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Sickly Sweet
The dangers of aspartame are pretty well known. And in this month's issue of Nutrition & Healing, Dr. Wright will be going into even more depth about them. But I know more than a few people who gave up using this artificial sweetener because of safety concerns only to switch to sucralose. Thanks to some clever marketing -- "made from sugar so it tastes like sugar" -- this sweetener certainly seems like a safer alternative. But based on what we know about sugar (among other things, that just a single teaspoon can impair your immune system by 50 percent for up to three hours after you eat it), that's not such a ringing endorsement after all.
The truth is, sucralose is just as artificial as aspartame -- and quite possibly just as dangerous. It's created by adding chlorine molecules to sugar.
And if you ask me, the "unknown" factor at work with sucralose makes it even scarier than aspartame -- at least with it you know what the risks are. No one is entirely sure what sucralose can do to you, or your health. In fact, there have only been six human trials on this artificial sweetener, and only two of them were done before the FDA approved it. Even more disconcerting, those two studies only involved 36 people (23 of whom were actually given sucralose) and looked at sucralose's effects in terms of tooth decay, not on overall safety.
And to top it all off, none of the researchers conducting trials on sucralose stuck around long enough to see what the stuff might really do to people: The longest human trial on sucralose lasted a grand total of three months -- hardly enough time to see what the effects would be in someone who ingests diet sodas or other products containing sucralose day in and day out for years on end, as so many people do these days.
Oh, there are lots more studies on sucralose -- the manufacturers are sure to point out that fact. But they've all been done on lab rats. And the results are anything but comforting.
In a study published in the FDA's Federal Register, rats that were fed sucralose experienced shrunken thalamus glands, enlarged liver and kidneys, reduced growth rate, reduced red blood cell count, and diarrhea.
The point I'm getting at here is that sucralose is hardly a healthy alternative to aspartame or sugar. There are two natural sweeteners that Dr. Wright does recommend -- stevia and lo han. Both are completely safe and natural and are widely available on the Internet.
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