Why to never eat Splenda or sucralose….

Today's Post:  Friday, 12-13-2013 

Once back when a friend and I were working together on foods for a heart health OK restaurant menu several years ago, I remember him suggesting sucralose to cut sugars.

Cutting back on sugars DOES help; but I remember saying I suspected sucralose was an unsafe way to do it.

True!

We already know one important reason; and there looks like there may be an even worse reason:

1.  Dioxin is something best NOT eaten! 

Citizens for Health

A new, in-depth review on the synthetic sweetener sucralose (marketed as Splenda), published in the journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health reveals that the dangers of sucralose and Splenda have been underestimated….

 baking with the artificial sweetener releases dioxin.

Read more:

http://www.naturalcuresnotmedicine.com/2013/12/splenda-sucralose-harms-vastly.html#dsPCv4wEyvH1HXx3.99

Dioxin is extremely toxic and damaging to your health in even very small amounts particularly if you keep ingesting them.  That’s in part because chlorinated hydrocarbons tend not to break down or take many years to do so.  So, like trans fats, if you ingest them regularly, you wind up having a LOT in your body.

My comment:  This may or may not be true as I've not tested it or seen it yet in other sources.

But since sucralose WAS developed initially as a chlorinated sugar it was hoped would be an insecticide and bait in one pass, it would NOT surprise me if it is true.  

2.  We DO know that eating sucralose DOES tend to wipe out the probiotics in your gut if you eat any! 

Looks like to me its only positive use might be to help kill the bacteria that cause ulcers and antibiotic resistant C Diff!

And, since it now looks like taking the right probiotics in pill form after emptying your gut does that job, you’d only need to use sucralose for the most dire cases.

The probiotics you normally have if you are healthy protect your health in dozens of ways we now know.

So wiping out all or even many of them for a sweet treat when you don’t have to is NOT a great idea.

3.  Sucralose (Splenda) is a chlorinated hydrocarbon.  Since World War One chlorinated hydrocarbons have been used as poison gasses. (Look up phosgene online some time.)  Since then chlorinated hydrocarbons have been used to make nerve gasses and insecticides.

To me that suggests these first two problems with sucralose (Splenda) may well NOT be the only reasons to avoid eating or drinking any!

4.  The CSPI, Citizens in the Public Interest group has published that despite FDA clearance ALL the major artificial sweeteners have enough track record of causing cancer and other problems in some people that ingest them that they are best avoided.

The one exception they made was for “Trulia” which combines an OK tasting part of Stevia, a natural super low calorie sweetener with erythritol, the sugar alcohol with by far the fewest gut problems.  These are natural substances and that OK tasting part of Stevia avoids the horrible and oppressive taste of all of Stevia.

So if you want to use something, you can use Trulia. 

But I personally think given who makes Trulia and the lack of care they have for human health in their other products, I think having sweets far less often and mixing erythritol 50-50 with real sugars when you do is better.

If you use half erythritol and not too much and you don’t eat a lot of the food or very often that gives you close to half the sugar and calories and glycemic impact.

Why not use 100% erythritol? 

You can.  Some people do.  But sugars like brown sugar from sugar cane, coconut sugar, and real maple syrup taste good in ways besides their sugar. So the half and half version is likely to taste better.

4.  But the most important reason is that if you eat foods with 100% erythritol once or twice a day or more, it may have some of the effects of artificial sweeteners on making you fat and helping cause heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

For sure aspartame and sucralose and the other artificial sweeteners have shown by many actual tests that they are more fattening and harmful to your health than real sugar.

People who drink diet soft drinks are fatter and have bigger waists than people who drink soft drinks with high fructose corn syrup.  And high fructose corn syrup is so fattening and harmful no one who knows about its effects is willing to ingest it!

That’s in part because when people think they are NOT making themselves, they eat or drink WAY more of these artificially sweet things.

According to animal testing it’s also because your body may do more insulin release and fat storage when artificial sweeteners are ingested that when real sugars are.  This looks to be a hard wired mammalian effect in the way artificial sweeteners are processed!

What about you?

For me these several reasons are way more than enough. 

I will never voluntarily eat a food or drink a drink that has sucralose (Splenda) in it.  And I’d never use a packet of it to sweeten a food!