Not So Sweet

 

I went to the doctor a couple of months ago. No worries, just blood work being done because I was switching thyroid meds. But while there, I took the opportunity to ask my doctor a few questions about my insulin resistance. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to reverse it. Sadly, the answer was no. It is only going to get worse as I get older and my metabolism slows to the pace of molasses going uphill in a blizzard in January. But he did give me some guidelines that, if followed, will help stave off the inevitable and improve my overall health. One of the things he said to avoid at all costs was

 Now before anyone thinks I'm picking on poor Diet Coke, my doctor's admonitions are good for all diet drinks and foods sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Period. When I asked him why, what he said shocked the hell out of me. Not only will an artificial sweetener increase the body's desire for sugar (thereby leading to weight gain, not weight loss), NutraSweet aka Aspartame causes blindness and dementia. 

Blindness and dementia, people.

WTF?!?

Well, that's all I needed. I started doing a little research, and here's what I found:

According to an article written by Marcelle Pick, OB/Gyn NP (http://www.womentowomen.com/healthyweight/splenda.aspx), "aspartame use can result in an accumulation of formaldehyde in the brain, which can damage your central nervous system and immune system and cause genetic trauma." Oh, but wait! It gets better (read: worse): "The FDA admits this is true, but claims the amount is low enough in most [people] that it shouldn't raise concern." (emphasis is mine)

Uh, I don't know about you, but I plan to avoid formaldehyde until I'm dead and gone, thankyouverymuch, not to mention blindness and dementia. So I tossed everything in the house that contained Aspartame - the Diet Dr. Pepper, the Crystal Light, the Diet Lipton Tea, the 25% less sugar Quaker granola bars and whatever else I had.

I then decided to see what I could find out about Splenda. Like everyone else, I believed exactly what the manufacturer wanted me to believe: That Splenda is "natural" because "it is made from sugar" - an assertion parroted by the FDA in its press releases about Splenda. I had begun using Splenda to sweeten my tea when Darling Daughter was less than a year old. When Darling Daughter was old enough and wanted her own tea, I put Splenda in it believing I was providing her with a healthy alternative to sugar. I even experimented with baking with Splenda (or the Kroger knock-off brand Apriva) so that my chocolate chip cookies were only made with half the sugar - I still used brown sugar, just substituted the granulated sugar with Splenda/Apriva. Here's what I learned about good ol' Splenda (again thanks to Nurse Practioner Pick):

Splenda is the trade name for sucralose. Sucralose is a synthetic compound that was 'stumbled upon' in the mid-70s by British scientists looking for a new pesticide formulation. (Mini-biochem lesson ahead!) The Splenda molecule is comprised of sucrose (the chemical name for sugar), but here's the rub: Three of the hydroxyl groups (fancy chemistry-speak for bonded oxygen and hydrogen atoms) have been replaced by three chlorine atoms. The reason Splenda is characterized as having no calories is that it is for the most part unrecognized as food by the human body and isn't absorbed by the small intestine. But our bodies don't like unrecognizable things and will try to digest them regardless, so there is really no guarantee that our bodies aren't absorbing the chlorine molecules in Splenda.

The ugly upshot, my friends, is that Splenda has more in common with DDT than it does sugar and there is damnall that's natural about it. Unless it is created by Mother Nature, it isn't natural, and we're all fools if we allow ourselves to believe what the manufacturer wants us to believe about their product because the manufacturer is chiefly interested in selling its product to us, not in whether the product is actually good for us like they claim. There is an enormous conflict of interest here.

Caveat esor - eater beware.

Needless to say, as painful as it was to do, I tossed every last bit of Splenda/Apriva in the house, too. I hate wasting money more than just about anything, but I couldn't in good conscience give away the Splenda I had in the house knowing what I know about it - I'm not going to participate in the poisoning of America by buying and ingesting anything that contains an artificial sweetener, nor am I going to help poison my friends and neighbors by giving them anything with an artificial sweetener.

I have gone back to sugar, but in very limited quantities. There is after all the issue of my insulin resistance - which is really diabetes, even though I don't have to do insulin shots (yet). And here's the crazy thing - I've actually lost a little bit of weight - nearly five pounds. One more anecdote: Darling Daughter has not had any more rashes on the backs of her knees since I eliminated artificial sweeteners from her diet. That's all the proof I need, right there.

Bottom line: Do your own research, learn the truth for yourself about artificial sweeteners. And accept the fact that curbing our sweet tooth-impulses isn't fun or easy, but it is exactly what we have to do if we want to stay healthy and reasonably trim. There is no such thing as having our cake and eating it, too.