DailyDirt: How Sweet It Is?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've been following diet fads for a while now -- and seeing how sugar (in various forms) has been blamed for health problems. Artificial sweeteners are supposed to help us avoid consuming too much sugar (and be more healthy in the balance), but it's probably not surprising that studies are starting to show that these alternatives to sugar also have their own side effects. After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
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Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diabetes, diet, food, food additive, lugduname, microbiome, phenylketonurics, stevia, sucrose, sugar, taste
Companies: pepsi


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  1. identicon
    pixelation, 2 Oct 2015 @ 9:08pm

    All I need

    My wife is the sweetest thing on the planet.

    P.S. Please forward this to her next time I am in the dog house.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 3 Oct 2015 @ 10:27am

    Re: All I need

    I'll tell her when I see her tonight.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Rekrul, 3 Oct 2015 @ 11:20pm

    My mother tried Stevia extract once. She put the recommended amount of one drop into her coffee and said she couldn't taste any sweetness at all. She then put in several drops, but still couldn't taste it. She gave up on it and switched to using Sweet-N-Low.

    I tried Truvia once, a powdered sweetner made from Stevia. I was making a single packet of Kool-Aid, which makes about half a gallon. I put in five packets, but it wasn't sweet at all. So I added another five, making ten total. It still tasted like plain Kool-Aid flavored water. Six packets of Splenda in the same amount of water is usually enough to give it a slightly sweet taste.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. icon
    Ninja (profile), 5 Oct 2015 @ 7:31am

    Re:

    Weird. My parents use stevia and I honestly think it's much, much better than aspartame for instance (though I only use at their place because sugar is much better). Maybe some people are more sensitive to it?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. icon
    TruthHurts (profile), 5 Oct 2015 @ 9:17am

    Left Chondrite Sugar

    Ban all artificial sweeteners - they're deadly.

    Force makers of sucralose admit that sugar alcohols have the exact same effect on blood sugar levels as regular sugar does.

    If a company wants to reduce the "sugar" content, switch to all natural left chondrite sugar - aka Tagatose.

    Left chondrite means left handed - ie - the sugar molecule is spun in a mirror image to normal right chondrite sugar.

    The human body is not readily able to digest and process left chondrite sugar. Most bodies end up metabolising less than 15% of it, some less, some a bit more.

    Overall, that reduces the sugar content without causing the body to react like it would to artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. icon
    Michael Ho (profile), 5 Oct 2015 @ 9:31am

    Re: Left Chondrite Sugar

    Yah. The problem with indigestible sugar is that it isn't much sweeter than regular sugar -- and the volume has to go somewhere....

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. icon
    John Fenderson (profile), 5 Oct 2015 @ 9:36am

    Re:

    I think stevia is very, very sweet. Much sweeter than sugar. On the other hand, I don't think of Splenda as sweet at all. It tastes very chemically, with a slightly sweet aftertaste.

    Perhaps there is something genetic going on, like how lots of people think that cilantro tastes wonderful and lots of other people think it tastes like soap.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. icon
    nasch (profile), 5 Oct 2015 @ 9:42am

    Re: Left Chondrite Sugar

    Ban all artificial sweeteners - they're deadly.

    How deadly? How many deaths per year are caused by, for example, aspartame?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. icon
    John Fenderson (profile), 5 Oct 2015 @ 10:04am

    Re: Re: Left Chondrite Sugar

    In terms of acute toxicity, aspartame has an LD50 (the dose required to kill half of a population) of 5 grams per kilogram of body weight. The LD50 of other sweeteners vary widely, but they are all very high doses, far larger than you'd accidentally ingest.

    Long term toxicity is a more difficult problem to quantify for a lot of reasons, but a couple have been studied long enough and intensively enough that something intelligent can be said about them. Perhaps the most famous one is saccharine.

    In the long term, saccharine does not appear to have any toxicity associated with it above what we accept in all of our other foods and food ingredients. So, based on that alone, it is inaccurate to say that "all artificial sweeteners are deadly". Saccharine is not, and it's very likely that lots of other artificial sweeteners are not as well. Probably the overwhelming majority of them.

    If you want to be extra cautious about them, the thing to do is to avoid the new ones and stick with the ones that have been around long enough that we have good data on long-term problems resulting from their use.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    Rekrul, 7 Oct 2015 @ 4:26pm

    Re: Re:

    I think stevia is very, very sweet. Much sweeter than sugar. On the other hand, I don't think of Splenda as sweet at all. It tastes very chemically, with a slightly sweet aftertaste.

    By itself, Stevia/Truvia tastes sweet to me, but when I add it to anything else, such as a drink or cereal, I can't taste it at all.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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