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Artificial sweeteners are everywhere, but the jury is still deliberating whether these chemicals are harmless. Also called non-nutritive sweeteners, they can be synthetic, such as saccharin and aspartame, or natural derivatives, such as steviol, which comes from the Stevia plant.
To date, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved six types of artificial sweeteners and two types of natural non-nutritive sweeteners for use in foods.
For those who are trying to stop eating sugar, this has been great news. Worldwide, aspartame is present in more than 6,000 foods, and between 5,000 and 5,500 tonnes per year are consumed in the United States alone.
The American Diabetes Association, the most respected professional group on this disease, officially recommends dietetic soft drinks as an alternative to sugary drinks. To date, seven municipalities have established a sweet beverage tax to discourage consumption.
However, recent medical studies suggest that politicians who wish to impose a tax on soft drinks might want to include dietary drinks. because they would also contribute to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Why sweeteners do not have calories?
The key to these sweeteners, which have virtually no calories, is that they do not break down into natural sugars during digestion. as do glucose, fructose and galactose, which the body then uses as energy or which turns into fat.
Non-nutritive sweeteners have different by-products that do not change into calories. For example, aspartame goes through a different metabolic process that does not produce simple sugars. Others, like saccharin and sucralose, do not decompose at all: they are absorbed directly into the bloodstream and eliminated in the urine.
For diabetics, theoretically, these sweeteners should be "better" than sugar. Glucose stimulates the release of insulin, a hormone that regulates the blood sugar level. Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body no longer responds as well to insulin as it should, resulting in higher levels of blood sugar, damaging the nerves, kidneys, blood vessels and the body. heart.
Since non-nutritive sweeteners are not really sugar, you should avoid this problem.
Artificial sweeteners, your brain and your microbiome
However, in the last decade, more and more evidence has shown that these sweeteners can alter healthy metabolic processes in other ways, specifically in humans. ;intestine.
The long-term use of these sweeteners has been associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. It has been shown that sweeteners, such as saccharin, they alter the type and the function of the intestinal microbiome, the community of microorganisms that live in the intestine. Aspartame decreases the activity of an intestinal enzyme that normally protects against type 2 diabetes.
In addition, this response may be exacerbated by the "imbalance" between the body that perceives any something like a sweet taste and the expected associated calories. The greater the gap between sweet taste and the actual calorie content is, the greater the metabolic imbalance is important.
Sweeteners have also shown that they alter the brain activity associated with the consumption of sugary foods. Functional magnetic resonance, which studies brain activity by measuring blood flow, has shown that, compared with normal sugar, sucralose, activity decreases in the amygdala, a part of the brain bound to the perception of taste and to the food experience.
Another study found that greater consumption of longer-term food sodas is associated with lower activity in the brain's "caudate head", a reward-related region needed to generate a sense of satisfaction. . The researchers hypothesized that this decrease in activity could lead a person who drinks soda to compensate for the lack of pleasure that food now gives him by increasing the consumption of all foods, not just the food. soft drinks.
Together, these studies, at the cellular and brain level, may explain why people who consume sweeteners still have a higher risk of obesity than those who do not consume these products.
While this debate about the pros and cons of these sugar substitutes continues, we should see these behavioral studies with a grain of salt (or sugar) because many soda drinkers, or anyone concerned with the Health that consumes non-caloric sweeteners, already has the risk factors of obesity, diabetes, hypertension or heart disease.
Those who are already overweight or obese can resort to low calorie drinks, which make it appear that diet sodas cause your weight gain.
This same group may also be less likely to moderate their consumption. For example, these people may think that drinking a soda several times a week is much healthier than drinking a single soft drink with sugar.
These results indicate that consumers and health professionals need to verify our assumptions about the health benefits of these products. Sweeteners are everywhere, from beverages to salad dressings, to yogurt cookies, and we must recognize that there is no guarantee that these chemicals will not increase the burden of metabolic diseases at any time. 39, future
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