By Dean L. Jones, CPM

Reading labels on everything that we buy off of the shelf can at times seem daunting, but we do it to ensure the right gas pump is selected for fueling expensive cars and likewise we do it to administer the right amount of prescribed drugs.  Accordingly, when basing your decision on selecting artificial sweetener or refined sugar it is smart to comprehend how neither makes good sense.

Selecting diet soda over regular sugary soda can pose an even worse verifiable risk of deepening obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gout, tooth decay, and other health problems.  An increasing number of science studies are in fact showing that diet soda is equal to or of poorer quality than regular soda when it comes to advancing weight gain and chronic disease.

When eating artificially sweetened no- or low-calorie drinks and other packaged diet foods they have active ingredients that stimulate appetite, particularly cravings for carbohydrates that can stimulate fat storage and weight gain.  Some of the findings in those aforementioned reports show how diet soda drinkers suffer the same exact health problems as those who opt for regular soda, such as excessive weight gain, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Aspartame and saccharin are commonly used artificial sweeteners that basically trick the body into thinking that it is going to receive sugar, except real sugar does not show up and that makes the body and mind put out emergency signals that it needs more, which builds up those high carb cravings that result in overeating on other more bad packaged processed foods.

Too often we think in sweet taste for just about everything we eat.  Sweet, salty and savory is the most sought after dinning trifecta, where it has become a paramount issue for us to work at un-sweetening the daily diet plan if we ever expect to reverse the obesity epidemic that many of us are living.  Our social habits have become like an overt obsession to seek out sweet flavors, which biologically sets off certain processes that lead to excess weight gain whether that flavor comes loaded with calories or not.  These artificially sweeteners are very appropriately described as artificial as they are nothing more than a false fantasy of sweet.

Studies of all kind result in linking diseases to eating aspartame because it is comprised of methanol that when eaten transform into formaldehyde (formaldehyde’s common use is in paint remover and embalming fluids).  In human tests, formaldehyde has proven to cause cancer, particularly increasing the risk of breast and prostate cancer.  If you experience side effects from aspartame or any other artificial sweetener, please report it to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration web site (www.fda.gov) on their Consumer Complaint Coordinator page, where you will see phone number(s) listed to describe your respective personal health reaction to these trickery sweeteners.

www.SugarAlert.com
Dean Jones, Ethics Advocate, Southland Partnership Corporation (a public benefit organization), contributes his view on health attributes derived from foods & beverages.