Bite Me Nutrition

Episode 2: Artificial Sweeteners

April 16, 2020 Jonathan Steedman, APD Season 1 Episode 2
Bite Me Nutrition
Episode 2: Artificial Sweeteners
Show Notes Transcript

What are they? Where can I find them? Are they going to kill me? Can I drink 23 cans of Diet Coke a day?

If you've got a smidge under 10 minutes, I can help.

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Hey, guys, Welcome back to the Black Me podcast. As you probably just heard, I have doubled the production budget. I now have entering music, so pretty exciting things are happening today. I want to talk to you about artificial sweeteners. This is a topic, that man. How much have we heard about this? Unfortunately, not everything that we've heard should be listened to. And by the end of this podcast, my hope is that you would know what is true, what you can listen to and what you can ignore. And also, you can make the choice as to whether you want to include artificial sweeteners in your diet or not. Please remember that you are an adult and you can choose either. And you also don't need to enforce Ah, those decisions on other people. Anyway, artificial sweeteners are also known as non nutritive sweeteners. And what that essentially means is these air sweeteners that provide known nutrition. They provide no calories. You now die, and that's how way are able to add them to foods. Teoh massively reduced the calories that they provide. There's many, many, many different types of artificial sweeteners, but the Big Three that were probably most familiar with a spot. Aim s 05 and K and sucralose. Now aspartame is otherwise known as equal, and you can find it in Coke zero Pepsi max, sugar free gum and sugar free. I mean, it's statistic of saying sugar free sugar free Red Bull Ah, as the sole fame K. It's also found in Coke Zero and Pepsi. Max Sucralose is otherwise known as splendor and can be found mostly in like your supplements, protein powders, pre workouts, things like that. There's also one of the main sweetness in sugar free V. Now the reason they can be added and provides so few calories is because they're all incredibly sweet. All of those three that I mentioned are at least 200 times sweeter than sugar, which means that to get the same sort of level of sweetness we need to add far, far less of them a case so they're only in very tiny amounts in a without food. The other thing is just the way that they metabolized. A lot of them are broken down by the body, so they just kind of go the whole way through Now I really want to talk about the way that these air legislated because that's a very important factor. An important thing to remember. Because these have found so commonly in so many different areas of that food, they are very heavily, heavily regulated. It's quite difficult to get a new artificial sweetener sort onto the market into the food system. So the way that this occurs is the governing bodies put together a toxicology report which essentially pools a whole bunch of rodent daughter. Ah, whole bunch of studies. Andi comes up with a dose, okay? And this dose, this level of artificial sweeteners is called the no observable adverse effect level. Okay, they establish that level. Really catchy name. I know. Essentially, that is the amount the dose of artificial sweeteners you that you can have per day where we observe no negative effects, no downsides. Okay, so they've got that number. They then divide that number by 1000. That's wrong. They divided by 100 they come up with what's called the acceptable daily intake. OK, so this is 100 times smaller than the original number. And then that's the dose that they kind of put us like the couple limit right now. To put that in perspective, a spot aim the Diet Coke Pepsi Max that has a acceptable daily intake that level off 50 milligrams per kilogram off body weight. So for myself, in 85 kilogram male, that means I can have about 4.25 grams of it a day. That's 22 a half cans of Coke zero. So don't do that. I feel like you probably don't need me to tell you that. And look, even if you want to go ahead and do that, you're still 100 times below the no observable adverse effect level. Okay, so the dosages that were talking about that could be found enough food. Pretty, pretty, pretty low artificial sweeteners and Cassa is definitely something we need to talk about, because I would suggest that that's probably the main criticism that's leveled artificial sweeteners. And the reality is it's pretty unfounded. All of the evidence supporting that is coming from rat studies on DSO. Unless you're an incredibly intelligent rat, I'm going to assume that you are not a rat listening to this podcast. So whether weaken, take those findings and apply them to human beings is a bit of a gray area. And to be honest, a rat's metabolism, the way they break down artificial sweeteners, is quite different to the way that we do. So I would suggest that not really. Also, just a lot of the rat models in general have been pretty poor. There was a study that really got a lot of attention because all of these rats had cancer. But the thing is, they let the rats live out their natural life. And just like in human beings, the older we are them way higher. At risk of just getting cancer by being frickin unlucky is sorry. There's no necessary. There's no way of knowing that those cancers wouldn't have occurred naturally, anyway. And there's lots of things occurring like that which just muddy the waters. But the thing is, newspapers don't like to report that they like to report that artificial sweeteners and give you cancer. And so that's all that someone reads. They don't necessarily dig into the studies to find that there's not really any support for that claim. The next claim that comes up is artificial sweeteners around weight gain, and I know that at first it's like, How could something with zero calories cause weight gain? And believe me, I'm right there with you. The first thing is a lot of the populations they study. They find that people with a high B m I consume artificial sweeteners. Now the thing is, this is what's called reverse cause ality and reversed. Causality is a bit of a bitch, because essentially, instead of saying you have a high being being mind you drink lots of artificially sweetened drinks. You must have a high being my because you drink lots of artificially sweetened drinks instead of people with a high B m. I tend to try to be losing body weight and therefore opt for more artificially sweetened drinks. Okay, so reverse causality is when we feel like the thing. Something has caused something when in actual fact, it's gone the other way. I feel like I explain that incredibly poorly, and I apologize for that. I'll probably follow up about it at a later date. One thing which is a fair point and just something to consider if you're going to consume artificial sweeteners, is that can potentially be ah, behavioral effect in that people kind of, I feel like, Well, I didn't have any calories in my coke, so I can have an extra dessert. I can eat more after dinner. Okay, Um and absolutely. If you do that, that's going to cause you to gain weight. I would suggest that's not due to the fault of the artificial sweetener. That's just something that you should probably be mindful of if you are including those in your diet. Because the reality is in all of the studies that have swapped out sugar sweetened beverages and foods for artificially sweetened beverages and foods, the groups with the artificially sweetened foods and beverages lose more White case. Sir. From an evidence perspective, they've got good evidence for white loss. There is also a little bit of talk about it affecting blood sugar. The reality is, if it did affect blood sugar and you had an artificially sweetened drink on an empty stomach, it would cause your fasting blood sugar to drop out of the healthy range, which leads to coma and can lead to death. So if that was the case, I'd probably be dead, sir. The good news is that doesn't appear to be any effect on your blood sugar levels and therefore no effect on sort of fasting, insulin or insulin resistance and all of these other things that are related to that. Your metabolic health and, in actual fact, artificially sweetened foods and drinks tend to improve your metabolic health because they tend to result in weight loss. And weight loss is a very, very powerful promoter of metabolic health. So, ironically, the opposite tends to occur. The last one is around the gut. Microbiota. They got microbiome, basically the profile of gut bacteria living in you, which is disgusting. But you know, it's the reality. Basically, they have been. There's been some talk that artificially sweetened drinks and foods change your gut microbiome. The thing is, we don't know if that change is good or bad or mutual. We just know that it changes it, and not all of them do change it. Sucralose, for example, tends to not really change it. A spot him does change it. But again, we don't know if that's good or bad, and as of now, we haven't actually seen that result in anything negative, so I wouldn't again suggest that it's bad for your gut health. That's a very big leap. So in summary, like I said, whether you choose to consume artificially sweetened foods and beverages is completely up to you. If you choose to ignore them, eliminate them from your diet. That's completely fine if you choose to include them at doses off. Less than 22 a half cans off, soft drink a day. I firmly believe you're going to be fine. That being said, nothing beats water. Okay, Please do not replace your water. Ah, with you know, two leaders of Diet Coke make sure that you're drinking plenty of water eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. And if you are sprinkling the odd artificially sweetened beverage or food throughout your week, I'm sure you're going to live a long, healthy and happy life. So that's it from me. If you have enjoyed this, please share. What way would have you gotta do You gotta share, like put reviews? I think I don't know I'm bad at this, but what I would love for you to do is take a screenshot of a truck it in instagram stories and tag me so I can say thank you. And also so we can spread a bit more correct information about artificial sweetness. Thanks, guys.