Artificial Sweeteners

[Manhattan]

Hi Girls!

Just wondering what your thoughts on sugar and sweeteners are? Which is the best alternative: Real Sugar, Equal or Splenda? I try to eat as low GI as possible, and read somewhere that sweetener has exactly the same effect on insulin levels as sugar. And are there any side effects of having too much sweetener in your diet (yes I'll admit, I've a sweet tooth to boot )

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

x

[chris]

Hi
My experience with sweeteners is not good. I have been on soooooo many diets and have found that natural is best for your body as the sweeteners can have bad side effects on your body, I don't even drink diet dinks.

I use raw sugar at home, by memory it even has low cal compaired to white sugar but not sure how it rates with GI.

Check it out on google Aspartain (sp??) and all the others and their side effects. It is not good.

Take care
Chris

[butterfly_warrior]

Manhattan, you may want to look into stevia...

BW

[melbel]

beat me to it BW......have a squizzy at stevia.....you will probably only find in health food stores...it is the only sweetener my naturopath recommend for rying to conceive etc....failing that she said honey, then organic raw sugar. She would rather I eat real as in raw sugar than artificial sweeteners...they are really quite bad for you and if you have never used them before can make your gut very unhappy.

[Junglemum]

i wouldnt touch artificial sweetners with a 10 foot barge pole!
There are studies, (yes they are mainly in rats, but still) linking them to Cancer when taken in high doses. I think the best thing is the real thing, in moderation of course.

This Stevia the girls speak of sounds interesting, i might go check it out.

[LimeSlice]

if you google for aspartame you should find wealth of info...also check out the actual numbers for the various sweetener and google them.
Apartame
Has both pos and neg of some common sweeteners
National Cancer Institute (US) informative, but not conclusive.
Green Facts cited as 'unbiased'

You will be shocked at the negative impact these artificial sweeteners can have on your body!!
Saccharin and Splenda are not good!
You are much better off eating real sugar than artificial. I wouldn't feed them to my worst enemy,but that is just me.

HTH

[Visitor8]

in regards to aspartame causing cancer I believe it is true, my grandad grew up using it instead of sugar from about the age of 20 and he died of a brain tumor.

[smiles4u]

DP & i are convinced the artificial sweeteners helped cause our regular headaches that we both had for years cause as soon as we started using raw sugar in moderation instead of the artificial sweeteners our headaches were nowhere near as often