alt Hacker NewsI'll impart my n=1 experience, since I've been using powdered Aspartame (in combination with Stevia) in drinks and baking for almost 20 years, and I've tried almost all available sugar substitutes over the years.
We already know from glycemic index charts that almost all sugar substitutes impact blood glucose to a certain degree, and there are only a few that have no impact. When sucralose became widely available, I bought some to try to bake with, but the carrier was maltodextrin - a starch, which prevented me from using it. Undeterred, I purchased pure sucralose drops in a neutral liquid. The sickly-sweet mouth feel after consuming sucralose is a bit tough to take [0], but that wasn't the worst of it. It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it ("Several studies have shown that sucralose is not physiologically innocuous").[1]
Then I read how sucralose is produced; literally thousands of pounds of sugar is used and converted to produce a few pounds of sucralose. It's being pushed hard by the industry, and I can only think of the 'vilification' of cheaper sweeteners such as Aspartame by industry, much in the same way that saccharin was vilified by flawed [2] studies in the 1970s - just as Aspartame was being developed as a commercial product.
Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, and sugar causes irreparable damage to millions of people around the world. I find it somewhat odd how people react to what appears to be a flawed and dubious Aspartame study, when there are much larger elephants in the room.
[0] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/after-sales-plummet-diet...
Replies
I'm pretty sure that the minor glycemic spikes after sweeteners (artificial, zero calorie) is because they're sweet it's a combination of some glucose mobilization and insulin response that shapes the results after use of artificial sweeteners. You're carrying a fair amount of glucose in the kidneys which is quickly available and glycogen the muscles that can be activated nearly as quickly. The impact from this on those that consume a lot of sweetened beverages over the course of a day may not be such a good thing and may even contribute to insulin resistance.
Aspartame is really inexpensive compared to real sugars... the sugar industry really doesn't like it and that was well before sucralose was an option.
My personal take is it's probably best to limit sweetened drinks to with meals, and to limit meals to 2-3 a day in a relatively narrow window of 6-10 hours.
What sweeteners are you leaning toward these days? I try to stick to stevia/monk fruit/allulose, but if you're not preparing food yourself, it's hard to find things that aren't using the sugar alcohols, maltodextrin, etc
Still, why would you willingly manually add aspartame to your diet?
Especially since stevia exists I see no reason to put my health at risk with these. Personally I avoid sucralose and aspartame at all costs, regular sugar is much preferred in moderation.
> It actually impacted my blood glucose, and when I read more of the research, sucralose actually did cause an insulin reaction in many people who consumed it
Yeah the research has been pointing this out for a while now: even if it doesn't contain digestible sugars, the body, once again, is not a furnace and might activate similar pathways when ingesting something that tastes sweet.
Sweeteners are the biological equivalent of bait-and-switch. Taste the sweet, prepare the body to accept glucose by increasing insulin response, but then there's no glucose coming in in the blood stream. The downstream effect of this is that all that insulin with no sugar causes a minor glucose drop in the blood. In fact, due to this phenomenon, other research indicates that sweeteners causes people to be hungrier/eat more food than if they had simply consumed non-sugar-free food.
As always, there is no such thing as (sugar) free lunch.