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I have been compiling info on artificial sweetners for years and there are some that are OK and some that are really bad for you but here is a bit of an overview of he dangers of using different artificial sweeteners to try to drop your calorie intake.

Aspartame

Aspartame, a dipeptide of aspartic acid and a methyl ester of phenylalanine, is approved for use in pharmaceutical products and is being used increasingly in chewable tablet and sugar-free formulations. Labels for both prescription and nonprescription products must include the phenylalanine content. The major consideration in the use of aspartame in children is in patients with autosomal recessive phenylketonuria. Although heterozygotes do not appear to have clinically significant increases in phenylalanine after ingestion of even large amounts (equivalent to 24 12-oz cans of diet beverages), homozygotes with strict dietary restrictions should avoid aspartame. Children without dietary restrictions could safely ingest 10 mg/kg/day. Dietary consumption of aspartame is typically less than 5 mg/kg/day; young children, however, could ingest considerably more. For example, a 2-year-old child weighing 12 kg consumes 17 mg/kg from drinking one 12-oz can of diet soda and one serving of a sweetened product (eg, cereal, pudding, gelatin, or frozen dessert). Read the rest of this entry »

A calorie is a calorie I always thought but maybe I am wrong. There is a good shance that your diet soda is making you fat.

Diet Blog has just posted the results of a study done on rats that shows that eating artificial sweeteners in the form of saccharin will actually make you gain weight faster then using the sugar itself.

I know that I have seen these kinds of results before and have always been confused by how it would work but essentially the thinking by the scientific community is that your brain notices the “sweetness” of the food and think that it is sugar. and stores food as fat because the brain thinks that the body has more than enough fuel (calories) to keep it going.

I know that some people will say in seeing this that people are not rats but still physiologically this makes sense to me. Also, if you look at all the diet pop that is sold and people in North America just seem to be gettng bigger and bigger then maybe there is some merit in the conclusions of this research. Read the rest of this entry »