Think Before You Reach For That Splenda!
May 7, 2010 – 4:09 pmI always laugh (at least in my mind) when I see someone reach for the Splenda or other sugar-substitute at a cafe. Especially when it’s someone young and clearly in-shape. There are of course those individuals that have to refrain from sugar at all costs, such as diabetics, and I can understand their decision to turn to Splenda. It’s the fact that so many other people are using Splenda that gets me.
From Splenda’s own website:
“SPLENDA® is also the brand name for the ingredient sucralose. It is made through a patented, multi-step process that starts with sugar and converts it to a no calorie, non-carbohydrate sweetener. The process selectively replaces three hydrogen-oxygen groups on the sugar molecule with three chlorine atoms. In the case of sucralose, its addition converts sucrose to sucralose, which is essentially inert. The result is an exceptionally stable sweetener that tastes like sugar, but without sugar’s calories. Sucralose isn’t broken down for energy, and is not recognized by the body as a carbohydrate.”
I suspect that many of those Splenda users out there aren’t aware that what you are eating is sugar, with added chlorine, making it indigestible. Naturally, there are plenty of arguments made by the pro-Splenda camp, as well as the anti-Splenda camp, with both citing scientific studies.
No matter what this or that study shows, do you really want to consume a sugar-chlorine mix? Is it worth saving those few extra calories every day?
Unfortunately for many this is an extension of their processed-food-eating ways. All the better to be able to get all the sweetness Americans want, without the calories, right? I say WRONG.
Personally, I’ll continue to reach for sugar, honey, or agave whenever I drink my tea (I don’t sweeten my coffee), and I will certainly continue to stay away from all artificially-sweetened foods. If you are using enough Splenda every day that it would truly make a significant difference to your total daily calories were you to change back to sugar, then you certainly have a problem.
For starters, maybe you should try and wean yourself off the need for that amount of sweetener!
7 Responses to “Think Before You Reach For That Splenda!”
This post is incredibly one-sided, and I believe it dramatically understates the risk of table sugar while dramatically overstating the risk of Splenda.
Is it best for your health to avoid sugar and Splenda altogher? Probably. But to ask why would someone young/in shape choose Splenda as a sugar alternative you seem to ignore the incredible dangers of table sugar and summarize the risks as just a “few simple calories.” Let me tell you…
And as for the risks of Splenda, you read one source stating that chlorine is in the product and you automatically are against it!? I guess you must laugh when any young/in shape person reaches for a glass of tap water which contains chlorine as well.
Of course chlorine can be dangerous, but wouldn’t it be prudent to do a little research on how much is absorbed before you try to sound the alarm? The FDA has done years of testing and Splenda has an absurdly high safety margin. The highest limits of consumption with no side effects comes out to the equivalent of thousands of packets of the product/day for the average adult. Most vitamins can have severe side effects at such absurd levels as well.
So whats the conclusion for the average American who is overweight and looking to get healthier? Your advice of trying to wean them off the several cans of sodas/day is nice in theory, but if only it were that easy…
Replacing a few cans of soda/day with diet soda holding all else constant can result in weight loss of ~1 pound/week from that change alone!
If your tirade against artificial sweeteners is because they are not natural and you are trying to only eat natural products, then make that your central argument.
Quit worrying about other people’s diet choices and start worrying about how you’re going to burn off those excess wasted calories accumulating on your gut from that “harmless” reach for the sugar and honey for your tea.
By RDP on May 11, 2010
I think one moral of this story is that we as Americans have an excessive addiction to sweet foods. Of course food choices are up to the individual – however, it hurts to see people you care about ingest things that can hurt them (whether it be Splenda or sugar or any other controversial substance like marijuana).
Splenda has been around for a relatively short period of time and it is impossible to know what the long-term effects are. Choosing whether to eat Splenda or sugar in excess could be making the choice between cancer and diabetes – but it’s just too early to tell.
Also, I do wonder (and I don’t know the answer to this) if people who try to only use chemical sugar substitutes are actually thinner or healthier than people who don’t – I’m not convinced they are.
I have also heard that eating artificial sweeteners makes you want more sweets.
The question is: are these things actually making people healthier (or preventing diabetes/weight-gain) more than just moderating one’s sugar/honey/agave intake?
Moderation is key…
By Aliza on May 11, 2010
RDP,
My central argument stands- Splenda is an unhealthy choice. My post also dealt with our culture’s need for sweetness at all costs. In addition to being an unhealthy choice, it is a crutch for people living an unhealthy life (i.e. drinking loads of soda) to escape the effects of there choices. It’s the easy way out!
Or is it?! Why have Americans continued to get more and more obese even with the introduction of artificial sweeteners? For one, it has been shown that drinking diet-soda actually is associated with eating MORE calories! Perhaps it’s even the effect that the artificial sweeteners have on our bodies?!
There is absolutely no need to douse one’s body with artificial sweetener.
To your attack on my lack of research. I stayed away from a discussion on the “research” on the matter because as is the case with many subjects, there are numerous “studies” or “opinions” both for and against. And then we could also get into the counter-studies. When it comes to nutrition, “expert opinion” apparently changes on a daily basis.
If you must bring up the FDA, I suggest you do a little research into the history of the FDA and the USDA’s actions (often at the detriment to American’s health). Their “research” is often extremely biased and has flat out been wrong. Remember the whole “fat is evil” campaign? This is just one example.
In our government’s trusting hands, we have become a dangerously unhealthy country. If I were you, I wouldn’t believe everything I read when it comes to government research. Remember Food Inc? I had hoped you learned a little more about the make-up of certain government institutions…
I am a proponent of eating/using natural products. This may be difficult for people who look at food simply as an input to understand. It will be a sad day indeed when food cultures are completely lost because of an obsession on nutritional/reductive food science.
Of course it’s easier to eat/drink products whose calories have been artificially lowered, but how many mistakes do we have to make until we realize that there are is no miracle food that can allow us to continue our unhealthy lifestyles? Remember margarine before we knew what trans-fats were?
As for the dangers of “table sugar”, I completely agree that we should all limit our daily use. But your obsession with calories shines through when you say “quit worrying about other people’s diet choices and start worrying about how you’re going to burn off those excess wasted calories accumulating on your gut from that “harmless” reach for the sugar and honey for your tea”.
I personally do limit the amount of refined sugar I consume, but for the few times each week that I may have tea, I use a small amount of honey/brown sugar/agave which adds up to a small amount of calories. Everything in moderation. To me, this doesn’t represent wasted calories. I am very conscious of my sugar intake and in terms of my overall food intake for a week, if I wanted to cut calories, sugar would most definitely not be the place to start for me.
We do have an obesity epidemic in this country and it is our nation’s diet for sure which has caused this. And yes, sugar-filled sodas are a large part of the problem and I am well aware of the amount of weight that can be lost when switching to diet-soda (again, when NOT eating more calories otherwise!). But again, this is a crutch, enabling someone who doesn’t want to change his or her diet to take the easy road.
How about some water instead?
Drinking diet-soda, while it may have great short-term benefits, only represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the American diet. But I digress…
I stand by my central argument- I am an advocate for individuals to cut down on the amount of sugar/sugar-substitutes they “need” on a daily basis.
By ThePerfectFoam on May 11, 2010
I think Aliza’s post is right on the money, but I will give my reactions to some of her points.
1) We don’t know the long term effects of Splenda, and so replacing excess consumption of sugar with Splenda might be replacing risk of obesity/diabetes with cancerà I agree. But I also believe that the amount of sugar it takes to reach these ‘excess’ levels is far lower than the ‘excess’ levels of Splenda.
2) People who rely on artificial sweeteners crave more sweetsà This has been shown to be true, and can explain why so many people gain weight even while consuming them. However, this is why I was careful to include “holding all else constant” in the diet in my first post. Of course if you eat more cookies because you feel like you deserve some for switching to diet coke you will gain weight! But this is just one more example of the classic confusion between causation and correlation…
And as for ThePerfectFoams post, I agree with many points as well:
1) The central argument that people should cut down on the amount of sugar/sugar-substitutes they “need” on a daily basis is hard to disagree with. My only comment before was to say that using artificial sweeteners can be a useful stepping stone to achieving this goal and can produce rapid results to help with encouragement in sticking with a program. But calling this a ‘crutch’ is insulting: If these people had the willpower to limit consumption themselves they would not be seeking to lose fat in the first place!
2) There is absolutely no need to douse one’s body with artificial sweetenerà Of course
A compromise:
We all agree that moderation is key. As I stated, I think a good first step for a severely overweight person having difficulty cutting down is to first slowly wean away from sodas and artificial sweeteners can be of great help. But even for a young/in-shape person who is practicing moderate consumption, wouldn’t it still be better to replace the simple sugars we do consume with something less dangerous?
As for “obsession with calories”, this generally comes in the form of being worried that I am eating too few. At the same time, I don’t simply want to add empty sugar calories to fill that void. One compromise I have found and use frequently represents a middle ground between table sugar and artificial sweetenersà sugar alcohols. These substances may have somewhat reduced calorie content, but more important for me is that they act more like complex carbohydrates as their blood sugar impact is minimal. Of course there are many more benefits like the fact that they are natural substances and cause no harmful effect on teeth, but this is already a subject for a future post…
By RDP on May 12, 2010
RDP,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. A few thoughts:
My calling Splenda a “crutch” was by no means meant to be insulting. I simply mean that instead of getting to the bottom of reforming our eating habits, this allows us to continue guzzling soda which even with Splenda is bad for us. Also, eliminating the sugar in soda from one’s diet is not enough for an obese person to lose all of the necessary weight, so if an individual does not have enough willpower to limit the consumption of soda, what makes you think they can will themselves to work out, to eat more fruits and veggies, etc.?
Another point of my original post that I perhaps should have spelled out more clearly, is that I find people’s Splenda use amusing/disturbing because many of them have taken no time to look into what Splenda actually is. They hear “calorie-free” and run with it. Again, we need the people in our country to pay much more attention to what they are putting into their bodies.
I agree with you that moderation is the absolute key. I am less inclined to agree with your point that Splenda is less dangerous than other natural sources of sugar. See the quote below from the nutritionist at my medical group just emailed out today coincidentally enough:
“Minimize sugar consumption. Simple sugar should account for no more than 10% of your daily calories. Remember that the more sugar you consume, the more you’ll want! And avoid artificial sweeteners, which don’t provide much caloric savings and have actually been linked to weight gain! (When your body tastes something several hundred times sweeter than real sugar but doesn’t get the expected caloric boost, you’re left craving more calories and are driven to eat more.) Moreover, artificial sweeteners impair your ability to taste the sweetness in natural foods.”
I also would like to stress again that I am wary of eating something that my body doesn’t recognize and thus doesn’t digest. Processed, white sugar certainly is something to avoid, but for example honey is something that people have been consuming for thousands of years (honey has been found in Egyptian tombs!). Don’t you feel more comfortable consuming that rather than an industrial product that has only been around for a fraction of the time?
To close, I do agree that in the short-term Splenda can be a useful additive to a weight-loss regime, if the individual simply cannot wean him or herself off of soda/sugar. However, I think that once the weight is off, every effort should be made to get off artificial sweetener as well.
By ThePerfectFoam on May 12, 2010
I need to weight in here…..all this talk about sweetener is absolutely ridiculous. You talk about Splenda having chlorine as if they pour bottles of pool cleaner in their mixture. The citation from their website says that they replace three oxygen-hydrogen groupings with three chlorine atoms. You think chlorine making its way into foods is some strange danger? How about table salt…. NaCL – half of every salt molecule is chlorine. People talk about cutting down on the salt in their diet, but I don’t hear many people talk about the dangers of putting toxic salt in their food.
And by the way Dave and RDP….you both may give me crap about being unhealthy, but I’m going on my eighth straight year of only drinking water. Neither of you can say that!
By RDK on May 20, 2010
RDK, while your comments are appreciated, you unfortunately missed the point of my post completely. I was trying to illuminate that too many people simply reach for Splenda and other sweeteners without knowing what it is that they are ingesting. I also wanted to point out that Splenda is used by many people as a way to escape making truly significant changes to their (often very unhealthy) eating habits.
I was not tying to argue over the pros and cons of chlorine…
Further, as I already stated, there have been no long-term studies done on Splenda and it’s potential negative impacts on people’s health. When ingesting something that is 100 times sweeter than normal sugar without the calories, it’s not surprising that your body begins to crave more food, which is why Splenda has actually been linked to weight-gain.
Finally, though you may be going on years of “only drinking water” (I am assuming you are still drinking some wine, beer, etc., but that you meant to imply you have been soda-free), you drank enough Sprite in high school that you are just now catching up in terms of total-amount of soda in your life. Meaning, you are finally lowering your number! I average like 1 soda per month, which I am fine with. Let’s not even get into your overall eating habits- that’s a post all on its own!
By ThePerfectFoam on May 21, 2010