Artificial Sweeteners

I've always avoided artificial sweeteners. I'm not sure why I initially rejected them, but I just don't feel I need them and I'm somewhat suspicious of them. Nutra Sweet gives me headaches, and the research is so conflicted- today they cause cancer, tomorrow they don't, that I just washed my hands of the lot of them. Now I'm finding out that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is also an artificial sweetener I want to avoid. It's not a low calorie sugar substitute but a high calorie, cheap-for-the-corporations sugar substitute. It's also really bad stuff, in spite of the ad campaigns they have out now. My new blog buddy Melinda wrote about it and included a link to a website with more information, and I'm spreading the word, too. It's so hard to avoid! Luckily we aren't big on sodas around my house so we weren't getting it that way, but it's in salad dressing, bagels, popsicles, and waaaaay more products that you would imagine- read your labels!

As far as dieting goes, a lot of people think the artificial sweeteners will help them lose weight. How wrong you are, Grasshopper! I'd figured out why myself, sort of, which I'll explain, but then I've also heard other sources verify what I'd already theorized about. When you eat/drink something with a sweet taste, which artificial sweeteners give you, your tongue sends a message to your brain- "hey, here's some sweet stuff for you", then your brain gets ready for nutrients. Only there aren't any nutrients in artificial sweeteners! So your brain kind of panics a little and says back to your body "we got sweet but no nutrients; must eat more, must eat more!", and you get hungry. When you get hungry, you eat more to get the nutrients you needed in the first place, and wind up over eating, and gain weight. When I'm a nutritionist the FIRST thing I'll tell people is NO MORE ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS!!! And they'll probably run screaming from the room, but oh well. ;) Now, as to what I figured out on my own. In a book I read about why diets fail and people have such a hard time maintaining weight loss, the author wrote about a study done during, I think it was one of the World Wars, where a bunch of service men were put on a super restrictive diet and lost weight to the point where they were underweight. They found that the men developed an obsession with cooking, cookbooks, and finding new recipes. The author came to the conclusion that this study was proof that the men were going to fail in their attempts to diet since they developed such an obsession with food, or something like that. (I was so disgusted with the obviously flawed conclusions throughout the book I threw it away, so I can't go look it up.) MY conclusion is different. I think that the men weren't looking for recipes and so forth in order to increase calories, but rather to increase NUTRITION. Our bodies need certain building blocks in order to survive and be healthy and if those soldiers were on restricted calorie diets then their brains wanted every calorie to count and be packed with the nutrients needed for survival, thus the interest in food preparation. I've heard variations on the same theme on Oprah, both from Dr. Oz and from her diet guru/personal trainer guy. It boils down to this- if you eat junk without the nutrients your body needs, then your body is going to crave more and more food just in hopes of getting some of the nutrients needed for health and survival. If you eat nutritious, healthy, minimally processed food, then you'll be able to feel quite full and content on far fewer calories. You can't just count calories without counting the quality of those calories!!