Are Artificial Sweeteners Harmful?

we've been getting a lot of comments and questions about artificial sweeteners you want to know if they're safe we live to serve welcome to healthcare triage [Music] people are justifiably suspicious of chemicals I'm fine with that but sometimes that suspicion goes too far sometimes chemicals including drugs do some good there's a definite benefit to artificial sweeteners have you seen our collective waistline recently the important question is are there harms that outweigh the benefits we have a ton of data on whether artificial sweeteners are harmful not all artificial sweeteners are the same saccharin is one of the oldest and made from coal tar according to Mental Floss there have been more than 50 studies written about the effect of saccharin on rats about 20 of them were done in rats consuming saccharin for at least one and a half years 19 of these studies found nothing one study found an increased rate of bladder cancer but it was in a type of rat that gets easily infected with a bladder parasite that can leave it more susceptible to cancer scientists then moved on to see if giving saccharin to two generations of rats would do anything they fed rats and then their rat children lots and lots of saccharin they found that male rats in the second generation got more bladder cancer because of this some countries banned saccharin and others like the United States started labeling products with warnings there was one problem the link between saccharin and cancer couldn't be found in humans ironically later work found that often cancer induced in rats doesn't equal cancer in humans for instance if you give rats vitamin C in the same dose of saccharin in similar studies that causes bladder cancer in rats too yet no one attempts to ban vitamin C there's no real evidence even in the animal models that saccharin is dangerous cyclamate was approved by the FDA for use in the United States in 1950 almost 20 years later a landmark study found that cyclamate increased the rate of wait for it bladder cancer in rats this led to it being banned in a number of countries later the ban was lifted pretty much everywhere but the u.s. always with the rats and their cancerous bladders but in one of those studies you can't believe they actually did some scientists fed 37 monkeys either no cyclamate a hundred milligrams per kilogram of cyclamate or 500 milligrams of cyclamate every day for 24 years by the way 500 milligrams per kilogram is like drinking 30 cans of diet soda a day for 24 years at the end of the study they killed the remaining monkeys and autopsy them three animals in the cyclamate receiving group had cancers but they were different types of cancer in different parts of the body and they were common cancers and monkeys their conclusion was that there was no apparent risk of even consuming that much cyclamate did that change our policy of course not this brings us to aspartame today this seems to be the sweetener of choice when discussing harms approved for use in 1981 it took until 1996 for panic to set it and that year a paper was published to get a lot of attention it discussed the fact that there have been a recent increase in the incidence of brain tumors and question whether this could be linked to aspartame as usually happens with these kinds of things the media had a field day but here's the thing further investigations with National Cancer Institute statistics showed that the increase in brain cancer began in 1973 eight years before aspartame was introduced also most of the increases in tumors were seen in people over 70 who are not huge consumers of diet soda as with vaccines and autism once the myth is out there it's really hard to beat it down a double blinded randomized controlled trial of self-reported aspartame sensitive people showed that aspartame didn't cause headaches a similar study showed that it didn't affect memory behavior mood or even EEG changes another study published in 2006 followed more than 285,000 men and almost 190,000 women and couldn't detect any relationship between aspartame and brain or blood cancer don't bring up methanol and artificially sweetened beverages either analyses show that there's more methanol and a glass of tomato juice or in fruits and vegetables than there is in diet soda some people find diet beverages distasteful for other reasons a few studies have shown that drinking artificially sweetened beverages doesn't promote weight loss or even promotes weight gain more often than not this is because people wind up over compensating for the calorie savings they think they're getting by switching beverages think of the person who orders dessert as a reward for having diet soda but in those cases it's not the diet beverage that cause weight gain its dieters behavior you can even find people who postulate that artificially sweetened beverages trick the brain into wanting more calories but there's really no proof of that finally some will claim that diet drinks will cause the brain to release insulin which can change your metabolism and make you hungry that's a bit hard to swallow that's like saying if you eat sugar dense food that tasted terrible it would trick your brain into not releasing insulin that doesn't happen of course it's the pancreas that releases insulin anyway not the brain the bottom line is that artificially sweetened beverages are safe that doesn't mean you should drink tons of them my wife and I limit our kids consumption of soda to caffeine free diet types but we don't let our children drink them every day we stress moderation and everything including such drinks a study published just a short while ago in JAMA internal medicine found that the added sugar from drinking just one extra 20 ounce Mountain Dew a day is associated with a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular disease you shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good given a choice between a sugared soda and a sugar-free soda I'd choose the latter every time there's an abundance of evidence that an overconsumption of sugar is contributing to health problems there's a lack of evidence that our official sweeteners are doing the same

Channel: Healthcare Triage

Views: 290,488

Keywords: Aaron Carroll, healthcare, sugar, sweetener, artificial, sucralose, aspartame, cyclamate, saccharin, studies, evidence, bladder cancer, animal studies, rats, diet soda, diet coke

Id: Mf82FfX-wuU

Length: 5min 50sec (350 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2014