Sweeteners have been on my mind a lot lately. I have been researching and writing about them for a chapter in my book, Eating with the Enemy. There is a soaring trend for sugar-free diets which is driving the immense rise in the use of sweeteners in foods and beverages. Food and beverage innovators (people who develop products to suit the growing health consciousness in our community) and general food manufacturers have been jumping on board, making sugar-free products a priority. Plus, sweeteners are cheaper to use than sugars.
So, if sugar-free and low-calorie foods and beverages are popping up everywhere, are they in fact safe – a critical question for someone like me who loves sweets!
Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) has deemed these chemicals safe. However, there are studies and evidence now available to say they may indeed not be as safe as we would like to believe.
Intense sweeteners (which is their scientific name as used in the food industry) are divided into three categories: artificial, nutritive and natural.
Artificial sweeteners are highly processed and chemically produced substances. Most often it is the chemical substances aspartame and saccharine which constitute the sweet element of anything labeled sugar-free.
Nutritive sweeteners are carbohydrates. For example, sorbitol (a sugar alcohol), one of the commonly used nutritive sweeteners, is made from corn syrup. Nutritive sweeteners are not calorie-free like their artificial friends; however, their calorie content is less than sugar. Food and drinks labeled low-sugar or low-calorie will likely have this type of sweetener.
Natural sweeteners are a recent addition to the intense sweetener market. Stevia is the only natural sweetener approved by Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ). Stevia is extracted from the leaves of the Stevia plant which is part of the sunflower family. It is dried and powdered, then blended with maltodextrin, which is a bulking agent and not what you would call ‘natural’. So, the product we buy as Stevia is not quite as natural as we are led to believe.
Here’s why I have decided to eliminate ALL intense sweeteners from my diet.
Intense sweeteners change how your body metabolises fat. You end up with the same kind of health impacts as you would as if you had consumed sugar (ie diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance etc).
Intense sweeteners trick your body into thinking it has had something sweet to eat. When your body can’t find that shot of energy (as you would if you had used real sugar), it takes energy from somewhere else, like your muscles. This means that your body is burning muscle tissue as opposed to body fat. The result: WEIGHT GAIN!
Discovering this explained a lot to me. Over the years, I had struggled with uncontrollable weight gain, and trust me, not as a result of poor diet or lack of exercise (both of which I OD’ed on). I was following a prescribed health plan to help me strip my body fat, with the aim of getting me back to my pre-baby body shape. This was the promise the diet industry had given me and I believed them. I was so wrong!
Overdosing on intense sweeteners can have a detrimental laxative effect. But how do you know how much of these substances you are consuming? They are cheaper than sugar for manufacturers to use and are therefore added to many ‘diet’ products. This sometimes leads to a misdiagnosis of IBS and is a nightmare for someone like me who has food intolerances.
You can become addicted to intense sweeteners, just like you can with sugar. Intense sweeteners can be around 2000 to 3000 times sweeter than sugar. The more intense sweetener you eat, the more you will crave; it’s a vicious cycle of carbohydrate hell. Intense sweetener addiction is real! It was one of the reasons why I was putting on so much weight.
Who and what do you believe.
There is a lot of misleading information out there in the big wide world of the web. It certainly pays to do your research and make sure you have the right facts. Intense sweeteners are currently booming in the beverage and diet industries and I am concerned where they will go next.
I am smack bang in the middle of writing a book on eating issues involving food intolerance, and how it affects your body, mind and spirit. I had to. Mine were taking over my life, spiraling out of control. I researched heavily. I spoke to many different professionals, both medical and alternative. I used my knowledge and resources from working in a government health authority to find out as much as possible on what food intolerance is and how it affected my body.
Eating with the Enemy is the result of what I know, and how I apply it every day - bringing balance back to my health.
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