Are artificial sweeteners dangerous?
The sweeteners that are FDA approved are supposedly safe. Do I still feel queasy about them? Yes. But I have the freedom of personal choice; nobody forces me to eat them.
On the flip side: there are so many people who only seemed to be able to reduce total calories by resorting to those sweeteners. I myself have suggested to people to switch to ‘diet’-whatever when they steadfastly insist that water is not something they would consider. Where is the balance between the risk imposed by excess weight and the risk from those substances? I do not know. I am holding my nose when I mention it …….
I am a great fan of Michael Pollan who wrote, among other books, ‘In Defense of Food’ and ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’. He advocates (my very simplified paraphrasing) eating only what you can pronounce, what our grandmas would have recognized as food and what is not processed.
I’m with you guys!
There’s nothing like reading a label and getting a lesson in how chemically-inept you are to make you want to eat purer foods.
Supposedly aspartame is correlated with Alzheimer’s Disease, and certain other polysaccharides in liquid sweeteners are linked to cancer. Having said that, correlation and linkage does not mean cause and effect.
I doubt we’ll ever really know the true dangers of any sweetener.
