Many health-oriented people are convinced that artificial sweeteners are poison. The evidence of toxicity for saccharin, aspartame, and sweeteners that contain phenylalanine isn't what their opponents suggest.
I'll begin this article with a confession. I drink Diet Coke.
I only drink at most one Diet Coke a day, and there are days I don't drink any. I don't have to have it. (I think that any food or beverage you "can't live without" is one that you should give up, so that you aren't controlled by it.) While I have had some very serious health issues, and come through them, I don't think my one can of sugar-free soda is the culprit. The scientific evidence suggests that sugar is a far greater problem than artificial sweeteners.
What's The Problem With Sugar-Sweetened Soft Drinks?
Sugar hasn't always been regarded as toxic. In fact, for most of human history, it's been considered medicinal. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, when people didn't have cars or washing machines or vacuum cleaners or power mowers, drinking an 8-ounce (240 ml) glass of sugar-sweetened soft drinks had very little effect on health, other than to provide energy between meager meals. As recently as 1964, Julie Andrews could sing "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down...in the most delightful way" without protests from mothers who wanted to ban the movie, Mary Poppins, as a bad influence on their children's diets.
In the twenty-first century, sugar usually is toxic. People get so little exercise that their bodies readily turn sugars into fat.
In North America, where soft drinks are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, the problem is even worse. Instead of burning fructose, at least after the first 25 grams (100 calories) or so a day, the liver turns it into fat. The body can burn the glucose released from table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, but only about 600 calories a day, before glucose also has to be converted in to fat.
In the United States and Canada, about half of people consume no sugar-sweetened soft drinks at all. Another 25 percent of North Americans consume up to 200 calories of sugar in soft drinks daily. That's about 100 calories more than the body can burn, and the rest has to be converted into fat, although only about one pound (half a kilo) of body fat a month. Another 20 percent of North Americans drink the equivalent of four 12-ounce (360 ml) sugar-sweetened soda pop daily, 500 calories a day or more, and 5 percent of North Americans drink even more. The extra calories don't translate directly into extra fat, but sometimes that is only because people gain so much weight that they start burning enormous numbers of calories just to move around.
The statistics indicate that drinking the equivalent a regular Coke or Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew a day begins to raise the risk of death. Over a 14-year-period, people who consume four sugar-sweetened sodas a day have have twice the risk of dying of cardiovascular disease.
Aren't Artificial Sweeteners Just As Bad?
Similar increases in the risk of death just aren't found in long-term, large scale studies of people who drink artificially sweetened products. That doesn't mean that researchers haven't looked for them.
What Are The Real Risks Of Saccharin, Asparatame, And Other Artificial Sweeteners?
There really are some drawbacks to some artificial sweeteners. Sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol and mannitol, more frequently used to sweeten "sugar-free" ice cream than soft drinks often cause flatulence and diarrhea. Many diabetics find that their sugars mysteriously go up about 24 hours after consuming products sweetened with mannitol or sorbitol, probably because probiotic bacteria break down the chemicals if they stay long enough in the gut.
There are also some surprising drawbacks to using the herbal sweetener stevia. In its "raw" form, stevia has a licorice-like aftertaste. To get around this problem, most companies process stevia to extract a group of plant chemicals known as rebaudiosides. These stevia-based chemicals are so sweet that they have to be "cut" with natural sugars, or with xylitol, extracted from wood bark, or erythritol, extracted from corn cobs. Otherwise either the product would be disgustingly sweet or the appropriate amount rebaudiosides would mostly float off into the air before it reached the mixing bowl or glass where it is to be used.
What About The More Common "Chemical" Sweeteners?
Saccharin has been around since the nineteenth century, when Johns Hopkins University chemist Constantin Fahlberg first made it from coal tar. Saccharin is 300 to 400 times sweeter than sugar, but it has a metallic aftertaste. Saccharin was regarded favorably by US President Teddy Roosevelt, who famously said, "Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot." However, some 75 years later, in 1980, the US FDA required that saccharin (the main ingredient in Sweet 'n Low) be labeled with a warning stating “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”
It took 21 years for scientists to find out that just about dietary additive, including vitamin C, would cause bladder cancer in the strain of lab rats used in the 1970's-era studies. In 2001, both the US government and state government removed all warnings for saccharin. There have been no studies that find it increases the risk of cancer. In type 2 diabetics, it may stimulate the release of insulin, which may interfere with blood sugar control, although not enough to cause hypoglycemia.
NutraSweet, also known as by its chemical name aspartame, has come under much more intense scrutiny that any other artificial sweetener. For many years, Nutrasweet was widely regarded as safe. However, in 1996, The Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology published an article entitled "Increasing Brain Tumor Rates: Is There a Link to Aspartame?"
The bottom line of nearly 20 years of scientific research since the publication of this article is no, there isn't a link between brain cancer tumors and aspartame.
The paper stated that brain tumor rates had begun to rise in 1975. Since aspartame wasn't on the market until 1981, it isn't possible that it was part of the problem. The paper also reported that most of the increase was in people born between 1905 and 1922, who weren't the principal consumers of soft drinks and other products sweetened with NutraSweet. When a study of over 450,000 people of all ages was completed in 2006, there was no increase in brain cancer (malignant glioma) in regular users of NutraSweet. In fact, people who use NutraSweet were found to have lower rates of this kind of brain cancer.
READ Sugar Addiction: How to Stop Sugar Cravings
There is no reason to fear artificial sweeteners just because they are, well, artificial. Water, amino acids, and healthy fatty acids are also, after all, chemicals. However, it's always a good idea to remain in control of your appetites. If you can't go through a day without your Diet Coke, probably you should try.