Artificial Sweetners

Photo by holohololand. Published on 07 January 2014
Stock photo - Image ID: 100225601

I didn’t have a Hot Chocolate this morning.  I did buy one for someone else.  So I’m not sure whether that was nice or not.  I love the smell of Hot Chocolate.  I also started my day with a healthy green smoothie.  Yay me.  I need to celebrate and recognize every little triumph right now.

I did buy myself a diet soda.  Now I know diet sodas are just chemicals and could not by a long stretch be considered health food.  My conflict centered on how bad for you are artificial sweeteners.  Not if their good for you… chemicals not health foods. How bad they are for you.  In several otherwise well researched books I have read lately there has been a side note or paragraph saying splenda and stevia are bad for you.  Only there has been no research used to back this up.

Recently I did find out how bad for you sugar is.  It’s bad, really, really bad.  In my green smoothie in the morning I like to add a splenda or a stevia.  The question was whether I would have to stop doing this.  Does the bad out way the good?

Luckily from years gone by and university and other research papers I remembered I could do my own research.  One of the big questions with artificial sweeteners is the chicken and the egg question.  Which came first?  Did people use diet sodas because they were fat or were they fat because they drank diet sodas.  Again we know diet sodas are not good for you they are all chemicals and can crowd out healthier beverages like water.

I did find one scientific study (study not experiment) which suggested a correlation between artificial sweeteners and weight gain.  I also found a couple of more studies and experiments that were inconclusive.  They could not say one way or another.  I did find research that determined artificial sweeteners do not light up the addictive pathways or brain the way sugar does.  Additional experiments determined artificial sweeteners can be helpful in weight loss.  

So ya, I still need to way cut down on diet sodas, but I can now feel okay using the occasional artificial sweetener in my salad dressing or green smoothie.