Are artificial sweeteners okay for our health? Here’s what the current evidence says
#Health #ArtificialSweeteners #Sucralose #NutritionFacts #SugarAlternatives #HealthyEating #MetabolicHealth #Aspartame #Obesity #Type2Diabetes #FoodScience #Sweeteners
https://the-14.com/are-artificial-sweeteners-okay-for-our-health-heres-what-the-current-evidence-says/
#ArtificialSweeteners
#ArtificialSweeteners Are Ruining Your #Diet by Tricking Your #Brain
https://www.vice.com/en/article/artificial-sweeteners-are-ruining-your-diet-by-tricking-your-brain/
5 expert-approved ways to eliminate #artificialsweeteners in your #diet
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/23/health/artificial-sweetener-reduction-wellness/index.html
A way to wean off coffee and diet sodas
This is an unusual topic for me. This year I worked to wean myself off of caffeine and artificial sweeteners, and given the trouble I had finding information on how to do it, thought I’d put notes out on what worked for me.
Why bother? After all, most of us have our addictions, and are able to get by in daily life despite them, particularly if they’re common ones. Caffeine dependency in particular is widespread, although most people are in denial about it. And many have a double whammy, being addicted to diet sodas, which have both caffeine and artificial sweeteners like aspartame. Most people take these in without any issues. But in recent years, I was drinking a lot of coffee and Diet Dr. Pepper, and as I’ve gotten older, it’s caused increasing problems.
I have a long history with caffeine. When I was younger, I drank copious amounts of coffee (usually black for maximum effect), somewhere in the neighborhood of ten cups a day, and chased them down with a few diet sodas. I was one wired puppy! That level of caffeine made it hard to keep calm in stressful situations, which caused both career and relationship issues.
This eventually led me to give up caffeine cold turkey, which I don’t recommend. You might be able to get away with it if you don’t work for a living, or if your job doesn’t include a significant social factor, but for me, it was the wrong approach. Still, I was able to do it, twice.
What I didn’t understand back then was that I was also addicted to aspartame. I kept drinking caffeine free diet soda, but it wasn’t always easy to find, which eventually led to me falling back on the caffeinated versions. Before I knew it, I was drinking a half dozen diet sodas a day. Not as bad as the ten cups of coffee, but that much aspartame led to its own set of problems. At one point I cut back on the diet sodas by mixing in a few cups of coffee, and so was back to where I started, although at a fraction of the earlier levels.
Early this year, the problems were increasing, so I decided it was time to do something. Tackling all of it at once was too overwhelming, so I decided to focus first on the diet soda, which meant focusing on aspartame.
Aspartame
The medical field seems unsure whether aspartame is really addictive. All I can say is that every time I tried to give it up cold turkey, I had bad withdrawal symptoms. One was an unquenchable thirst, no matter how much water I drank. The other were headaches, distinct from the caffeine withdrawal ones. But the worst was what I can only describe as a feeling of impending doom, which seemed to increase in urgency the longer I went without an aspartame hit.
Over the years, I had tried just gradually cutting back on the number of drinks, but that always led to a feeling of deprivation, along with longing for the next drink, and rationalizing why it could be sooner. It felt like an agonizingly long goodbye to an old friend. In short, I found the psychological effort in doing it this way problematic.
What finally worked was separating the experience of drinking the diet soda from the intake of aspartame. I picked up a large box of Equal packets, and found out how many milligrams of aspartame were in the drinks vs the Equal packets. (Getting reliable info was hard, but the best I could find was 35mg per Equal packet.). It came out to something like a 12 oz can of Diet Dr. Pepper having the equivalent of about 5.3 packets.
So I cut out the Diet Dr. Peppers cold turkey, but replaced them with the same number of glasses of water, each with five packets of Equal mixed in. I gulped these down quickly, treating them as a drug, and not savoring them. I also temporarily increased my coffee intake to keep the caffeine levels about the same. The first few days were rough. There were obviously other things in the soda besides the caffeine and aspartame that my body was missing, but taking in the aspartame in an alternate manner prevented the worst symptoms.
I then worked to gradually cut down the daily intake of aspartame. I cut the number of packets per glass of water by one each week. I discovered that the day after a cut was worse than the day of the cut, so my cut days were on Friday, giving me the weekend to recover. I did this until I was down to one packet per glass, and then cut those down by one each of the following weeks. It took about six or seven weeks, but it worked. I was now aspartame free!
That was several months ago. I had thought I might stabilize with the coffee drinking for a while, but the increased coffee consumption started causing its own issues. So I moved on to tackling the caffeine portion.
Caffeine
Here my strategy was similar: replace the habit of coffee drinking with caffeine pills. Finding low dose pills is difficult. The lowest straight caffeine pills (without other crap mixed in) that I could find is 100 mg, but there are splitable tablet versions, and four way pill splitters, so the dosages could be brought down to 20-30mg pieces.
I cut all coffee drinking cold turkey, replacing it with the pills. Again the first couple of days were rough but manageable. At the start I was taking in about 350mg of caffeine a day spread over 25-50mg hits throughout the day. The plan was to cut the daily intake by about 25mg each Friday. It worked. I was caffeine free by early December, and in a relatively stress free manner. Patience seems very useful for this kind of endeavor.
Afterward
I recently had a drink of a diet soda, and discovered that it didn’t taste nearly as good as it used to. Apparently when you’re addicted to something it may taste like one of the finest pleasures in life. But get away from it for a few months, and you’re able to realize what you were taking in was mediocre at best. It seems to support the Epicurean insight that pleasure is basically lack of suffering, what they called “ataraxia.”
The methods used here are similar to the nicotine patches smokers often use to quit, although I only realized it afterward. I’m not a particularly strong willed person, and it worked for me. If you’d like to wean off aspartame (or other artificial sweeteners) and/or caffeine, it might work for you too. So if you’re looking for something to have a New Year’s resolution on, this might be a candidate.
I’m not planning to be strict about the caffeine. After a few months, I can see having the occasional (full sugar) coke or mocha. The trick, I think, is not drinking them at home or work, or in any other setting where they could turn back into a daily habit.
#addiction #ArtificialSweeteners #aspartame #caffeine #coffee #dietSoda #Health #Nutrition #wellness
Consuming a drink with erythritol—a sweetener often used in stevia, monk fruit, and keto products—more than doubled the risk of blood clotting in 10 healthy people, according to a new pilot study. Clots can break off from blood vessels and travel to the heart, triggering a heart attack, or to the brain, causing a stroke. Previous research has also linked erythritol to a higher risk of stroke, heart attack, and death. #HealthRisks #Erythritol #ArtificialSweeteners #HeartHealth #KetoDiet
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/08/health/erythritol-blood-clotting-wellness/index.html
A former American Diabetes Association employee alleges she was sacked after refusing to endorse salads loaded with Splenda, an artificial sweetener. Totally by coincidence, Splenda gave the ADA a million dollars.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/18/splenda-diabetes-lawsuit
#Splenda #AmericanDiabetesAssociation #DietaryAdvice #ArtificialSweeteners #Diabetes #Nutrition
#Evidence that #artificialsweeteners like #aspartame cause #cancer lacks support, according to review from #WHO agencies
Medical research finds
Artificial sweeteners, cancer,
Male birth control pills
#medicine #research #artificialsweeteners #coloncancer #malebirthcontrol #haiku #poetry
Research suggests that highly processed foods, especially those with artificial sweeteners, may increase the risk of depression. The study found that among heavy consumers of such foods, the risk of depression could rise by up to 50%. The exact mechanism linking these foods to depression remains unclear, but factors like chronic inflammation and gut microbiome disruption are considered.
https://consumer.healthday.com/depression-2665590185.html
Sweeteners can depress
Darkening moods with sugar taste
Unnatural diets
#ultraprocessedfoods #depression #artificialsweeteners #haiku #poetry
Artificial Sweeteners Increase Cardiovascular Risk
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/artificial-sweeteners-increase-cardiovascular-risk-2023a1000jjg
#sweeteners #artificialSweeteners #diet #disease #heartDisease
I'm #diabetic, but quit #ArtificialSweeteners because I hear more bad 💩 every day.
Anyone used #Allulose yet?
It seems to be a rare natural #sugar that's only found in raisins, dates & a few others. It's sweet, but not digested, so it has no calories & doesn't really enter the blood.
Can't find anything dangerous (yet)
#Scientists Confirm That #ArtificialSweeteners Don’t Help At All With #WeightLoss
https://www.sciencealert.com/its-official-artificial-sweeteners-dont-work-for-weight-loss-who-says
As a life-long soda junkie that long ago switched to diet soda and seltzer I'll be the first to say that I don't consider diet soda or junk food made with artificial sweeteners "healthy food". At the same time the hyperbole on this topic, often coming from the a place of trying to be helpful, is really not grounded. Would it be better if I cut back on my diet soda habit or even better eliminated it? Absolutely. Is diet soda likely causing me ill health outcomes like: weight gain, gut health disregulation, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. No. This video has perhaps the best dissection of the present available evidence and solid recommendations at the end. #nutrition #fitness #health #longevity #ArtificialSweeteners #DietSoda
Are artificial sweeteners safe?
Are artificial sweeteners safe?
This is why I avoid artificial sweetners. Better to just reduce sugar usage if possible.
Also, I never like the idea of diet and zero sugar drinks.
"World Health Organization: New guidelines from the UN health agency released on Monday have advised against using non-sugar sweeteners (NSS). The recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) is based on a review of available evidence which suggests that artificial sweeteners do not help control body mass or reduce the risk of weight-related illnesses." #sugar #diets #artificialsweeteners https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136667
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