Real Food for Life

Sugar makes you FAT. Many people choose to ignore this fact.    Very many.  There are more overweight people in the world than hungry people…. more than one billion according to the World Health Organization.

Sugar also makes us nervous, depresses our immune system and even cause wrinkles. So why do we eat the darn stuff …. and what are the options? Most of us enjoy sweets.  It is natural for our bodies to enjoy the sweet taste in the naturally sweet foods like fruit which is good for us. The problem is that most people do not limit their sweet foods to fruit; it too often is a sugar fix that many resort to.

In 1879 someone at Johns Hopkins had a bright idea to develop a calorie free sweetener, saccharin.   Almost 100 years later, in the early 1970s, warning label was thus required on all foods using saccharin: "Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals." That was the first artificial sweetener; a chemical duplicating the taste of common table sugar and is many times sweeter.

Because it is big business there are many artificial sweeteners on the market or attempting to be approved for use. Look at this long list: Acesulfame potassium, Aspartame, NutraSweet, Salt of aspartame-acesulfame, Neotame, Neohesperidin dihydrochalcone, Saccharin, Sucralose and Splenda.

Here is a summary of the five most common ones:

1. Saccharin – aka Sweet'N Low, Sugar Twin is calorie free because the body cannot break it down. It was found to increase bladder cancer in diabetics who used saccharin for years.
2. Aspartame – aka Equal, Nutrasweet is one of the more common artificial sweeteners today. There are over 92 different health side effects associated with aspartame consumption (a few examples: hearing impairment, epileptic seizures, migraines, irritability, insomnia, shortness of breath, loss of hair and increased craving for sweets) and it worsens or mimics the symptoms of diseases and conditions as fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, ADD, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. See this article: An Overdue Ban On A Dangerous Sweetener http://bit.ly/TVVXU
3. Sucralose (aka known as Splenda ) is a chlorinated artificial sweetener. There have been no long-term human studies on the safety of Splenda; however, issues have been raised about Splenda in a new study from Duke University showing that it will literally destroy all good bacteria in your gut, while increasing acidity which stimulates the growth of harmful bacteria and yeast. Research has shown it to cause Shrunken thymus glands, enlarged liver and kidneys, reduced growth rate, decreased red blood cell count and diarrhea. For more info go to http://www.holisticmed.com/splenda/
4. Neotame has similar structure to aspartame and appears to be even more toxic than aspartame. According to Dr. Janet Starr Hull it is "It's Just Aspartame Without the Warning"
5. Acesulfame-K (aka acesulfame potassium, Sunette, Sweet One, Sweet ‘n Safe) is an unsafe chemical. Compared to aspartame and saccharin, Acesulfame-K is the worst. There has been very little research done but studies have shown that it can produce lung and breast tumors, leukemia and chronic respiratory disease in rats.

Artificial sweeteners can cause weight gain! Yes it is true…at Purdue University Research on Artificial Sweeteners they found that an artificial sweetener makes your body less able to regulate energy. This explains why when you are eating so little, exercising so much and find you are STILL gaining weight.

Also, the body doesn't recognize chemical sweeteners as food; it leaves the body feeling unfilled and seeking nourishment, thus increasing your craving for food. The main reason people consume these is to lose weight. Now do you really want to be consuming artificial sweeteners?  I certainly do not! Since these artificial sweeteners came on the market, we have been seeing eating disorders on the rise among younger people.

Because of very clever advertising, we are believe we can eat sugar-free foods without penalty. On the other side of this there is a fear that eating REAL food will cause weight gain. 

The body was designed to eat whole food, real food….not chemicals. If you care about your health, my advice is to stay away from artificial sweeteners. This excerpt is from a full article in a magazine I write for www.holistic-health-solutions.com go there to get a subscription. Next week we will talk about other healthy sweetener alternatives.

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