If you walk up and down the aisles of your local grocery store, you will be hard pressed to find one aisle that doesn't include an artificial sweetener of some kind. From NutraSweet to Splenda, it seems these fake sugars are everything, sweetening up biscuits, sweets, and even spaghetti sauces. Since you can't seem to avoid them anymore, it might be a good idea to start looking at what they really do to and for your body.

While avoiding sugar is certainly a good step toward better health, are artificial sweeteners a good way to accomplish this goal? Deep down, you already understand that they are chemicals, but are they really that bad for your health? Here's what you need to consider.

Why are You Tricking Your Body?

When your body takes in something sweet, anything sweet, it thinks it needs to produce insulin in order to break down this sugar content. The insulin does its job and converts the sugar into more manageable energy pieces for your body to use. This is a positive cycle and one that helps your body's cellular functions. Your body needs to have the glucose that is released by sugar, but something different happens when you eat artificial sweeteners.


Because artificial sweeteners are so much sweeter than the real thing, your body can become confused. Your body might think you are eating more sugar than you are, so it floods your body with more insulin than you need. But why is this a bad thing? When your body produces too much insulin, your body might begin to swing the other way, thinking it needs more sugar to compensate for the extra insulin. This creates a nasty cycle in which your body doesn't quite understand how to react to sugars when you take them in.

Having too much insulin is a bad thing in your body, potentially harming your pancreas and other organs.

Your Appetite Increases

When your body begins this cycle of ups and downs from the sweeteners, you will respond by eating. This is natural as your body wants to balance itself out again. But this can also lead to weight gain as you can begin to take in more calories than your body needs to consume in a given day. Weight loss is hard enough without this adding to the challenges you face with food.

But it's not just the ups and downs of your appetite from artificial sweeteners that can lead to weight gain. Studies have also shown that people who eat fake sugars can have troubles remembering how much they've eaten. This too can lead to eating more than one needs in order to maintain their weight. What happens is that you think about the artificially sweetened item as having no calories or as having fewer calories, so you can then make up for those calories with other items you eat.

A Cancer Risk?

Of course, the main concern with anything artificial is that you might have long term effects to worry about. Since fake sugars haven't been used for a long period of time, we might not know what can happen to their users in the future. It has already been shown that some artificial sweeteners can cause cancer when taken in high doses, but these doses are far too high for any human to even consider eating.

That said, while the jury might still be out on fake sweeteners and their link to cancer, chemicals in general can alter your body chemistry, so it may be better to avoid them altogether.

A Natural Alternative?

But there's no disputing the appeal of artificial sweeteners because they give you the sweetness you crave without all the calories. And today, there are some promising natural sweeteners that can do the same thing. Stevia, an herb, is being used in many natural products to add sweetness without adding calories. So far, it seems to be a worthwhile replacement to the sugar in that sugar bowl – and since it's not artificial, people have been able to use it without any nasty side effects.

Artificial sweeteners can be a part of a healthy diet, but also when the risks are considered before consumption. While the sweetness of foods might be appealing to you, it might also be a good time to start thinking about the natural sweetness which is found in fruits and vegetables. After all, they're also going to provide you with nutrition – and the only effect of this choice is good health.

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