Why Artificial Sweeteners are Preventing you from Losing 10 Pounds

 

Food and Drink Lifestyle by Nagina Abdullah  My cup of warm coffee is the highlight of my morning. I wake up looking forward to it. The comforting taste in my mouth, the warm feeling in my body and the satisfaction knowing that my mind will slowly start to awaken, brings me incredible pleasure. I feel like I deserve a treat for being up early, getting to work, and having so much under control (or at least looking like I do) so early in the day. My coffee used to be more than a simple comfort in the morning, though. It was a creamy, sugary delight that helped satiate my sweet craving. I used to add one pack of Splenda and a low-fat (heavenly) vanilla creamer in my morning coffee. “Can’t I just have a little sweetener in my coffee?” I would think. I felt like I was already giving up so much. I knew not to go overboard with brownies, cakes and cookies. There were so many times when I would resist a pastry at work or say no to a cupcake or donut. I wondered if my sweetener would help me lose weight because it wasn’t officially sugar – it was a sugar substitute and didn’t have any calories. Sweeteners are low-calorie substitutes for sugar – and many of them are not unsafe nor hazardous to our health in the typical amounts you would use. “While they are not magic bullets, smart use of non-nutritive sweeteners could help you reduce added sugars in your diet, therefore lowering the number of calories you eat.” – Dr. Christopher Gardner, associate professor of medicine at Stanford The biggest prevention to our weight-loss is not that artificial sweeteners have less calories than sugar. I challenge you to think bigger than if your artificial sweetener will help you lose weight because it has less calories than sugar. . . Sweeteners prevent weight-loss because of the effect they have on your brain. Here are 3 major effects sweeteners have on your brain – and why they are preventing your weight-loss:   1. Your sweet craving drives overeating From a Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine article: “Experiments generally have found that sweet taste, whether delivered by sugar or artificial sweeteners, enhanced human appetite. Animals seek food to satisfy the inherent craving for sweetness, even in the absence of energy need.” This means that even if your body does not need energy, or calories, from food, it is seeking to satisfy its sweet craving. You may think, “Why not give your body its sweet fix though a no-calorie sweetener?” Here’s my take – as a longer-term solution, why not reduce your dependence on sweetness so you don’t need any kind of fix? It’s possible (I did it after being a sugar addict until I was in my thirties)   2. Sweeteners prevent enjoying the real taste of healthy, unsweetened foods One of the biggest effects of adding sweeteners is that it “changes the way you taste food.” Sweeteners are more potent than sugar, and though you are using a lower quantity than you would of sugar, it over stimulates your sugar receptors – and as a result, may “limit tolerance for more complex tastes” says Dr. Ludwig, Weight-Loss Specialist at Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital. “That means people who routinely use artificial sweeteners may start to find less intensely sweet foods, such as fruit, less appealing and non-sweet foods, such as vegetables, downright unpalatable” – Harvard Medical School article Artificial sweeteners make it very difficult for you to eat healthy, filling foods because you don’t like their taste as much and crave food that is sweet.   3. Sweeteners reduce your brain’s association of sugar with high calories Since artificial sweeteners are low in sugar, they can prevent your brain from associating sweetness with high-calorie intake. “As a result, we may crave more sweets, tend to choose sweet food over nutritious food, and gain weight. Participants in the San Antonio Heart Study who drank more than 21 diet drinks per week were twice as likely to become overweight or obese as people who didn’t drink diet soda.” Try cutting the amount of sweetener you use in half starting today, and slowly starting to take them out of your diet so that you can lose weight faster and easier. Some of the most popular sugar substitutes are Splenda, Stevia, Nutrasweet, honey and maple syrup, among many others. Once you start the process of taking sugar out of your diet, your body will rapidly respond. Though you may feel some withdrawal symptoms like sharper cravings, these will fade if you stick with the plan. You will lose weight quickly, have shinier skin, and even start to look younger. When you take time to actually taste real food and drinks, you’ll find they’re pretty damn good! Taking pleasure in them makes losing weight and having the body you dream of so much more attainable, no matter your genetics or busy lifestyle. I still savor my morning cup of coffee. I just actually enjoy the taste of the coffee itself and the feeling it gives me – it’s no longer masked by the sugar and heavy sweet cream. I enjoy the real deal now as well as a healthy relationship with food and my own body. Care to join me? source : http://www.lifehack.org/272634/why-artificial-sweeteners-are-preventing-you-from-losing-10-pounds?mid=20150724&ref=mail&uid=580391&feq=daily

Should you fear aspartame?

 

Soft drink giant PepsiCo recently announced its plans to stop sweetening Diet Pepsi with aspartame in response to growing consumer concern, yet the company, regulators and many medical authorities say the potential detrimental effect of the artificial sweetener on human health is overblown. So, what's really going on here and who should you believe? The tricky thing is that there's lots of conflicting information out there on the safety of aspartame, and there's almost as much conflicting information out there on the scientific quality of that primary information. In short, it's a rabbit hole of never-ending argument. The full history of Aspartame is one plagued by controversy almost since the day in 1965 when it was accidentally discovered by a chemist named James M. Schlatter. He was working on an anti-ulcer drug and found that his concoction had a pleasant, sweet taste. After a few more years of testing, the pharmaceutical company that employed Schlatter, G.D. Searle & Co., decided to take advantage of the damaged reputation of the existing sugar substitutes of the time (cyclamate was banned in 1969, giving saccharine a virtual monopoly, but it too was plagued by health concerns and building calls for a ban) and petition for the approval by the American Food and Drug Administration for aspartame to be sold as a food additive. That petition was filed in 1973 and was technically approved the following year, but approval was then delayed when concerns surfaced about the methods and research procedures Searle used to prove the safety of aspartame. What followed for the next seven years was a series of audits, inquiries and even a grand jury investigation into both the safety of aspartame and the internal practices at Searle. While a board of inquiry declared in 1980 that more testing was required of aspartame due to concerns of possible carcinogenicity, the FDA commissioner found errors in the board's calculations of the potential risks and overruled its decision. In 1981 FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. ruled that aspartame was safe and approved its use as a tabletop sweetener and in dry goods; it was later approved for use in soft drinks in 1983. While the initial science behind aspartame's safety was eventually validated, the climate of controversy and suspicion under which aspartame came to market has never abated and has flared up at certain times over the last three decades. In 1985, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, who led an investigation into Searle and aspartame's safety prior to its approval, introduced the Aspartame Safety Act of 1985 to provide for further study in response to the widespread popularity of aspatame-based NutraSweet. The bill came out shortly after the Centers for Disease Control conducted a study on short-term negative side effects of aspartame use and found no reason for concern, which may have played a role in the bill failing to become a law. A lawsuit attempting to remove aspartame from shelves on health grounds also failed around the same time. When the internet became a global phenomenon in the 1990s, an anti-aspartame community was able to better connect, coalesce and grow exponentially. A study published in 1996 by long-time aspartame critic Dr. John Olney and publicized by Metzenbaum suggested a possible correlation between the incidence of brain tumors and the introduction of aspartame to the market several years earlier. The company producing Nutrasweet and the FDA both pointed out problems with Olney's study and it was widely criticized in scientific, academic and regulatory circles, but the mass media latched on to the fear factor over potential health concerns associated with aspartame, arguably exaggerating Olney's main conclusion, which was simply that more study of the effects of aspartame was called for. Now, nearly two decades later, the influence of the internet on the aspartame debate has snowballed, and the web is filled with a dizzying array of claims, conspiracy theories, debunkings, and debunkings of those debunkings. Depending on what Google result you click on, you could find claims that aspartame is linked to the Nazis, the Illuminati, or that it causes multiple sclerosis, a claim that the National Multiple Sclerosis Society now lists on the "disproved theories" page of its website. So how can we pull anything resembling the truth about aspartame, especially its effects or lack thereof on human health, from this tsunami of rhetoric spanning three decades? Here's what we think we know with a pretty high level of confidence. While there's plenty of reason to doubt either the competence or the motives of both the aspartame manufacturers and the regulators from time to time, the science still speaks for itself, and it has yet to prove a conclusive link between aspartame and cancer, or even between aspartame and lesser health effects like headaches. Of course, science has not completely disproven the existence of such a link either. Such is the nature of scientific inquiry – it's very difficult to prove a negative. All we can do is study something as rigorously as possible, and then continue to study it more. That process has been ongoing for almost four decades with aspartame, and the science has yielded a few false positives (including an oft-cited 2005 study linking high doses of aspartame intake in rats to brain tumors), a lot of data pointing to aspartame as a benign additive, and some studies that call for further study, which continues to be ongoing. Today, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), among others, all consider aspartame to be safe for human consumption in the amounts currently recommended (one exception being those with the medical condition phenylketonuria, who should probably steer clear altogether). "This opinion represents one of the most comprehensive risk assessments of aspartame ever undertaken," said Dr. Alicja Mortensen of the EFSA, following a full risk assessment in 2013. "It’s a step forward in strengthening consumer confidence in the scientific underpinning of the EU food safety system and the regulation of food additives." While aspartame's early political history may leave reason to doubt its safety, the scientific consensus that has been amassed since then points in the other direction. However, the science also suggests that aspartame might not be all that great for one of its initial purposes, which was to help people diet and lose weight. There's conflicting data in this area, with some studies supporting the notion that artificial sweeteners can be a miracle weight loss tool, others showing no impact, and even some that suggest they may have the opposite effect. There are also new concerns, published in a study last year, that indicate artificial sweeteners could be messing with the microbiomes in our guts and leading to problems like glucose intolerance. This research is pretty new and only applies to animals so far; it probably needs more research to see if humans might also be affected in similar ways. So, to wrap this all up, don't believe the hype that aspartame is killing you, whereas large amounts of the high-calorie sugar sweeteners it replaces just might. In fact, you'd probably be better off just restricting sweet stuff from your diet and choosing water or tea over Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke. Like most things, there's no reason to fear aspartame in moderation, but we should continue to question past findings and study it more as our science and technology improves. That's just the way science works. Maybe some day I'll eat these words, but right now there are decades of research backing them up. So what's to become of Diet Pepsi? In a conference call with industry analysts in February, before officially initiating the move away from aspartame, the company's CEO for the Americas hinted at the issue: "The number-one thing we see from consumers is a complaint about aspartame. Aspartame is just one sweetener, but it's the one that seems to get most of the negatives in the press and on YouTube. And as you research it, that's where the negatives are coming." The company also says aspartame is safe in the frequently asked questions section of its website, but now it's switching to sucralose, (aka Splenda) in response to those "negatives." This naturally leads to the question, how safe is sucralose? It's generally accepted as safe, but a few seconds of Googling will lead to other opinions ... but that's an entirely different article. Sources: Harvard University(PDF),( 2), National MS Society, NCI, NIH, EFSA, FDA, ACS, Nature, Mercola, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, PepsiCo, ( 2), ( 3 - PDF)

Artificial Sweeteners May Have Despicable Impacts on Gut Microbes

 

By Sheena Faherty | November 26, 2014

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Artificial sweeteners. (Credit: PunchingJudy/Flickr)

I find it ironic that Thanksgiving coincides with American Diabetes Month. In honor of that irony, two recently published studies have suggested a possible link between what you eat, how it impacts the behavior of the microbes living in your gut, and type II diabetes.

To further explain, allow me use the most adorable analogy I could dream up: minions.

A rambunctious gang of rotund homunculi, minions are the tireless workhorses behind Gru’s malicious plots in the movie Despicable Me.

Minions are like gut microbes. For starters, despite appearing to be relatively simple-minded, both microbes and minions are capable of astounding things. Building and operating weapons, in the case of minions; regulating immune and digestive function, in the case of microbes.

Working in dark, cramped quarters, like microbes, minions excel at their respective jobs, making Gru’s evil-manufacturing plant run like a well-oiled machine. Upsetting the minions’ balancing act is sure to incite chaos.

It makes sense then that, just as with minions, disturbing the critical equilibrium of the community of microbes living in your gut (i.e. the microbiome) might have chaotic effects on your health. New research may have uncovered a reason why.

Consumption of artificial sweeteners has been shown to alter the community composition of the gut microbial communities in mice, rats and humans. (Figure credit: Erin McKenney, Duke University)

Results from a study by researchers in Israel, published in the journal Nature in October, have suggested that consumption of artificial sweeteners—found in over 6,000 food products—can lead to changes in the gut microbiome, and have put forth an explanation for how this alteration might be associated with diseases such as type II diabetes (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group).

The authors wanted to test the effects of saccharin-spiked water (i.e. Sweet’N Low) on a variety of health parameters, such as glucose intolerance, which develops when the body can’t cope with large amounts of sugar in the diet, in both humans and mice.

Jotham Suez, a PhD candidate and lead author of the study explains, “We asked people who do not regularly consume artificial sweeteners to add them to their diet for one week, and saw that the majority of these subjects had poorer glycemic responses.”

And like humans, mice that were given saccharin-spiked water also developed marked glucose intolerance compared to mice drinking sugar water, or water alone.

The results were also supported by fecal transplant experiments. (Yes, this is what it sounds like: Mice that initially have germ-free guts are fed feces from mice that were given either saccharin-water or sugar-water. In this way, the microbial communities from the donor mice are established in the germ-free mice. But, I promise, it’s humane. Mice disgustingly eat their own feces anyway through a process called coprophagy. The humans in the study were spared from this experiment.)

Next, the authors wanted to investigate if artificial sweeteners changed the community composition of the microbiome.

Suez says, “We hypothesized that [because artificial sweeteners are] non-digestible, they directly encounter the microbiota, and might exert their effects on the host health through alterations to the microbial community’s composition and function.”

Sweet'N Low is a brand of artificial sweetener made primarily from granulated saccharin. (Credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr)

Their experiment revealed that mice did exhibit different microbiome profiles after consuming artificial sweeteners, just as with the human volunteers who had developed glucose intolerance. And importantly, the humans who did not show glucose intolerance after consuming artificial sweeteners also did not see changes in the community composition of their microbiome.

“[We were surprised] that unlike mice, not all humans consuming artificial sweeteners will be affected in the same manner. We were able to demonstrate that this may be mediated by changes in the composition of the microbiota,” says Suez.

Consequently, this change in microbial community in mice also modified how the microbiota functioned as a group to regulate metabolism. Pathways that impact the transport of sugar in the body were found to have decreased function after saccharin treatment and, notably, there was an increased abundance of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which are implicated in lipid biosynthesis.

An investigation done by an independent group of researchers in Canada found similar results in a study published in October in the journal PLoS ONE.

Although conducted using rats instead of mice, and with a different artificial sweetener (aspartame instead of saccharin) this study also found an increased risk of glucose intolerance. In addition, both studies showed that propionate—a SCFA highly involved in sugar production—is increased in animals consuming artificial sweeteners (although, unfortunately, propionate concentrations in humans weren’t assessed in the Nature study).

You can think of it this way: when mice and rats consume an artificial sweetener, their bodies may be duped into thinking they are following a low-sugar diet, and thus the microbiota shift to produce propionate, ultimately generating more sugar. (It’s important to remember, though, that since propionate concentrations were only examined in mice and rats, the results can’t be directly extrapolated to humans.)

While this isn’t necessarily bad for mice and rats, in humans it might be. Western diets are notorious for containing a gross amount of added sugar, so the food we eat doesn’t lend itself to actually following a low-sugar diet. In humans, if a similar increase in propionate is demonstrated after consuming artificial sweeteners, high blood sugar could be a consequence.

Remember back to the increased risk of glucose intolerance after consuming artificial sweeteners? This comes back into play here.

Not only are the mice and rats now producing more sugar from the alterations of microbial communities, but on top of that, their bodies are less adept at dealing with all the excess sugar that they’re making.

Artificial sweeteners are packing a double-punch.

As compelling as results from these studies might appear, it’s only fair to digest these findings with a grain of Sweet’N Low. Propionate has been linked with loads of health benefits ranging from anti-cancer properties to regulating satiety.

But the take home point is this: findings from two independent studies suggest that messing with the microbiome may have despicable consequences. Artificial sweeteners were originally intended to stave off the increasing obesity and metabolic disease epidemic, but instead they may have directly contributed to it.

In other words, consuming artificial sweeteners appears to throw metabolism out of whack by upsetting the critical balance of the biota in the gut—just as how chaos would surely ensue if you were to throw Gru’s minions out of whack.

However, as Suez says, “Further experiments with a larger number of participants and over a longer duration are required before any recommendations regarding human consumption of artificial sweeteners can be made.”