[Skybird]

Addendum: On SWEETENERS:


In the post before I mentioned that sweeteners were found to nevertheless trigger an insuline reaction although they may do not rise blood sugar/glucose.

Comparable claims I have red many times before, and it never made sense to me. It still does not, and thats why I researched it today after having red in a believable source recently that sweeteners can trigger an insuline spike up to 20% higher than normal sugar. I googled for it. Two hours long. And I did not find a convincing evidence for this claim. If there is evidence, then it still waits for me somewhere out there. Where is Mulder when you need him.

This is a confusing situation, and I think its worthy and necessary to shed some light on the situation of the debate. I do not like the picture I see.

What angers me is that when you look for biochemical arguments against sweeteners, you literally always sooner rather than later get confronted with criticism based on not chemical, physiological facts, but psychological and ecological arguments. They all get systematically mixed into just one argument, without any differentation: that sweetners are bad, should not be used, and implying that enjoying sweet taste is a sin in general, we better do not use neither sugar nor sweeteners. I am so sick and tired of this pleasure-hostile reeducation! While the changing of your diet changes your taste preferences a bit over time (due to TASTE, not due to feeling a duty of any kind), and consumming salt can reduce your craving for sweetness for sure on the brain-neurological level, and your appetite chnages as well (which is hormone-controlled and even can set up its own, hormone-dependent time tables: you feel an appetite because it is that time of the day and although you even are not hungry, because that hormone gets produced when the timer beeps), lets face it: a basic appetite for sweetness remains in many of us, always, if not in form of "sweetness intense", then at least as an additional ingredient helping to make something else you drink or eat more pleasurable a taste experience: coffee for example, tea. I love coffee - but never black, black it is an ineditable, bitter, suspicious brew to me, It makes me almost vomitting that bad it is, I add milk and some mild sweetnes to actually change it into somethign extremely! enjoyable. For the same reason, historically this is why Espresso traditionally gets served and enjoyed with lots and lots of sugar. The drink stems from the times when after WWII the factory workers in Italy had neither time nor money to waste precious money on expensive good coffee, they wanted a coffeine kick, and it had to be fast and affordable. The quality of the coffee used for cheap Espresso (a fast brew costing less time to prepare and to drink), was accordingly: it was a bitter, terrible brew, and it needed lots of sugar to turn into something eatable. Cheap coffee beans = bad coffee. Trivial!

Sweeteners are not all the same. Some get more metabolistically digested and chemically processed in your guts than others, thats why most of them differ in the dose at which they already produce diarrhea, the differences can be many factors. They also differ greatly in sweeteness intensity and own taste, some have very strict, strong own taste (Stevia) that even limit their usability, others are more neutral and less offensive in own taste, can even taste like sugar (I personally find the controversial Aspartam so convincing that I cannot reliably differentiate it from sugar, but I do almost never use it anyway).

Now, insuline. I have not found anything describing how sweeteners chemically or metabolistically trigger an insuline reaction while not causing a rise in blood sugar. Please note: some products that have sweetners in them, do cause insuline reactions, to varying degrees. You may even have a written warning on the bottle or box. Usually it is less intense than from sugars exclusively used. Since some sweetners are not completely free from calories, and/or get digested differently in the upper guts - and because additional agents are beign used that for themselves DO cause insuline spikes.

I think this is what the source of the quoted claim ("some sweetners can cause insuline spikes up to 20% higher than those from sugar") has allowed itself to get confused over: talking of sweetners as a pure agent while in fact referring to ready-to-eat products or liquids that include sweetners AND other agents.

Please note: mixtures of different sweeteners, mostly used in ready-to-eat products like lemonades for exmaple, can include different agents to add sweetness, and such an added agent for example can be fructose. In light lemondes, it can form up to 1% of the liquid's volume. That is something that definitely triggers an insuline reaction. Heck, its fructose, or corn syrups, so what else would you expect? But this does not mean that you get the same when adding for example Xylit - without any fructose. Xylit and Erythrit do not cause any raise in blood sugar, period. And hence I strongly assume they do not cause any insuline reaction at all. I found no evidence and no hint for that. If you know better, I would be thankful for letting me know, I really would like to know these things for certain.



Sometimes it is claimed that the brain realising the taste '"sweet", by this stimulus alone already creates insuline reaction. I cannot find anythign confirming this, however!? As long as this circumstance does not change, I rate this as unproven claim, and therefore: myth.


What is being done by routine by propagators of the anti-sweet-movement, to give the whole crowd a name to call them by, is this: they take psychological arguments on motivation and behaviour and imply these are like are hard-coded metabolistic reactions and processes on the bio-chemical level. But this is wrong - though a factor worth to be considered!

People can - and often do! - believe "Oh, this is a cola light, I saved calories, I have some calories free to eat somethign additional" and they throw in another chocolate bar, or they drink another bottle of it carelessly, ignoring or not knowing that it indeed includes not just a calory-neutral sweetner, but also 1% of fructose. And here you get an insuline reaction for sure - with a "light" product of which you wrongly assume it does not make you thick. It does, a tiny little bit per bottle. But that must not be the wrong of the pure sweetner itself...!

So the argument is that because people can be motivated to eat more because they drank a diet coke, products with artificial sweetners (without fructose or anything!) make people thick and fat and so should be avoided. Wouldn't it be better to educate people on the facts better and more honestly so to change their motivation this way? I personally take great anger from this deceptive and cheap argumentation. And until I do not get shown by evidence (!) that my reasoning is wrong on the chemical and metabolistical level, I insist on that taking sweetners is better than taking sugar as long as you take care not to throw in more other bad stoff due to using sweetners. So, I will continue to enjoy my coffee with a mild dose of sweetner in it (I do not want to have sweet coffee, but mild tasting coffee instead of bitter coffee, that ammount and not more sweetnes in it I want, same for condensed milk or cream), without feeling it as ecothrophologically sinful.

Another abstruse argument mistaken for chemical reality comes from the ecological direction. It is said that sweeteners are bad because they are indeed NEVER natural food, but always are chemically highly-processed agents from the lab. That is absolutely true, even for Stevia (and especially for that one), also for others that have a better reputation like many other sweetners, namely Xylit and Erythrit. They are food lab - like so much artificial stuff you can buy in the bio-market for vegans. Much of that is high tech food and anything but "natural". And often it is low in nutrients, causing deficits whichwho form patterns by which doctors can identify vegans and vegetarians, vegans and vegetarians, too different degrees, often (though not always) need to supplement nutrients like vitamines and minerals. There are many chemically highly processed food nobody cares to call out: plant oils, refined salt, margarine... And I say each of these is more dangerous than sweetners.

Also, an environmentalist argument in formed, due to the chemical processing of sweetners, quoting the energy needed to be invested, and chemical agents used in the process of chemically cracking up molecules, filtering and so forth. Well that is like with avocados. Avocados often get criticised for being transported over long distances, and they need plenty of water to be farmed. That are facts, yes. But these are facts for themselves the consumer should decide on by the standards by which his own personal word view ticks, they are no chemical, nutrition-relevant arguments. Avocados are not dangerous to your health just because they take long travels and need lots of water! They are VERY healthy for sure!

Here you again have the case that chemically hard-coded metabolistic arguments and non-related arguments get both mixed together and taken as one. Such intellectual sluggishness makes me wild! And often missionising drive and ideology is behind it - what makes me even wilder.

A word on Aspartam. It would be my preferred sweetner, because its sweetness is equal to that of sugar, you therefore can dose it like sugar, and I cannot differentiate the taste of it from the taste of sugar, no other sweetner to me tastes as natural and as much the same like sugar. However, I am only human, too, and I irrationally allowed to get scared by the argument that always is being used against it, although you only have an animal experiment with unclear results in its defence, and no human-researched hard evidence. A rat is a rat, and a man is a man, I reject to conclude from the the one on the other, it does not work, and I saw it not working in relation to according conclusions made in the reading on salt, fat, and acrylamide, too. A rat is no human. A chimp is no human. Chimps can digest cellulose, we cannot. As just one exmaple, the list of exmaple is open-ended.

"Aspartam causes cancer." Thats the one claim against Aspartam. More precise: it is claimed to cause cancer in rats, but it has not been really proven in those experiments. Said the American food authorities.

The other claim is indeed a chemical fact, and I learned about it already in physiology class at university. Aspartam includes phenylalanin, and there are people with so-called (German) phenylketonurie who are well advised to avoid phenylalanin, which has a very neurotoxical effect on them. The prevalence for this desease is 1 in 8000 (0.125%), and Aspartam-including products thus must have a warning on their packages that the product includes a phenylalanin source. For comparison, in Europe 0.3-8% of kids and 0.3-3% of adults are affected by any forms of food allergies. The Americans allowed Aspartam in the years from the early 80s to the early 90s for different food product groups, and since the mid-90s without any restrictions, and in the EU the product is allowed wihtout restrictions since 1990. The original patent has fallen, the most known marketing name is NutraSweet, but there are now many other companies offering it, too.

Personally, I am surprised by my own hesitation to use it more, I only use it on Belgian waffles a bit, since it can be dosed like ordinary powder sugar: one tea spoon of this and one tea spoon of that both taste the same and add the same quantity of sweetness. The rat claim is just a claim and never got proven and rats are not humans anyway, and the thing with phenylalanin is relevant for just every 8000th consumer. We have many diabetics that shoudl avoid sugar more or less. Does this make an argument to ban sugar from all and everything? People with peanut allergy - should peanuts be banned from the shelves? Other people having metabolic issues that prevents them from eating this and that - should these foods be banned in general?

Paracelsus said something like that the dose makes the poison, and there can even be individual doses for different people. Its like that with sugar and sweetners as well. People's organisms react differently to both, and can tolerate different doses of these. They all become toxic if you reach excessive doses. What a surprise!

In the late 80s/early 90s the Swedes panicked everybody by claimign that acrylamide causes cancer. What they did not say immediately is that they fed their poor rats - not humans! - with amounts of it that equalled up to several dozens and I think even a hundred times the animals' own body weight. Well, if I eat lets say 600 pounds of acrylamide, I assume I too would then prefer to lay still on the ground and being dead. - This is one of my most favourite examples of how absurd the nutrition debate is often led. In roughly the first decade of this century they tried to replicate the Swedish "findings", and so they amounted almost one thousand studies worldwide! And not one was able to replicate the Swedish findings: not one in almost one thousand! Even worse, more than half of these studies found all the same correlation: a correlation between acrylamid-avoiding eating behaviour, and prevalences to form various sorts of cancer. The more acrylamide-avoiding people were, the more often they got cancer! (This does not mean that acrylamide is an antidot to cancer, it most likely means that the lifestyle acrylamide-aware people are living by makes them prone to cancer: limiting food and nutrients for example) This study meanhwile has been withdrawn, is no longer being referred to, and the scandal is that it even was published in the first, this tells a lot about the lack of quality in the science magazine'S reviewing. Neverthless, until today we get warned to not fry our fries too hot and that we should reduce heat in deep fryers to 175° and you know what. Once the nonsens is out of the bottle, its hard to squeeze it back in. Personally, I do not care for acrylamide one bit. We are evolutionary adapted to it, because our ancestors roasted meat over open fire since - since how many thousands of years...?

I bring this example to illustrate from a different angle that not every claim against sweetners should be uncritically believed. Food sciences often base on only observation studies that do not allow causal linking, like correlations do not allow, too, and this is an inherent and unfortunately omni-present weakness of the whole academic branch of ecothrophology.

All I want to reach with stating this is: dont stop thinking yourself, be modest with whatever our eat, and practice healthy scepticism: do allow to get convinced, but do not allow to get convinced for free and without solid argument. Always scrutinze what is being claimed.



Edit:


P.S. The following is a release by the German "Süssstoff Verband e.V.", a lobby group for producers of sweeteners, so what they say better gets taken with some caution. Still - ah well, form your own opinion.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://suessstoff-verband.info/suessstoff-wissen/haeufige-irrtuemer/suessstoffe-regen-den-appetit-an-und-lassen-den-insulinspiegel-steigen/

Recent studies on cell cultures and laboratory animals have shown that there is a stimulus from the taste receptors to certain hormone-producing cells in the digestive tract. Theoretically, these cells could promote insulin release. Numerous clinical studies with volunteers have shown, however, that this stimulus is so minimal that it ultimately has no effect on either blood sugar or insulin levels.