Artificial Sweeteners: Science Experiment gone Wrong

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Welcome to the Virgin Diet lifestyle show.

With your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York times bestselling author, J.J. virginia.

What if I told you that the artificial sweetener you're using to help you lose weight and get healthier is actually worse for you than a donut? Yes, a donut. I'm going to reveal the truth about artificial sweeteners. How they can make you gain weight, especially around the waistline, age you, increase your cravings and may even lead to diabetes. But I'm not going to leave you hanging. I've got a few great low sugar impact swaps for you so that you can still sweeten things up without taking down your health in the process. So artificial sweeteners were created so we could have our cake and eat it too, and they'd become a huge business. Some of the most popular names to look for are Splendor, Sucralose, Nutrasweet, Aspartame, Acetame, K, Saccharin, and Equal. By the way, sugar alcohols, including erythritol and xylitol, are not artificial sweeteners. I see them referred as artificial sweeteners all the time. They're not. And they can actually be good for you. More on that in a bit. So these artificial sweeteners were created so that you could satisfy your sweet tooth without the big calorie hit. But that's actually a big part of the problem. See, here's how that one works. They did this study on rodents, rats or mice. I'm not quite sure which ones. Let's go with rodents. Right. So what they did with these rodents is they had them drink sugar water, and then they were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, and. And they ate enough to maintain their weight. Then they gave the rodents artificially sweetened water, and again they were allowed to eat whatever they wanted. And they ate enough again to maintain their weight. Then they went back and gave the rodents sugar water again. And here's where the problems started. Because what happened now was that the rodents could no longer correlate the degree of sweetness with the amount of calories. So when they went back and ate again, they Overate, it created a phenomenon called calorie dysregulation, where you can no longer correlate or calibrate the degree of sweetness with how much you're eating. So you overeat. Okay, now next up, let's be real about what happens when you eat sweet. What do you want? Yep, you guessed it. More sweet. Right? So artificial sweeteners can be a gateway to making you crave the very sweets you're trying to avoid. And speaking of a gateway, what about the idea of permission? Well, I'm having the diet soda so I can have the pizza or the cookies. And the chemicals in these sodas can be neuro excitatory. What that means is that you can get addicted to them, and they can then actually lower serotonin. And that's another factor in making you crave more sweet. Yikes. You just stack the deck of worse and worse and worse. And these artificial sweeteners, they've been shown to raise insulin just like the sugar glucose does. And when you raise insulin, your body then lowers blood sugar, which can send you looking for a quick pick me up. Plus, if insulin is up, your body is storing fat, not burning it. This is probably why studies are showing that people who drink diet sodas as opposed to regular sodas. Now, hold on a minute. And know that I'm not advocating them either, right? But people who are drinking those diet sodas are gaining more weight, especially around their waistlines. And those diet sodas, they actually increase their risk of diabetes right along with it. In one study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, women who drank just one diet soda a day had a 33% increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Just one a day. You know what the studies show? People don't drink just one artificially sweetened drink. They drink a couple of.

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Please drink responsibly them Now Possibly the worst place artificial sweeteners wreak their havoc is on our gut by disrupting the balance of good bacteria to bad. Now we're more bacteria than cells. We've got 100 trillion bacteria in us and bacteria plays a huge role not only in our overall health, but in our weight. Too much bad bacteria can actually extract a more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. And it's been shown that Splenda can feed the bad gut bacteria. Now here was a recent study that showed that in just one week, one week actually it was six days of artificial sweetener consumption, the bacteria in the gut shifted to be glucose intolerant. That means we couldn't handle sugar well and become more insulin resistant, which all of that means not good at tolerating sugar, more insulin resistant. That equals weight gain and diabetes. And that was in less than a week. So let's face facts. Artificial sweeteners are a science experiment gone wrong. They have no place in anyone's diet. They create the very problems they were set up to help us avoid. Now thankfully there are a few low sugar impact swaps to help you taper down off the sweet taste that artificial sweeteners have tried to trained you to desire. So there are two sugar alcohols, erythritol and xylitol that can be very helpful. I see these listed all the time as artificial sweeteners and they're not. They're sugar alcohols and they're similar to carbohydrates but they don't get absorbed in the same way. So these have been shown to help reduce the risk of cavities, help with weight loss, and more importantly, they don't impact blood sugar, so they can be safe for diabetics. They have a small amount of calories and this is actually important. So they're about 2 to 2.5 calories per gram. Remember, no calories can equal calorie dysregulation, so it helps you avoid that challenge. And there are also two sweet herbs that I like, stevia and monk fruit, also known as lo hango. These are also safe for diabetics and they have this long, long, like thousands of years history for abuse. Now here's the caveat here. They don't have calories, so they could potentially cause that calorie dysregulation issue. And my favorite sweeteners of all. Cinnamon. Yep, cinnamon. The herb cinnamon, which naturally helps you balance blood sugar, and vanilla, which can help boost serotonin, that feel good brain chemical that's going to help you stop craving sugar. Now the one thing I want to stress here is that you really want to retrain your taste buds to appreciate circumstances savory and spicy. So use these alternatives to help you taper down while you're retraining your taste buds so you can break free of your sweet addiction and learn to appreciate the natural sweetness in foods. If you'd like a free transcript of today's show, text 58885 and enter fake and the number one, fake one, your first name space and your email address. Again, that number is fake 58885 and you enter fake 1, your first name space and your email address. In the Sugar Impact diet, I help you clear up the confusion around sugar and take back the control that sugar has over your life. In just two weeks, you'll lose your sweet tooth and shrink your waistline. Why wait? Start those two weeks today.

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