If you think diet or zero-calorie foods and drinks will help you cut calories, consider they could be causing weight gain and damaging your health.
Zero calories. Sounds tempting right? In the dangerous pursuit to get thin, people are doing more harm than good. In the effort to reduce calories, they buy diet drinks, lite juices, and lite desserts. These may reduce sugar content, but they increase chemical intake. NutraSweet, Equal, Sweet’N Low, and Splenda (supposedly “natural” but produced by chlorinating a sucrose molecule), and neotame are all names of the most popular artificial sweeteners.
If you avoid products with labels, then you generally don’t have to worry about these chemicals. Diet sodas have been linked to an increase in heart disease, stroke, risk of type 2 diabetes, occurrences of bladder cancer, and kidney damage. Plus, they have been linked to weight gain instead of weight loss! It is possibly because artificially sweetened beverages stimulate your brain, causing the desire to ingest sweets.
Artificial sweeteners may be FDA approved, but that doesn’t make them safe. The body does not metabolize them for energy. They supposedly pass through the digestive tract unassimilated and unprocessed. The body is created to respond to its environment. It is hard to imagine that an unnatural, artificial substance could enter the body without the body’s defenses reacting.
These chemicals do not naturally occur anywhere else and are linked to an abundance of health issues. One may argue that chemicals don’t hurt. However, do they really help? Maybe the question shouldn’t be, do they make you sick? Maybe it should be, do they make you healthier?
As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.
– Adelle Davis
Fresh Ideas to Extend Your Expiration Date
Avoid sugar-free, “diet,” no-added sugar, zero-calorie, cookies, ice creams, juices, desserts, and jams. Stay away from making recipes that call for artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners are packaged under many different names: sucralose, Splenda, aspartame, neotame, NutraSweet, Equal, Sweet’N Low, saccharin, Sweet Twin, Necta Sweet, acesulfame-K, Sunett, and Sweet One. In moderation, stevia is the best noncaloric sweetener. You can even grow it yourself!
Skip the diet beverages. Water is the best no-calorie beverage to drink. Need more flavor? Water made at home, infused with essential oils or real lemon, lime, and mint, is tasty, real, and has health benefits. Herbal teas and Metromint water are also great no-additive drinks. Having been artificial sweetener free for three years, I can instantly taste them in beverages and sweets. They have a distinct, extremely sweet, fake flavor. The less fake sweeteners you consume, the more you notice when they are the sweetener choice in a product or recipe.
Learn More
Two documentaries that show a different side to artificial sweeteners are Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World and Sweet Remedy: The World Reacts to an Adulterated Food Supply. Both of these can be watched for free online at youtube.com.
Russell Blaylock’s book, Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills, looks at the potential effects of artificial sweeteners and other chemical additives.