Is Splenda Ok in Moderation?

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Is Splenda okay in moderation? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Claudia Young from Facebook says hello from Toronto, Canada. What can you tell me about Splenda? I use Splenda daily for just my coffee tea. Is Splenda okay in moderation? Thank you. Okay, I'm getting back up off the floor and I am going to be answering this when I come back. Stay with me.

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Okay, Claudia, can I go on a little bit of a rant here? Now here's the thing. You know that whole thing, everything in moderation. The challenge is you would not say that about, like, toxic stuff, right? You wouldn't say, oh, everything in moderation. Except, like, you know, things that are poisonous. You wouldn't say, that's okay in moderation. So I view artificial sweeteners like that. To me, they are toxic. Now, years ago, when I first started looking at artificial sweeteners, I was like, and by the way, I am a recovering diet soda freak. I got over it took me a while, but years ago, I started really looking at these. Cause I'm like, why are they so bad? And what we started to see in the research was that people who were drinking diet sodas had a higher rate of risk of diabetes, had a higher waist circumference than those people who were drinking regular sodas. What? How does that make any sense? And I looked at that, and of course, the theories back then, the hypothesis was, well, someone's drinking a diet soda and then they're eating pizza. I'm thinking, you know, that just doesn't add up. So here's kind of the. The way we started to look at this was first off, there was this study done where they looked at. At rats drinking sugar water and allowed to eat and at will. And when they drank sugar water, they were, you know, free feeding and they maintained their weight. So then they were given Splenda water. I think, actually, I think that one was aspartame, but an artificially sweetened water. And they were then presented their food, and again, they were free feeding with their rat food. And they were allowed to eat however much they wanted, and they ate the amount to maintain their weight. Then. Then they were given sugar water again and they overate. Why? Because they lost the ability to do this caloric calibration. They could no longer calibrate the degree of sweetness to the amount of calories. So they got calorie dysregulation. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you tell me what happens when you eat sweet. What do you want? You want more sweet? We are hardwired to seek out sugar. So when you eat sweet, you want more sweet. And there's actually some genetics. Genetics. It's called being a sweet taster. Is the more sweet you eat, the more sweet you want. So if you eat sweet, you want more sweet, and then you eat more sweet, and then you want more sweet. So that's a problem. We also know that some of these artificial sweeteners can be a little bit neurotoxic, can induce seizures. So that's a problem. But here's the biggest one, and this is new, and this was Splenda, was this study Sucralose, was that they found that it changed the gut microbiome, the bacteria in your gut, to be more glucose intolerant. That means you do not handle sugar as well, which now makes sense as to why they were seeing a higher rate of diabetes with this. So this is not a anything in moderation. In my book. In my book, there is no amount of artificial sweeteners that are okay. If you're going to use a sweetener, use stevia, use monk fruit, use allulose, use erythritol. There's all these other ones that don't have the bad effects. Now, could they cause calorie dysregulation? Yeah. So don't go be, you know, they're a gateway. Be careful with them. But they don't have the harmful effects that these other ones do. And again, they're natural. They're not artificial. That's monk fruit allulose, erythritol, stevia, and if you can tolerate it, xylitol. All right, there you go. Put the artificial sweeteners down. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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