DailyDirt: Sugar, Yes, Please…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The number of calories you can ingest as soda or juice can be surprisingly high, if you’re not accustomed to accounting for your caloric intake. There’s a reason why so many diet soft drinks exist — and why a few low-cal beers are on the market. Drinking fewer calories just seems like an easier path to consuming fewer calories.
- Should you rely on artificial sweeteners instead of sugar to get your sweetness fix? Obviously, artificial sweeteners aren’t “natural” (well, except for Stevia or tagatose), but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad for your health. Added sugar in your diet correlates with some health problems, but so far, serious health issues aren’t so strongly associated with artificial sweeteners. [url]
- Aspartame acquired a bad reputation for causing cancer in rats, but actual health problems for humans haven’t been demonstrated. Unless you’re one of the rare individuals with phenylketonuria, there’s little scientific evidence that you should be concerned about consuming a reasonable amount of aspartame. But if you’re worried about your gut bacteria, the scientific jury is still out on the long-term effects from altering a person’s microbiome. [url]
- Coca-Cola is moving away from sugary drinks with lower calorie products that replace sugar with sweeteners like Stevia. Stevia-sweetened Coke hasn’t caught on (yet?), but it’s the more “natural” successor to Diet Coke. [url]
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Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diet, food, health, microbiome, phenylketonuria, soda, stevia, sugar, tagatose
Companies: coca cola
Comments on “DailyDirt: Sugar, Yes, Please…”
Sweetener Error - What Gives?
Actually, the best ‘artificial sweetener’ that really isn’t artificial is Sucralose (aka commercially, ‘Splenda’).
I say ‘actually artificial’ because it IS found in nature, we just don’t have enough of it – so we are also able to manufacture it.
Splenda is the number 1 turn-to choice for diabetics, it is ‘zero calorie’ due to its large molecule size, it IS naturally occurring, and it doesn’t cause systemic body problems. It IS the sweetener you want to turn to, if you don’t want HFCS or Sucrose (high-fructose corn syrup or regular sugar calories).
Get a ‘little yellow packet’ next time you go for coffee, and actually taste it. It seems ‘sweeter than regular sugar’, no ‘bad afterbite’, and can replace sugar in drinks, home cooking, anything.
Oh, and there ARE soda companies using it heavily (blended with Stevia – a plant-leaf that is bitter, but that confuses your taste buds making them think it is actually sweet). Read the labels…but definitely try Sucralose!
Re: Sweetener Error - What Gives?
Oh, and drinking anything with Aspartame is akin to drinking drain cleaner, and here’s why:
Starting around 1980, Searle’s CEO Donald Rumsfeld (yep, that one) faced off with the FDA not once, not twice, but three times over Aspartame. The reason? THE FDA BANNED IT the first two times. Better read that full article. Aspartame was BANNED as a sweetener because of human toxicity! (Then again, it was developed as an insecticide before some genius figured out it was sweet, go figure how THAT testing turned on itself)
Re: Sweetener Error - What Gives?
Tried Sucralose, Aspartame, Stevia, and Saccharin. None of them taste the same as sugar to me, and all of them have an aftertaste.
It’d be nice if Sucralose fit the bill, but I still have to stick with actual calories for my sweetening.
Sugar Is More Fattening Than Fat
Sugar doesn’t need to be digested—it goes straight into your bloodstream. Fat, on the other hand, needs to be specially packaged before your circulation can handle it.
If you have a sweet tooth, by all means go for artificial sweeteners. Me, I prefer creamy, fatty things. Like full-cream milk—ah, when those lumps fall into the coffee and melt like butter …
Coca-Cola began using nontrivial amounts of Stevia as a sweetener in its flagship product about ten years ago. My local bottler was one of the early adopters. For a while I had to stock up when out of town to feed my Coke habit, then the two adjacent bottlers began using Stevia as well.
To me, Stevia tastes a bit like licking a 9-volt battery, except with a nasty metallic aftertaste. Buried deep in the labyrinthine twisties of fda.gov there’s a .pdf of a decision by the FDA to allow soft drink bottlers to replace sugar with Stevia and exempting them from putting that on the label. I didn’t find anything specific about the calorie counts, but apparently there’s another ruling somewhere exempting them from having to change the calories-per-can.
How much Stevia a bottler uses probably depends on cost, since that was the reason they began using it in the first place. And though the Official Word is that a “vanishingly small” percentage of people find the taste of Stevia repellent, I’ve found plenty of people who thought the taste of their soft drinks was “off”, at least back when there were some unadulterated ones to compare to.
I went from a 3 or 4 liter a day Cokeaholic to zip.
Bottlers have been using Stevia for a *long* time. It’s just now that the word is getting out.
Re: To me, Stevia tastes a bit like licking a 9-volt battery, except with a nasty metallic aftertaste
Maybe that’s the phosphoric acid content in Coca-Cola. It’s dissolving away your teeth even as you worry about the taste.
Artificial sweeteners are bad
Studies show they create a craving for real sweets. I saw this with an elderly gentleman I knew. He used artificial sweeteners and invariably after using them, he’d go hunting for real sugar. If he skipped the artificial sweeteners, the craving for real sugar just wasn’t there.
I could care less about cancer. There are better reasons not to use fake sugar. Like fake pot, it’s not even close to being good for you.
Re: Studies show they create a craving for real sweets.
So is it the sweeteners that are bad, or the “real sweets” that cause the damage?
Wrong. Pure sugar us FAR BETTER for you than any fake seeetener or high fructose corn syrup. It actually helps control your weight. Sugar uses leptin to make you feel full. Sweeteners do not, so you keep eating…
https://www.google.com/search?q=lepin+sugar+and+sweeteners&oq=lepin+sugar+and+sweeteners&aqs=chrome..69i57.9674j0j4&client=ms-android-att-us&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=leptin+sugar+and+sweeteners
Re: Pure sugar us FAR BETTER for you
Ah, I see the snake-oil salesmen have arrived…
Re: Re: Pure sugar us FAR BETTER for you
Actually there is truth in that. I’ve talked to doctors about it and there is some consensus that besides other collateral effects that are being discovered, when you eat and your brain doesn’t get the calories it is expecting it will actually start asking for more to ‘compensate’.
While “helps control your weight” tells only part of the story it seems it is not all snake-oil.
Well that’s just great… anyone tell Coca-Cola (or is it Caca-Cola now) about the laxative effects most “fake sugars” have ?
Unless, of course, the industry moves on to something like erythritol – which won’t happen because it’s too expensive.
Stevia-sweetened Coke tastes awful. But then again I found out that I specifically like the version sweetened with sugar from sugarcane. When I tried it in the US it wasn’t the same.
The challenge nowadays is to make sweeteners that add taste without adding the calories and the collateral damage that usually come with such products when they are too successful in replacing sugar taste-wise.
As a bit of trivia, I found out from friends that in Switzerland for example the sweets are less sweet than here due to specific legislation. Though truth be said some sweets simply cannot be made if you add less sugar because of other properties besides the sweetening effect so in some cases the sweetener would have to replace some of these qualities. I’ve tried a few different types of sugar and surely there are tastier solutions other than the white sugar. I’m contemplating trying coconut sugar but it’s hellish expensive 🙁