The Truth About Artificial Sweeteners

If you do an internet search on “artificial sweeteners”, you’re bound to find a slew of articles decrying them and just as many articles touting them as the next best thing since sliced bread. You’ll find references to studies, good and bad, showing how toxic these chemicals are. You’ll also find references that support their safety. So, are they toxic or not? If not, are they good calorie-free substitutes for table sugar? And the question many of us have, will they help you lose fat?

As for their safety, you can debate either side of this issue almost indefinitely because we just don’t know enough about their complex effects within our bodies at this time. Any substance can be toxic at high enough doses, even those essential to life such as water and oxygen. Several sugar substitutes such as saccharin and aspartame are known to have toxic effects in humans. But they are generally considered safe to consume at the levels needed to make our foods more palatable. However, the stronger your sweet tooth, the more sweeteners you’re likely to eat, inching your consumption levels ever closer toward known levels of toxicity. Whether you ever reach those levels, or have any side effects, depends on your eating habits.

Just take a look at plain sugar. Decades ago, people never imagined we would consume as much sugar as we do today. Over the years, we’ve trained our brains to require higher levels of sweetness to be satisfied. This meant adding more sugar to our foods. While generally considered to be non-toxic at “normal” levels, when you eat too much sugar, you will develop metabolic problems like obesity and diabetes. For many of us, our brains have lost touch with how much sweetness it really needs and our health is paying for it.

The obvious “fix” to this sweetness addiction is to substitute sugar with low- or zero-calorie sweeteners. Indeed, this is the path that many people have chosen although many still have trouble losing unwanted pounds of fat despite the ostensible calorie reduction. However, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. When you crave high levels of sweetness, you’re more likely to end up eating more treats, even if they are lower in calories per serving. And when you are in situations where you aren’t able to eat sugar-substituted versions of a dessert, such as at a restaurant with friends, you’ll pile on even more calories. Despite intentions to lose weight, your addiction to sweetness trumps any discipline or willpower that you can muster.

The real solution to reduce caloric intake and achieve weight loss is to break this addiction. As you slowly ratchet down the sweetness level you consume, your brain adjusts accordingly. With time, you’ll no longer crave the same level of sweetness as before, making it easier to cut down on your overall calorie intake. In fact, you may find the previous levels of sweetness to be too much for you. I’ve experienced this effect several times as I cut down on various sugar-laden foods.

So, in the end, artificial sweeteners ARE bad for you but not in the sense that they are biologically toxic. Rather, they make the process of losing weight and keeping it off that much harder since they help fuel your addiction to sweetness and high-calorie foods. If you are truly serious about losing fat, do yourself a favor and cut down (not out!) on all forms of sweetness. You might be surprised how many extra calories those low- or zero-calorie sugar substitutes were making you eat before!

The Real Deal With “Whole-Grain”

The number of products labeled “whole-grain” is blooming these days. People looking for healthier food are moving away from refined flour products and picking up “whole-grain” versions instead. But are they really better for you? And does it matter?

To answer those questions, we need to look at how our bodies process the foods we consume. While our bodies are generally quite efficient at absorbing nutrients and energy from the foods we eat, it’s not 100% efficient. Just because you put 2000 calories into your mouth doesn’t mean your body absorbs all 2000 calories. How many calories your body actually absorbs depends on many factors.

For example, the type, amount, and mix of foods you eat affect nutrient absorption. Certain foods are digested and converted to energy more readily while others can slow down the digestive process. The health of your digestive tract can also matter. When you have an intestinal infection or severe food poisoning, food can go through with little of it being absorbed. Even the microorganisms in your gut can affect how much you can extract from your food.

If you consider the ease with which your body digests and absorbs nutrients from various “whole-grain” products, it becomes pretty clear which ones can be healthier for you, and which ones are not much different from refined flour products. Digestion takes place in many phases. We commonly think of it starting in the mouth when we chew and mix saliva with the food. This helps break down the food into smaller particles, giving the rest of the digestive process more surface area to work on. However, if you think about it, we often “pre-digest” our foods by preparing and cooking them. For instance, a tough cut of meat can be made quite tender and easy to eat if tenderized or cooked long enough.

It’s a similar story with whole grains. Left completely intact, they are quite difficult for our body to digest since each grain has several fibrous outer layers protecting it. If you don’t chew and break apart the protective layers, the grains go through you relatively untouched. However, when whole grains are ground into whole-grain flour, the fiber-rich outer layers are broken up, exposing the readily-digested carbohydrates inside. White flour takes this “pre-digestion” a step further and removes all of the fibrous parts, leaving a fine powder of quickly-absorbed carbohydrates.

Since white flour is so refined, your body will readily digest and absorb it as if you are eating sugar. This is why your blood sugar can spike quickly when eating foods made primarily with white flour. Whole-grain flour is essentially the same as white flour but with the ground-up fibrous parts left in. The presence of fiber in the whole-grain flour may slow down absorption slightly but not to a great extent. So, your body will also rapidly absorb the carbohydrates and cause your blood sugar to spike. Neither option is as favorable as eating intact whole grains. These take longer to digest and therefore affect your blood sugar levels less quickly.

So, if you are watching your waistline or your blood sugar levels, consider buying foods that haven’t been “pre-digested” (i.e. processed) as much. Don’t let the marketing on the packaging fool you into thinking a product is healthier than it really is. Think about what the labels really mean, and when in doubt, choose foods that are closer to their natural form.