SPLENDA:
This article has long been overdue. For those of you who love to drink Diet Coke because you think you're doing your body a favor, I want you to read this article, and reconsider your beverage choices.
As you all know, I am a HUGE proponent of eating healthy, clean, and natural. So artificial sweeteners kind of go against nature, by their very nature. Starting with Splenda (aka Sucralose), a sugar substitute CHEMICALLY ALTERED so that our bodies cannot digest the sugar calories. They alter the chemical code, to make it into a chlorinated sucrose (sugar) molecule. Meaning they change sugar's basic molecular structure. Here's a diagram to show you what I mean: The first diagram is of sucrose's chemical structure.
The second diagram (below) is of sucrose's altered structure, now Sucralose.
Notice that the two OH's on the right are now Cl's.
How do they alter the very chemical structure? I can guarantee it's not natural. If you'd like to know more about the process, click here.
Despite the fact that it isn't natural, there have been numerous studies that find nothing wrong with Splenda. The only study I could find to actually say anything possibly negative about Splenda or Sucralose's effect on the human body were from a Duke University study funded by the Sugar lobbying group, so they may not be as impartial as we'd like them to be. The study found the mice in the study who were dosed with between 100 and 1000 mg/kg per day of sucralose had a 50% reduction of good bacteria in their intestines. They also found it increased body fat in those rats and led to an increased pH level in their intestines. These were rats, however, not humans.
On the other hand, who's to say the studies conducted by the FDA are unbiased? I've recently had the unfortunately eye-opening experience of watching Food, Inc., and I feel as though the FDA is not as trustworthy as it would like us to believe it is.
So I did some more digging.
I'm not super excited about doing research on the Internet. Anyone can put anything they want out into cyberspace, and I don't want to falsely report to my faithful blog followers. I will say this: the fact that Splenda/sucralose has chlorine, and the fact that our bodies absorb anywhere from 11-27% of it, means we might be slowly poisoning ourselves with it. Chlorine is not meant for the body. We're also tricking our bodies. We intake a sweet substance, and our brain tells the insulin receptors to get ready for a big surge of insulin! But then nothing happens. We get zero. Now our bodies are ready for action, and nothing? What does this do? It makes us crave the sugar and the jolt we usually get with it, and tends to turn dieters into sugar junkies all over again.
And must I stress for the 3rd time that SPLENDA IS NOT NATURAL. It just isn't. It was made in a lab, it has potentially harmful chlorinated chemicals in it, and it's not recognized by the body. Our bodies were designed to ingest very low levels of sweeteners, things occuring in nature. Table sugar does not fit in to this plan, nor does Splenda. My consensus? Stay away.
I wanted to include here a few of the blogs and sites I found against Splenda, just so we can kind of see what the CONSUMERS and the Organic Community are saying, not just the scientists:
http://splendasickness.blogspot.com/
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_16815.cfm
the following web pages also scared me but I'm not sure how trustworthy they are, so take it with a grain of salt:
http://www.truthforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=170
http://www.wnho.net/splenda_reaction.htm
I know there are several other artificial sweeteners out there. I found Splenda to be the least threatening of them all. I wanted to blog about all of them, but honestly, just the little amount of info I got was incredibly time consuming, and not nearly as fruitful as I'd hoped it would be. I will blog next about the natural calorie free sweetener, Stevia, and whether or not it's healthy to put into our bodies.
As a final note, I have a personal blog. I recently posted on the movie Food, Inc., which I watched last weekend. I didn't post about it on this blog because I feel like it's a personal passion I now have, something I don't want to push on others. But if you're interested in reading about my very strong opinions on the Food Industry as we know it, please check out my blog at http://hoketungs.blogspot.com/.
This article has long been overdue. For those of you who love to drink Diet Coke because you think you're doing your body a favor, I want you to read this article, and reconsider your beverage choices.
As you all know, I am a HUGE proponent of eating healthy, clean, and natural. So artificial sweeteners kind of go against nature, by their very nature. Starting with Splenda (aka Sucralose), a sugar substitute CHEMICALLY ALTERED so that our bodies cannot digest the sugar calories. They alter the chemical code, to make it into a chlorinated sucrose (sugar) molecule. Meaning they change sugar's basic molecular structure. Here's a diagram to show you what I mean: The first diagram is of sucrose's chemical structure.
The second diagram (below) is of sucrose's altered structure, now Sucralose.
Notice that the two OH's on the right are now Cl's.
How do they alter the very chemical structure? I can guarantee it's not natural. If you'd like to know more about the process, click here.
Despite the fact that it isn't natural, there have been numerous studies that find nothing wrong with Splenda. The only study I could find to actually say anything possibly negative about Splenda or Sucralose's effect on the human body were from a Duke University study funded by the Sugar lobbying group, so they may not be as impartial as we'd like them to be. The study found the mice in the study who were dosed with between 100 and 1000 mg/kg per day of sucralose had a 50% reduction of good bacteria in their intestines. They also found it increased body fat in those rats and led to an increased pH level in their intestines. These were rats, however, not humans.
On the other hand, who's to say the studies conducted by the FDA are unbiased? I've recently had the unfortunately eye-opening experience of watching Food, Inc., and I feel as though the FDA is not as trustworthy as it would like us to believe it is.
So I did some more digging.
I'm not super excited about doing research on the Internet. Anyone can put anything they want out into cyberspace, and I don't want to falsely report to my faithful blog followers. I will say this: the fact that Splenda/sucralose has chlorine, and the fact that our bodies absorb anywhere from 11-27% of it, means we might be slowly poisoning ourselves with it. Chlorine is not meant for the body. We're also tricking our bodies. We intake a sweet substance, and our brain tells the insulin receptors to get ready for a big surge of insulin! But then nothing happens. We get zero. Now our bodies are ready for action, and nothing? What does this do? It makes us crave the sugar and the jolt we usually get with it, and tends to turn dieters into sugar junkies all over again.
And must I stress for the 3rd time that SPLENDA IS NOT NATURAL. It just isn't. It was made in a lab, it has potentially harmful chlorinated chemicals in it, and it's not recognized by the body. Our bodies were designed to ingest very low levels of sweeteners, things occuring in nature. Table sugar does not fit in to this plan, nor does Splenda. My consensus? Stay away.
I wanted to include here a few of the blogs and sites I found against Splenda, just so we can kind of see what the CONSUMERS and the Organic Community are saying, not just the scientists:
http://splendasickness.blogspot.com/
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_16815.cfm
the following web pages also scared me but I'm not sure how trustworthy they are, so take it with a grain of salt:
http://www.truthforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=170
http://www.wnho.net/splenda_reaction.htm
I know there are several other artificial sweeteners out there. I found Splenda to be the least threatening of them all. I wanted to blog about all of them, but honestly, just the little amount of info I got was incredibly time consuming, and not nearly as fruitful as I'd hoped it would be. I will blog next about the natural calorie free sweetener, Stevia, and whether or not it's healthy to put into our bodies.
As a final note, I have a personal blog. I recently posted on the movie Food, Inc., which I watched last weekend. I didn't post about it on this blog because I feel like it's a personal passion I now have, something I don't want to push on others. But if you're interested in reading about my very strong opinions on the Food Industry as we know it, please check out my blog at http://hoketungs.blogspot.com/.
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