As discussed in our previous blog post, sugar consumption can lead to a huge variety of health issues including:
visceral fat & follow on effects from the release of harmful chemicals, which alter all aspects of bodily functions
sugar addiction symptoms
lack of sustained energy
But how do we move on from so many years of enjoying our favourite sweet foods?
Thanks to sugar free sweeteners we don't have to, and we can say goodbye to the damage caused by sugar. These sweeteners can now be used to replace sugar in basically any sweet foods you can think of.
Food authorities such as FSANZ (Food Standards Australia New Zealand) define 'ADI' as: "amount of a food additive that can be consumed each day, over an entire lifetime, without any appreciable health risks."
High intensity sugar free sweeteners are those which only require a tiny quantity, since they are hundreds of times (>x100) sweeter than sugar. These include:
Stevia (150 - 300 times sweeter than sugar) and has zero calories
Monkfruit sweetener (100 - 250 times sweeter than sugar) and has zero calories
Sucralose (600 times sweeter than sugar) and has zero calories
Acesulfame potassium (200 times sweeter than sugar) and has zero calories
Aspartame (200 times sweeter than sugar) and has a tiny amount of calories
Since these sweeteners provide zero calories (or a very tiny amount of calories in the case of aspartame) AND are consumed in such tiny quantities:
they do not contribute to visceral fat in your body
they don't affect the liver
have no effect (or negligible effect) on blood sugar.
Unfortunately these sweeteners have been given a bad image due to a lot of misinterpretation, misleading & simply false information in the public domain. This is despite the approval, regulation and support of these additives by major food authorities. For example, if we google "are sugar free sweeteners bad for you", some of the top results are alarmingly deceitful. To dismiss any of these alarming claims and help clear the misleading information:
high intensity sweeteners are nowhere close to being as bad as consuming sugar
there is no proof that high intensity sweeteners cause weight gain, brain tumors, or any cancers.
there is no evidence high intensity sweeteners alter human gut bacteria
Any of the alarming health claims you may see have absolutely no scientific proof and are seriously misleading the public. They look at animal studies (mice and rats) very superficially since in these studies animals are fed the sweeteners in enormous quantities that are atleast a dozen times (>x12) higher than the ADI (acceptable daily intake) set by food authorities.
Food authorities such as FSANZ (Food Standards Australia New Zealand) define 'ADI' as: "amount of a food additive that can be consumed each day, over an entire lifetime, without any appreciable health risks."
To even get to the ADI, you would need to consume huge amounts of sweetened products. For example, to reach the ADI for aspartame (40mg/kg body weight/day), a 60kg person would need to consume 4.5L of diet/no sugar soft drink everyday!
Again, this is because these sweeteners are hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, and you need a tiny amount to get the same sweet flavour. Consuming 500ml of diet soft drink would contain 0.50g to 0.55g of aspartame, while 500ml of regular soft drink would contain 50-55g of sugar. For reference it is suggested we should keep sugar intake below 24g a day, so that is about 250ml of regular soft drink (equal to a mini soft drink can).
One thing to note: these sweeteners are typically sold with bulking agents to help people substituting these for sugar (ie. 1 teaspoon of sweetener with bulking agent will provide the same sweetness as 1 teaspoon of sugar). But they contain >99% bulking agent and only a fraction of the high intensity sweetener.
It is always a better option to buy and consume the pure sweetener extract and learn to manage the dosage ourselves. This way we don't consume these bulking agents which can even end up being counter productive for our pursuit to cut out added sugar.
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