Ingredient irony In the last edition of Health eTips I told you about sucralose and how it's hardly the healthy sugar substitute it's made out to be (12/6/06 eTip, subject line "Sickly sweet). If you're on board with keeping sucralose out of your system, one thing you need to be aware of is that the boycott doesn't end when you bypass those little yellow packets at the coffee bar. Sucralose has found its way into some rather unexpected places these days -- ones that even the most alternative-minded of us have likely considered healthy.
Take the homeopathic germ-fighter Airborne, for example. I know I was thrilled to see what I thought was an all-natural remedy get such positive attention and feedback from the mainstream. Then I went to pick up a box for myself and took a look at the ingredient list. It's got all sorts of great nutrients and herbs -- zinc, vitamin C, selenium, echnacea, forshythia, etc.
But listed under "other ingredients" was something that cast quite a shadow over the light Airborne has been shining on natural medicine: sucralose. Once again, sucralose is anything but natural. And adding it to a product meant to bolster your immune system seems a bit ironic (i.e. hypocritical) to me.
I don't mean to pick on Airborne exclusively. There are lots of other products that shouldn't contain sucralose but do, including more than a few brands of chewable vitamins. So if you can't even trust vitamin manufacturers to keep this synthetic sweetener out of their products, who can you trust?
Yourself.
It's up to you to read labels of everything you buy, including vitamins and other supplements. Take your time with it, to At first glance, you might not even see sucralose listed on some of the ingredient lists, since it often comes at the end, or is listed separately under "Other ingredients" as it is in Airborne. But it's worth the extra time you put in to know for sure that you're not getting more than you bargained for. |
