You can have your cake and eat it too? What a wonderful concept. I’m all about having it all, but I’m also a realist so I have to ask myself: are artificial sweeteners really a dieter’s best friend or are they our worst enemy? Seems like such a silly question when you consider that anything sweetened with an artificial sweetener provides all that yummy sweetness without any added calories. What’s not to love? A lot. While not adding any extra calories to your diet, they are adding a lot of extra chemicals: chemicals that can do a lot of harm, including, according to recent research, make you fat. Hmm…”diet” food that makes you fat, sounds like a dieter’s worst enemy to me!

There are basically five types of artificial sweeteners:

* Acesulfame-K or acesulfame-pottasium (Sunette)
* Aspartame (NutraSweet or Equal)
* Sucralose (Splenda)
* D-Tagatose (Sugaree)
* Saccharin (Sweet 'N Low)

One can argue that some are “better” than others but they’re all basically the same: non-caloric, non-nutritive food additives. And some even have some added bonuses: for example, when Aspartame is ingested, one of aspartame’s ingredients, methyl alcohol, converts to formaldehyde. Equal contains the amino acid, phenylalanine. Phenylalanine occurs naturally in the brain but high levels of this amino acid can increase the chance of seizures and lead to depression and schizophrenia. Saccharin contains a coal-tar compound and Splenda contains arsenic. Lovely, huh?


Ok, so they’re filled with some less than desirable chemicals, but you still want sweets and you still want to be thin, right? So what’s a harried woman to do but consume artificial sweeteners? Well, the reality is, according to Dr. Joseph Mercola in Consumer Research magazine, “There is no clear-cut evidence that sugar substitutes are useful in weight reduction. On the contrary, there is some evidence that these substances may stimulate appetite.”

Because they are so sweet (some are up to 600 times sweeter than sugar) and are made with chemicals so foreign to our bodies, we don’t know how to metabolize them. Our bodies like sugar, real sugar. In fact, we are biological designed to seek out sugar. All sugars (sucrose) are carbohydrates and that’s what fuels our brain and muscles. Sugar floods us with pleasure by stimulating the release of serotonin our body’s natural mood-elevating hormone. So over time our brains have learned to associate the sweet taste with pleasure. Which is all well and good when food was hard to come and we were eating naturally found sugars such as those found in fruit, not those designed in lab.

Our bodies were not built for artificial sweeteners. They confuse our brains. When we eat something sweet, certain enzymes in our mouth are released to alert our cell receptors for an insulin surge (from sugar), and when it doesn’t arrive your brain feels cheated and you find yourself craving carbohydrates. In one study, people who used artificial sweeteners ate up to three times the amount of calories as the control group – three times the calories – doesn’t sound very diet-friendly to me! And I’m sure you can relate, you’re craving something sweet so you drink a diet soda and then an hour later you find you’ve consumed an entire loaf of bread still searching for that sweet fix.

So, let’s recap, artificial sweeteners contain potentially life threatening chemicals, mess with our body chemistry, and actually make us eat more. I would have to say all things considered, artificial sweeteners are definitely a dieter’s worst enemy. Now’s the time to get them out of your body and life for good!

Up Next…How to Break the Artificial Sweetener Addiction