels the body cells, called glucose, and processed differently by the body. The fructose from corn is then mixed with corn syrup, essentially pure glucose, to produce one of two mixtures called high-fructose corn syrup: 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose, which is used to sweeten soft drinks, and 42 percent fructose and 58 percent glucose, which is used in products like breads, jams and yogurt.

Neither substance is radically different from ordinary sugar, which is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose. The main difference is that in high-fructose corn syrup, the two sugar molecules are chemically separated, and in sucrose they are linked.

Whether fructose comes from high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose, it is really not part of our natural diet. Fruit contains only tiny amounts of it. We’ve gone from a few grams of it a day to tablespoons of it.

Fructose in the amounts now in the American diet are far from benign. As the amounts consumed increase, you begin to see effects that are not seen when it is consumed in smaller amounts.

Fructose is metabolized primarily in the liver, which favors the formation of fats. Studies have shown changes in circulating lipids when subjects eat high-fructose diets, and triglyceride levels that rose when people consumed mixtures containing more fructose than glucose.

Another study found that fructose consumption raised blood levels of uric acid, which can foster “metabolic syndrome,” a condition of insulin resistance and abdominal obesity associated with heart disease and diabetes.

And a study by Chi-Tang Ho, professor of food science at Rutgers University, found “astonishingly high” levels of substances called reactive carbonyls in 11 carbonated soft drinks. These molecules, which form when fructose and glucose are unbound, are believed to cause tissue damage. They are elevated in the blood of people with diabetes and linked to complications of the disease. Dr. Ho estimated that a can of soda has five times the concentration of reactive carbonyls found in the blood of an adult with diabetes.

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Valentine Day’s and Sugar – Is it the Sweet Life/La Dolce Vita?

With Valentine’s Day approaching, what better subject to discuss than sugar, the substance that can create the sweet life, or as they say in Italy, La Dolce Vita.

Today is the first article in a series on love and relationships, in honor of Valentine’s Day and the sweet life.

Unfortunately,  too much of a good thing is not a good thing, and so sugar is something that can be detrimental to your health, and lead you into a High Density Lifestyle, which would not be the sweet life you want.

In the U.S., it is estimated that the per capital consumption of sugar is 175 pounds per year.  The current recommendation is a maximum intake of 8 teaspoons of sugars a day, yet one 12 ounce can of soda or a 20 ounce bottle of Vitamin Water puts 9 teaspoons of sugars into your body. So you’re already maxed out before you’ve gotten going.

Then add onto that all the other potential sugary things you might eat: cookies, salad dressings, processed foods, soups, juices, fruit-flavored foods; heck, even a lot of natural and organic foods are sweetened with sugars.

So as much as you may like sugar, and like living the sweet life/la dolce vita, you are probably sugar-overloading your body. And whether the sugar is from corn, fruit, sugar cane or beets, they’re all simple sugars that the body doesn’t process or metabolize  very well at all.

It takes a pound of oranges to produce eight ounces of juice, which concentrates the simple fruit sugars and strips away the appetite-satiating fiber and bulk of the fruit. “An eight-ounce glass of juice from oranges, apples or grapes has about five to eight teaspoons of sugar,” said Dr. Barry Popkin, a professor of global nutrition and author of the book, The World is Fat. “Calorically and nutritionally, it’s much better to eat the fruit.”

Simple sugars cause weight gain, which then leads to obesity. And obesity, at least in the U.S., is at epidemic proportions. Simple sugars are metabolized in the liver, and the liver will then store them and transform them into fats. The result of this, besides obesity, is also diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, auto-immune disease and other chronic and degenerative ailments.

Plus it stops you from living a Low Density Lifestyle, and if anything is going to lead you into the sweet life, it’s a Low Density Lifestyle.

The answer is to focus on eating complex sugars, the natural occurring sugars found in whole grains, vegetables, fruits and other whole foods, and then when you want something sweet, to look for something sweetened with barley malt, rice syrup, maple syrup and honey.

So this Valentine’s Day, when you and your sweetie are looking to live the sweet life/la dolce vita together, remember that there are many ways to do this, and eating simple sugars isn’t the best or only way.

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