Artificial sweeteners, for and against

satindoll

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My take on this is more basic, I have tried most artificial sweeteners and find either they are bitter, leave a nasty aftertaste or in the case of some of them give me the trots, mind I suppose if you are suffering from constipation its a sweet way to shift the stuff.

:headphone: :wideyed: :eek:
 
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Jaylee

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Thanks.
An interesting & entertaining read..

A quote from the artical. Though surely they can't all be that "easily swayed". Can they!? o_O

"Why? What could it be about Americans that might make them particularly susceptible to the placebo effect?

Top of the list of possibilities is that in the US, unlike every other country in the world except New Zealand, direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs is permitted. The placebo effect is strongly linked to patient expectations, and maybe all those adverts showing virile middle-aged men shooting hoops on a basketball court have had a drip-drip effect on the minds of patients taking drugs, even as part of a trial."
 

Shirley N.

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Prediabetes
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Diet only
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Not being able to walk in the Dales any more. Not being able to eat some of my favourite foods any more.
Orange & mango. I know the one! :)

I'm more inclined to opt for pink grapefruit.. More tart to my taste. :D
Normally have a couple of glasses during the course of home maintenance or a glug after a hot day coming in from work!
Blood wise. It seems to stabilise or slow down what would/could have been a drop, till I manage to eat..?
Probably drink 3-4 glasses a day of the Robinson's No Added Sugar range @Jaylee, the one I like the best is the Orange & Mango flavour which has 0.7g of carbs per 100ml of concentrate, can't say I've noticed any bg rise.
You shouldn't have grapefruit, if on statins.

If you like lemonade, here's my homemade recipe. Put the juice of 1 lemon in a jug. Fresh lemons are particularly good and cheap at the moment (March 2019). Make up to 100 ml with tap water. Add a trace of pure sucralose. Use pure sucralose as it is genuinely zero Calorie, whereas Splenda is only 1% sucralose by weight and is bulked out with dextrose among other things, so contains about a third of the Calories of sugar. Sucralose is very, very sweet so one only needs a tiny trace, about 10 - 20 mg. Chill the result and then dilute half with fizzy mineral water or more tap water to fill a glass. There is just over 2 g of sugar in an average lemon, so each glass of lemonade contains about half that.
Provided one goes very carefully with the sucralose, it tastes like sugar, enhances the flavour of the lemon, and has no unpleasant aftertaste. I have not noticed any detrimental effects on my blood sugars or weight to date. I cannot tell whether it will prove harmful in the long term but I'm relying on the fact that one uses so very little; also 90% is not absorbed from the gut and the remaining 10% is excreted unchanged in the urine.
I guess a similar recipe would work with pink grapefruit too, or oranges, but both fruits have higher sugar content than lemons.
 
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monkfruit

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Not So Sweet For Your Health? Potential Pitfalls behind “Natural” Sweeteners - Monk Fruit Sweetener and Stevia


The search for guilt-free sweetness that spares waistlines has led to the rise of “natural” sweeteners: extracts from particular plants whose sweetness does not derive from sugar, and cannot be metabolized by the body. You might have heard of stevia, and the up-and-coming monk fruit sweetener, derived from mogrosides in the monk fruit, also called swingle fruit or luo han guo. However, what is marketed as “natural” does not necessarily equal “healthy” for consumers, nor is “natural” necessarily environmentally-friendly in production.


Concerns over sweetener safety has led to global legislation. The FDA has not approved the use of raw stevia, and stevia has been banned in the U.S. since 1991 due to studies that suggested the sweetener may cause cancer. Elsewhere, the European Union bans sale of the plant as a food or food ingredient also because of safety concerns. Although newer sweeteners such as monk fruit sweetner have not been officially banned, it is of note that the AHA recommends that children and adolescents should limit their intake of artificial sweeteners, including so-called natural sweeteners like monk fruit sweetener, due to the inconclusive evidence on their effects. In particular, children under the age of two should not eat or drink anything with such sweeteners. CSPI recommends caution because the monk fruit sweetener has been poorly tested in animals.


What may seem natural in origin may acquire carcinogenic properties due to comtamination in production processes. Mogrosides from monk fruit are processed and extracted with methyl alcohol or other toxic chemicals, and traces of these chemicals may remain in the final products, particularly when production plants are poorly equipped and underregulated. Furthermore, such extraction factories may substantially mar their environment and the health of local populations. One of the major monk fruit sweetener producers, Ji Fu Si, a poorly equipped enterprise based in Guilin, China, is the nexus of air, river water, and groundwater polution in its county, with a significant number of cancer cases among farmers living nearby in the polluted environment. With such enterprises lacking the updated technology to control their environmental impact, it raises questions as to how safe and pure their extractions actually are.


A Danish study done in 59,334 pregnant women found that the intake of artificially sweetened beverage was associated with an increased risk of preterm delivery, so artificial sweeteners use including stevia and swingle should be accompanied with caution in certain high-risk individuals such as pregnant and lactating women, diabetics, migraine,and epilepsy patients, and children. Many of sweeteners’ purported beneficial effects remain invalidated in large scale clinical studies.
 

JohnEGreen

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Better for you than granulated sugar I think so maybe the lesser of two evils .
 

zand

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Better for you than granulated sugar I think so maybe the lesser of two evils .
Short term maybe, but I wish I had never touched a sweetener. At least with sugar you could see the damage and take action, i.e. reduce food intake to lose weight. With sweeteners I never knew I was causing insulin resistance and upsetting my gut microbiome until many years down the line. I am still trying to put right the damage I caused myself back then.
 

JohnEGreen

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So far I have not seen any irrefutable evidence that sweeteners are that harmful I have seen plenty that show sugar to be harmful in the short term and the long term I will continue with the sweeteners but will never touch granulated sugar again.
 
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Lisa69free

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151
I've tried all artificial sweeteners. My parents stopped buying sugar unless baking when I was very young. Think I've been on them since about 8 years old. I'm 52 now. Not died yet
 
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zand

Master
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I've tried all artificial sweeteners. My parents stopped buying sugar unless baking when I was very young. Think I've been on them since about 8 years old. I'm 52 now. Not died yet
Nor have I, but I regret ever using them. I don't believe I would have become T2 without them messing up my metabolism.
 

millenium

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Not So Sweet For Your Health? Potential Pitfalls behind “Natural” Sweeteners - Monk Fruit Sweetener and Stevia


The search for guilt-free sweetness that spares waistlines has led to the rise of “natural” sweeteners: extracts from particular plants whose sweetness does not derive from sugar, and cannot be metabolized by the body. You might have heard of stevia, and the up-and-coming monk fruit sweetener, derived from mogrosides in the monk fruit, also called swingle fruit or luo han guo. However, what is marketed as “natural” does not necessarily equal “healthy” for consumers, nor is “natural” necessarily environmentally-friendly in production.


Concerns over sweetener safety has led to global legislation. The FDA has not approved the use of raw stevia, and stevia has been banned in the U.S. since 1991 due to studies that suggested the sweetener may cause cancer. Elsewhere, the European Union bans sale of the plant as a food or food ingredient also because of safety concerns. Although newer sweeteners such as monk fruit sweetner have not been officially banned, it is of note that the AHA recommends that children and adolescents should limit their intake of artificial sweeteners, including so-called natural sweeteners like monk fruit sweetener, due to the inconclusive evidence on their effects. In particular, children under the age of two should not eat or drink anything with such sweeteners. CSPI recommends caution because the monk fruit sweetener has been poorly tested in animals.


What may seem natural in origin may acquire carcinogenic properties due to comtamination in production processes. Mogrosides from monk fruit are processed and extracted with methyl alcohol or other toxic chemicals, and traces of these chemicals may remain in the final products, particularly when production plants are poorly equipped and underregulated. Furthermore, such extraction factories may substantially mar their environment and the health of local populations. One of the major monk fruit sweetener producers, Ji Fu Si, a poorly equipped enterprise based in Guilin, China, is the nexus of air, river water, and groundwater polution in its county, with a significant number of cancer cases among farmers living nearby in the polluted environment. With such enterprises lacking the updated technology to control their environmental impact, it raises questions as to how safe and pure their extractions actually are.


A Danish study done in 59,334 pregnant women found that the intake of artificially sweetened beverage was associated with an increased risk of preterm delivery, so artificial sweeteners use including stevia and swingle should be accompanied with caution in certain high-risk individuals such as pregnant and lactating women, diabetics, migraine,and epilepsy patients, and children. Many of sweeteners’ purported beneficial effects remain invalidated in large scale clinical studies.

The banned for Stevia extract has long been lifted because the study they used was done on rat and its result has been found to be unreliable. I personally think its ban previously was more to protect the interest of artificial sweetener manufacturers.
 

povens

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1
Hi, community friends.
Being new to this game, I thought there would be good, reliable professional advice on diabetes issues in this thread titled "Artificial sweeteners for and against". Instead it reads like all the other social media sites which have contributors peddling half truths and misinformed opinions. This may not be true of most posts here but how is one expected too know? Diabetes UK should be moderating posts in my opinion.
Thanks.
 
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zand

Master
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Hi, community friends.
Being new to this game, I thought there would be good, reliable professional advice on diabetes issues in this thread titled "Artificial sweeteners for and against". Instead it reads like all the other social media sites which have contributors peddling half truths and misinformed opinions. This may not be true of most posts here but how is one expected too know? Diabetes UK should be moderating posts in my opinion.
Thanks.

This is diabetes.co.uk . Diabetes UK is a different organisation altogether. That's the one which recommends wholemeal carbs with every meal for T2s. It also endorses the use of diet drinks. Not surprising really since it is funded by food and drugs companies.
If the advice from the official diabetes charity was so great we wouldn't need this forum. I followed most of the advice in DUK's booklet for new T2s for years, then I became T2, so then it was time to change tack.
 

hankjam

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Hi, community friends.
Being new to this game, I thought there would be good, reliable professional advice on diabetes issues in this thread titled "Artificial sweeteners for and against". Instead it reads like all the other social media sites which have contributors peddling half truths and misinformed opinions. This may not be true of most posts here but how is one expected too know? Diabetes UK should be moderating posts in my opinion.
Thanks.

Given your introduction to the forum, do you think there would be many vols to mod a forum, used by grown ups, to the degree you suggest?
 

lucylocket61

Expert
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Hi, community friends.
Being new to this game, I thought there would be good, reliable professional advice on diabetes issues in this thread titled "Artificial sweeteners for and against". Instead it reads like all the other social media sites which have contributors peddling half truths and misinformed opinions. This may not be true of most posts here but how is one expected too know? Diabetes UK should be moderating posts in my opinion.
Thanks.
what an interesting first post. Would you please fill in your profile information so we know what type of diabetic you are, and what diabetes meds you are on, as this will affect the help and answers we can give to support you.
 

bkr

Well-Known Member
Messages
162
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
Im on the fence with them, as some drinks like diet mixers etc with sweeteners don't cause an issue, yet BCAA with non sugar flavouring/sweeteners cause havoc with me (Type 2, metformin & diet controlled)

I hadnt checked my levels for a while since using the BCAA (which on its own unflavoured would help with running/gym etc.) yet as it has the dodgy flavouring Im sure its contributed towards my HBA1C rising, which makes me sad and frustrated.
 

millenium

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Urban noise, environmental destruction
So far I have not seen any irrefutable evidence that sweeteners are that harmful I have seen plenty that show sugar to be harmful in the short term and the long term I will continue with the sweeteners but will never touch granulated sugar again.

That is because the amount of artificial sweetener needed is very little.
 

JohnEGreen

Master
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Sola dosis facit venenum...
"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim
AKA Paracelsus
 
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