Artificial Sweeteners - 4 myths about artificial sweeteners
Many people are afraid of artificial sweeteners, but most of what you have heard about them are myths. Separate facts from fiction by reading this article.
It's amazing how much madness, poison and gnashing of teeth accompanied this topic. I am not a fan of this anger and madness associated with these topics. I prefer to look at it from a scientific point of view and draw rational conclusions.
And that's exactly what our friends are going to do today. Let's look at the truth behind the 4 myths they tried to tell you about artificial sweeteners.
1. Artificial sweeteners will make you fat
We humans like to blame the things that have caused us to gain weight. Take a look at every diet book over the last 30 years, each of them choosing something to blame and saying, “AHA! X is to blame, remove X and your whole universe will be perfect. "
Seriously, we see this again and again. Even artificial sweeteners have not been rid of this fate. Captions on how artificial sweeteners make you fat are spreading fast. But what is good, we have done many studies that have directly examined the effect of artificial sweeteners on weight gain.
In one study, 41 overweight people who were given supplements sweetened with sugar or artificial sweeteners were told to eat a normal diet. After 10 weeks, the sugar group gained 1.6 kg, of which 1.3 kg was fat; the group that consumed artificial sweeteners had no real changes in body weight and fat mass.
This study is not the only one to prove this, in another study of 30 people, people were given soda sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or aspartame for 3 weeks (it's basically like giving people Coke and diet Coke). In this study, sugar-sweetened drinks caused weight gain, while aspartame-sweetened soda caused weight loss.
A study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which randomly assigned 641 children aged 4 to 11 who consumed either artificial sweetener drinks or sugar-sweetened drinks.
During 18 months, children in the sugar-sweetened drink group gained more weight, had higher measurements of skin folds (body fat replacement) and a greater weight gain.
It also appears that artificial sweeteners are more useful than conventional sweeteners in maintaining weight loss in changing eating habits, during and after weight loss. So, overall, in intervention studies, artificial sweeteners, especially in the form of diet drinks, do not appear to cause significant weight gain.
2. Artificial sweeteners are worse than sugar
One of the general beliefs is that artificial sweeteners are worse than sugar because they reach the peak of insulin but have no calories. Where did it actually come from…
Initial studies from 1998 showed that when aspartame was applied directly to insulin-producing cells, it did nothing to release insulin. Nothing. However, if you add glucose to this, it seems to result in a small accelerating effect, by increasing the insulin glucose response.
Ok, those were just cells on a slide that were not human and a little weak.
Now some human data.
In 2009, a study was published in which people were fed either saturated water or diet soda. Overall, dietary soda had a very small (not statistically significant) increase in insulin release, which did not differ from carbonated water for all purposes. Interestingly, dietary soda increased the secretion of glucagon-like protein peptide, which plays a role in fasting and glucose metabolism.
To sum it up, it seems that most artificial sweeteners don't really cause crazy insulin output. So we can calm down a bit.
3. Artificial sweeteners will destroy your microflora
There is some speculation and concern that artificial sweeteners may alter your microflora. In addition, there has also been much speculation that changes in the microbial flora may cause weight gain (this is really unknown to people and recent studies suggest that this may not be true).
There are a few things we should know about this, as it is very important that we understand it.
In mice, it has been shown that artificial sweeteners in an appropriate to very high dose can cause negative changes in the microbial flora, and that this can cause a form of glucose intolerance. It is now important to note that not all artificial sweeteners tested caused this effect and that sucrose itself caused the same phenomenon.
In addition, these data were not significantly repeated in mice or humans. In fact, a thorough search for real evidence in humans yields the same result as I got, a big goose egg (it happens to us all…).
So we can say that there is some evidence in rodents that some artificial sweeteners can change our microflora, but we really have no idea if this happens to humans, how long it takes, how and what the final consequences are.
4. Aspartame is toxic
People like to hate aspartame. They often go so far as to call him poison. Well, again, we can look at science and the real evidence of whether it is really poison and, if so, in what dose.
Aspartame metabolizes to methanol, which is bad and causes blindness. Methanol is thought to be toxic and has these effects because large amounts of methanol metabolize to methane, which causes damage.
So for aspartame to be toxic, you have to convert it to a high amount of methanol and then to methane. This study has already been done and is correct.
30 people received a dose of aspartame in a volume of 34 mg / kg (very high dose compared to normal intake), 100 mg / kg, 150 mg / kg and 200 mg / kg. It's the equivalent of drinking an average of 12 to 80 cans of diet soda a day. At 34 mg / kg, methanol levels were undetectable but were detectable at 100, 150 and 200 mg / kg.
However, no methane was detected, even in the highest dose group. No problems with blood markers or eyes were also found.
In addition, there are no other known or studied aspects of aspartame in terms of toxicity.
Summary
Based on intervention data, artificial sweeteners do not increase weight. In fact, they can help you lose weight and maintain your weight.
In general, they do not appear to have any significant insulinogenic properties.
There is very limited evidence that some of them change the microflora in rodents in relatively large doses, but this has not been proven in humans. At doses that could be consumed by 99.99999% of us, it does not appear to be toxic.
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