The Truth Behind Artificial Sweeteners

When sales of Diet Pepsi began falling in 2005, and continued to fall each year since, PepsiCo executives frantically tried to find out why. The reason turned out to be that consumers had heard about health problems associated with aspartame, the sweetener added to Diet Pepsi, and they no longer trusted it or wanted it in their bodies.

Sold under such names as Equal and NutraSweet, aspartame had been extensively studied, with research both supporting and disputing its safety in humans. Health conditions implicated in the use of aspartame ranged from headaches and depression to memory loss, weight gain and obesity, even neurological problems and cancer.

Enough doubt about its health impact surfaced that on a Twitter sentiment scale of 0 to 100, with Christmas ranked at 88 and the U.S. Congress ranked at 38, aspartame got a lowly 22 ranking, according to the industry tracker Beverage Digest.

So the soft drink manufacturer decided in April 2015 to replace aspartame in Diet Pepsi with sucralose, another artificial sweetener better known as Splenda. This chlorinated sugar is a substance with almost as many health question marks as the sweetener it replaced.

For example, a team of scientists in Israel tested the entire range of non-caloric artificial sweeteners, including sucralose, saccharin and aspartame, on lab animals*. They used doses corresponding to the acceptable daily intake in humans set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They also did follow-up experiments using human volunteers to confirm the animal findings.

They published their findings in an October 2014 issue of the science journal, Nature, concluding that the more artificial sweeteners used the greater the bacterial growth associated with type 2 diabetes. Other markers for diabetes— raised blood sugar levels and glucose intolerance—were also induced by artificial sweeteners used in a group of 381 human volunteers.

“Our findings suggest that non-caloric artificial sweeteners may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact epidemic {obesity} that they themselves were intended to fight,” commented Eran Segal, a study co-author with the Weizmann Institute of Science.

The scientists speculated that absorbing artificial sweeteners expands the numbers of a bacterial species living in the intestines that store energy as fat, leading to obesity and as a consequence, type 2 diabetes. It may also be that the sweeteners suppress the growth of other important types of bacteria involved with preventing insulin resistance.

Rather than alleviate obesity-related metabolic conditions, as artificial sweeteners were intended to do by replacing sugar in soft drinks and a range of processed food products, these chemicals actually contribute to developing those very health problems by tinkering with the balance of healthy and unhealthy bacteria in the gut. The food industry and soft drink manufacturers just substituted one health undermining evil for another.

“Artificial sweeteners, which are present in high doses in diet soda, are associated with a greater activation of reward centers in the brain, thus altering the reward a person experiences from sweet tastes,” observed a 2014 report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “In other words, among people who drink diet soda, the brain’s sweet sensors may no longer provide a reliable gauge of energy consumption because the artificial sweetener disrupts appetite control. As a result, consumption of diet drinks may result in increased food intake overall.”

As more recent evidence indicates, it gets even worse! Researchers at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics used health data from nearly 60,000 participants (post-menopausal women) in the Women’s Health Initiative to determine the impact of all artificial sweeteners on heart health. Writing in an April 2015 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the 10 scientists involved in the study found a clear link between soft drink intake and cardiovascular disease and resultant death among post-menopausal women.

Those women who consumed two or more diet drinks a day were 30% more likely to experience a cardiovascular event (heart attack or stroke) and 50% more likely to die from cardiovascular disease compared to women who didn’t consume diet drinks containing artificial sweeteners.

These studies are just the beginning of a continuing cycle of intensive research into the role that artificial sweeteners play in triggering health problems. “Synthetic chemical sweeteners are generally unsafe for human consumption,” warned Dr. James Bowen, who has studied these substances for two decades after he found that aspartame triggered his Lou Gehrig’s disease. “Don’t be deceived. These chemicals are toxic.”

Article by Brian Clement, PhD, LN

*Hippocrates DOES NOT support or endorse testing on animals.