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
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Sweetener Error - What Gives?
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!
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Re: Sweetener Error - What Gives?
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)
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Re: Sweetener Error - What Gives?
It'd be nice if Sucralose fit the bill, but I still have to stick with actual calories for my sweetening.
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Sugar Is More Fattening Than Fat
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 ...
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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.
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Re: To me, Stevia tastes a bit like licking a 9-volt battery, except with a nasty metallic aftertaste
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Artificial sweeteners are bad
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.
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Re: Studies show they create a craving for real sweets.
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https://www.google.com/search?q=lepin+sugar+and+sweeteners&oq=lepin+sugar+and+sweetener s&aqs=chrome..69i57.9674j0j4&client=ms-android-att-us&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF- 8#safe=off&q=leptin+sugar+and+sweeteners
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Re: Pure sugar us FAR BETTER for you
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Re: Re: Pure sugar us FAR BETTER for you
While "helps control your weight" tells only part of the story it seems it is not all snake-oil.
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Unless, of course, the industry moves on to something like erythritol - which won't happen because it's too expensive.
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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 :(
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