How Sweet It Is!-A review of Artificial Sweeteners

[Darlene]

This is an article I pulled out of Dana Carpender's "Lowcarbezine" newsletter. She wrote a book titled "How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet -- And Lost Forty Pounds." I haven't read the book yet, but I LOVE her newsletter. This edition is located here:

http://www.holdthetoast.com/archive/020724.html

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Lowcarbezine! 24 July 2002

Perhaps the thing that scares people the most about going low carb is the idea of giving up sugar. In a country where the average sugar intake is now 152 pounds per year - and someone's eating more, folks, since we're all eating less - quitting the National Addiction looms as a very large obstacle - yet few steps have such beneficial results.

I don't eat sugar because it makes me fat and tired and cranky. This does not mean, however, that I never use a sweetener. I'm an enthusiastic cook, and perhaps an even more enthusiastic eater, and some recipes do call for at least a touch of sweetness. This poses no problem, since there is a wider variety of artificial sweeteners and other sweeteners that are easy on the blood sugar available now than at any time in history. Indeed, there are so many sweeteners available that it can get a bit confusing for the uninitiated - and there are new low carb dieters joining our ranks every day. So for those of you who are new to the ranks of the sugar-free - and we have more fun here than you may have imagined - here is a quick rundown of the most common sweeteners available in the US today:

Saccharine - Saccharine is the granddaddy of artificial sweeteners, and still sees a lot of use today. Most commonly known by the trade name Sweet 'n Low, or "the pink packets", saccharine is still a very useful sweetener to keep on hand. It's very cheap, it's widely available, and it holds its sweetness when heated. For many years, saccharine was suspected of being a carcinogen in large doses, but the FDA took it off the list of suspected carcinogens well over a year ago - and even when it was considered a cancer threat, the doses needed to equal those tested were ridiculously high.

The big disadvantage of saccharine is that some folks dislike the taste. There is a genetically linked tendency to taste a bitter aftertaste from saccharine - since it's genetic, some people taste it and some people don't. If you're one of the people who does, however, anything but the smallest amount of saccharin is not going to taste pleasantly sweet to you; it will taste unpleasantly bitter. The higher the concentration of the saccharine, the more likely that it will taste bitter, so it is better used when only a bit of sweetness is needed, like in a glass of iced tea, rather when a lot of sweetener is needed, for example for sweetening a chocolate dessert.

In cooking, saccharine has a couple of drawbacks: First of all, it is very, very sweet - you may remember those teensy little saccharine tablets, about double the size of a pinhead, just one of which replaced a teaspoon of sugar. Because of this intense sweetness, saccharine that has not been bulked with something less sweet can be awkward to use, making it difficult to know just how much to use in place of sugar - and bulking agent usually add at least a little carbohydrate; for instance a packet of Sweet 'n Low has just over a half a gram of carbohydrate in it. Liquid saccharine is available, and contains no carbohydrates at all. The second drawback is that saccharine does not provide any of the bulk or textural effects that sugar provides in baked goods and desserts - it will not hold moisture the way sugar will, nor will it brown, nor crystallize. This limits its usefulness in cooking, and particularly dessert making.

Still, saccharine is handy for adding a touch of sweetness to a cup of tea or coffee, a dish of yogurt, or a batch of salad dressing.

Aspartame - Aspartame debuted under the trade names Equal and Nutrasweet in the early 1980s, and it is still generally known by those names, or as "the blue packets" although its patent expired quite some time ago. At the time, aspartame took the market by storm, partly because it lacked the tendency to taste bitter that saccharine has, and partly because there was far more reason to aggressively market a sweetener that was still under patent than one whose patent had expired decades ago. The advantages and disadvantages of aspartame are, for the most part, similar to those of saccharine - aspartame is cheap and ubiquitous, but will not add moistness, browning, or any other textural effects to the foods in which it is used. As I mentioned, it does lack the drawback of tasting bitter to some folks, but on the other hand, unlike saccharine, aspartame breaks down when exposed to heat for any length of time, and loses its sweetness - indeed, it will even break down without heat over time. The shelf life of diet Coke, for instance, is nowhere near as long as that of regular Coke.

Too, aspartame is wildly controversial. There have been more complaints to the FDA about aspartame than all other food additives combined. The FDA steadfastly claims that all reports of headaches, seizures, MS-like symptoms, and visual disturbances are all in the heads of the folks reporting them, but the reports continue, regardless. Dr. Robert Atkins, who used to recommend the use of aspartame, no longer does; he feels that it interferes with fat burning on a cellular level. He also asserts that professional pilot's magazines have warned pilots not to use aspartame, because of reported visual disturbances. And this girl can tell you that when aspartame-sweetened Diet Coke took over the market from saccharine-sweetened Tab, I quickly found that two cans of pop during the day were enough to give me panic attacks in the evening. Although I do not shun aspartame completely, I prefer the other sweeteners, for this reason.

Still, many people use aspartame freely, with no apparent ill effects. Pay attention to your body is always good advice.

Acesulfame-K - commonly known as Ace-K, and sometimes as Acesulfame potassium. This is a sweetener that has never quite cracked the public consciousness, although it's available pretty widely in grocery stores, right along side the saccharine and the aspartame. The most common trade names are Sunnette and Sweet One. Ace-K stands up to heat, doesn't taste bitter, but once again, doesn't give any of the textural effects of sugar. So far as I can tell, folks don't use ace-K a lot, but it shows up in a growing number of sugar free products - all of which seem to taste pretty good. I haven't been able to find a lot of health info about ace-K; the only report I could find seemed to think that ace-K was bad and dangerous simply because it was, indeed, an artificial sweetener. This does not strike me as a compelling argument.

Sucralose - this is the new kid on the block, mostly being marketed under the trade name Splenda, and it blows the competition clear out of the water. Splenda tastes remarkably good; if you don't tell people that a dessert is sweetened with Splenda instead of sugar, it's unlikely that they'd ever guess. Sucralose, like saccharine and aspartame, is extremely sweet in its raw form. For this reason, Splenda is bulked with malto-dextrin to the same sweetness level as sugar. This is both good and bad - good because it is very easy to convert recipes; you just use the same amount of Splenda as you would of sugar, and bad because it needs so much malto-dextrin to bulk it to that level that the carb count starts to add up. One teaspoon of Splenda has a half a gram of carbohydrate. Granted, that's only 1/8th the carbohydrate of a teaspoon of sugar, and in a cup of coffee, it's no big deal. But when you want to use a cup of the stuff in a dessert, we're talking 24 grams of carbohydrate, or more than some folks' daily limit. Liquid Splenda, which is carb free, is available in some countries, but MacNeil, the company that produces Splenda in the US, says that they currently have no plans to distribute it here. By the way, to give you an idea of how sweet liquid Splenda is - 1/4 teaspoon equals a cup of sugar!

Splenda is the sweetener of choice right now for any serious sugar free chef. Still, it has some of the same drawbacks as the other sweeteners - it's easy to measure, and it tastes great, but it still doesn't give the bulk or the textures of sugar. Since it's still under patent, it's also quite expensive - this box of Splenda runs about $4. A good reason to use another, cheaper sweetener where it will work out well.

These four - saccharine, aspartame, acesulfame-K, and Splenda - are all artificial, non-nutritive sweeteners. This is enough to upset some folks; I get email every now and then saying, "How can you recommend artificial sweeteners?! They're artificial!" True enough.

I do not know if artificial sweeteners are completely safe. To me, however, that is an irrelevant question, since I know of nothing that is completely safe. The important question is "Are artificial sweeteners safer than what they are replacing?" And to this question, the answer appears to be a resounding "Yes". For instance, I had a reader write me, wanting to know if it was true that Splenda caused thymus shrinkage and kidney swelling. I read the FDA documents, and learned that it was, indeed, absolutely true that Splenda did just exactly that in the test rats - in doses the equivalent of a 150 pound human being eating well over 12,000 teaspoons a day of Splenda. At doses the equivalent of 8700 teaspoons a day, thymus shrinkage and kidney swelling did not occur. Considering that the average American eats about 45 teaspoons a day of sugar - an amount I consider to be manifestly unsafe - I find it hard to imagine that anyone is going to manage to force down more than, say, 200 teaspoons a day of Splenda. The kidneys and thymus glands of America appear to be safe.

I'd also like to point out that if you work it out, the same quantity of sweetness as 8700 teaspoons of Splenda a day would require that 150 pound human being to eat double their body weight in sugar, which might well kill them outright.

At any rate, sugar has been implicated in heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, poly cystic ovarian syndrome, and of course the ever popular tooth decay. If artificial sweeteners are only half as dangerous - and I don't believe they're anything like that dangerous - they're a better idea.

Now, for some not-so-artificial sweeteners:

Stevia - I did a whole speech on stevia a few years back. Stevia is an herbal sweetener, derived from the stevia rebaudiana shrub, known to the natives of South America as the sweet leaf shrub. An intensely sweet powder is extracted from the stevia leaf, and is growing in popularity as a sweetener. Technically, it is not allowed to be used as a sweetener in processed foods, but it is being used anyway, under the title "supplement."

Stevia has no known dangers. However, it shares many of the drawbacks of saccharine - it is so intensely sweet it can be difficult to use, and in quantity is it often unpleasantly bitter. It takes some experimenting with.

Easier to use is a blend of stevia and fructooligosaccharides, aka FOS. FOS is a naturally occurring sugar that is too big for the body to digest or absorb. As a result, FOS doesn't raise blood sugar levels or cause an insulin release. It does, however, encourage the healthy intestinal bacteria and improve bowel health. Since FOS is only half as sweet as table sugar (and wildly expensive!), it makes a good match for the too-sweet stevia extract. I use a stevia/FOS sweetener in my yogurt, and sometimes in beverages, and it works nicely in both.

Stevia, like the artificial sweeteners, does not give the bulk or textural effects of sugar. While FOS, in quantity, would give some of these effects, when paired with stevia the resulting sweetener is still too concentrated to use in amounts that would give these effects. Stevia and stevia/FOS blends also share a drawback of Splenda, in that they can be fairly expensive. Still, they're a good choice for anyone who is unhappy about using anything artificial in their diet.

Polyols - Polyols are also known as sugar alcohols. There are several - xylitol, maltitol, sorbitol, mannitol, and lactitol are the most widely used. The sugar alcohols are very different from the other sweeteners we've been talking about. They actually are carbohydrates, like sugar is, with one big difference - they are made of molecules so big that you can't digest or absorb most of them.

This means that polyols don't raise blood sugar much, don't contribute many absorbable calories, and don't cause much of an insulin release - yet they can provide virtually any texture that can be achieved with sugar. There are polyol-based marshmallows, gummy worms, jelly beans, caramels, meringues, ice cream, you name it, and they all are virtually indistinguishable from their sugary counterparts. Here we have polyol based taffies, hard candies, and chocolate; I think you'll be very impressed by both the taste and the texture of these candies.

There is one important thing to remember about the polyols, and you may consider it a drawback - although I consider it a benefit (hey, it's not a bug, it's a feature!) I mentioned that polyols are large-molecule carbohydrates that are very incompletely digested or absorbed. The same could be said of fiber. You know what happens if you eat a lot of fiber? Same thing happens with polyols. I find that just a candy or two, or a half a chocolate bar, is enough to make me, er, socially offensive a few hours later. Eat more, and you will regret it. I know someone who made the mistake of eating about a dozen sugar free taffies right before bed, and paid for it with 45 gut-cramping minutes in the bathroom at 4 am.

What this means, then, is that with the polyols we have high quality sweets that enforce moderation. Personally, I think this is a beautiful thing.

I have been asked, "Why use sweeteners at all? Why not just learn to do without sweet foods?" This is a question worth answering.

We are hard-wired to enjoy sweet flavors; this much has been well established. Apparently this is because for most of the millennia humankind has existed on planet Earth, sweet foods were rare, and served a strong nutritional purpose. Breast milk is sweet; I trust we're all clear on the value of babies enjoying their mothers' milk. Other than that, there was fruit - which originally had a far lower sugar content than our modern hybrid versions - a good source of vitamins and minerals. The one exception, and the only really concentrated sweet available in nature, was honey, and it seems unlikely that our primitive ancestors found enough honey to do themselves much damage, especially considering how much exercise they got. It seems clear that for most of the history of humankind, a preference for sweet flavors served us well. Only in our modern sedentary society, flooded with cheap and valueless sweets, has this preference been turned against us.

Although it seems unlikely that we will ever stop enjoying the flavor of sweet things, I do think we can, and should, unlearn our preference for vast quantities of heavily sweetened foods and beverages. That this could happen may seem unlikely to new low carbers; let me assure you that it is not. I have, in my life, quite literally stolen to get vast quantities of sugary food, yet most commercially sweetened products, both sugary and artificially sweetened, are far, far too sweet for my tastes now. As you wean yourself from sugar, you'll find your taste for the stuff diminishing, until someday you'll indulge in one of your old favorites, only to find it tastes so sickly sweet you can't bear to finish it. This is a far, far more common experience than you may believe!

Yet this lessening of our taste for sweets happens gradually, and in the meanwhile artificially sweetened desserts and such can keep the sugar monster from the door. This, to me, is a trade-off so valuable that I'm hard-pressed to find an argument against it - better, far better, to eat something artificially sweetened every day, and lose the physical addiction to sugar, and then let our taste for sweets gradually diminish on its own, than to say, "No! Nothing sweet, ever! No sugar, no artificial sweeteners, nothing!" and then get sucked back into sugar-hell. Every fight, every change, every goal has its appropriate time, and dealing with the very real addictive properties of carbohydrates, especially sugar, must happen before we start to teach ourselves not to need something sweet on a regular basis.

Further, I think it's likely that most of us will still find that at least a little sweetness among our variety of flavors is still desirable. I don't pick up the box of Splenda every day, but I don't hesitate to use a teaspoon or two in my cole slaw dressing, or to make a batch of sugar free ketchup - which I then eat a tablespoonful at a time. This sort of use of artificial sweeteners leads to truly minimal consumption, while keeping as broad a spectrum as possible of tastes available to us. If this makes our diets more interesting, and therefore more livable in the long run - and I have no doubt that for most of us it does - then this is a Very Good Thing.

We need to do this for the rest of our lives. Low carb sweeteners make this commitment far easier. I, for one, am grateful we have them.

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[This message has been edited by Midnightmom (edited July 25, 2002).]

[twilap]

Thanks for the interesting article!

I still have to say that Stevia is my sweetener of choice...but I haven't tried baking with any of them.

[mrszouave]

VERY INTERESTING!!

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[logcabinmama]

Thank you for all of this information Midnightmom.

This is all very interesting and there are a couple sweeteners I have never heard of before.

I remember my parents used Saccharine in their ice tea. Our DD is using Splenda now since her surgery.

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