There is nothing quite
like commenting on sweetening agents to generate a response, often quite emotional. A couple of
comments that are suitable for publication are reproduced in the letters
section below. If I say something positive about a sweetener, especially
aspartame, then someone will want to disagree. Let’s be honest, there are far
more negative than positive comments about “artificial sweeteners” on the
internet.
One enduring concern is
that sweeteners cause cancer. This has been refuted by the Cancer Council and the famous Mayo Clinic and others, but maybe they are all working in collusion.
500 year old advice still relevant
Last month I attended
the International Union of Nutrition Science conference in Spain. There I met Sir
Andrew Renwick, Professor of Medicine at the University of Southampton, UK who
has spent all his professional life in toxicology. He said that in “the last
46 years in studying sweeteners I have not seen any scientifically reproducible
evidence that any sweeteners cause any harm to humans in the amounts normally
consumed.”
He referred to the
famous quote by Paracelsus (1493-1541) that “all things are poison
… only the dose which makes something a poison”. There are variations on the
translation, but simply put, it is the dose that determines whether something
is good, neutral or bad for you.
Aspartame
He singled out aspartame,
now approved in over 90 countries, stating that it has a larger safety database
that any other food additive. Aspartame is a methylated dipeptide, comprising
two amino acids phenylalanine and aspartic acid. You will remember from biology
that amino acids make up proteins.
Some methanol is
produced when aspartame is consumed, and you will hear people tell you scary
stories about methanol, only because they don’t understand what Paracelsus said
500 years ago. Yes, methanol is produced but only in very small, non-harmful,
amounts. There is more methanol in the same volumes of orange juice, apple
juice and tomato juice than in a soft drink sweetened with aspartame. In fact
there is six times more methanol in tomato juice than a diet drink, but you
don’t hear scary stories about tomato juice, and neither should you because it
is all about dose.
“Nobody listens, no
matter how many authoritative scientific reviews take place. Low-calorie sweeteners are among the most extensively studied of all
food additives. Media stories about “health concerns” usually focus on a single
recent observation and ignore the totality of the database available,” said
Renwick.
Of course, because he
says this, his words are quoted by agencies and companies that have a vested
interest in sweeteners, so then people think that he has become a mouthpiece
for sweeteners and can’t be trusted. That’s the way conspiracy theories work.
One final comment he made was that the Wikipedia entry on the aspartame controversy was “surprising unbiased.”
Natvia
I was asked about Natvia, which is a mix of Stevia and
erythritol. Stevia has been discussed in an earlier blog. It is quite safe.
Erythritol is not often found in foods, although it
comes from a common family of sugar-alcohols, a bit like mannitol and sorbitol often
used for its sweetness, mainly back in the 1980s in confectionery such as gum
and mints. Some of you will remember Blizzard mints with sorbitol. I always
remember them because, when lecturing at a university I mentioned Blizzard
mints as an example of a product with sugar-alcohols. After a few minutes one
quizzical student put up her hand and asked: “Where do you buy “lizard mince”?”
A reminder to me to enunciate better. Yes, it was funny, and no, I don’t think
lizard mince is legal either.
Anyway, erythritol is a sweetener with about
two-thirds the sweetness of sugar. It has passed all the safety and toxicology
tests thrown at it, even at high doses. It is absorbed from the gut and
excreted through the kidneys unchanged. Its sweetness works well in combination
with stevia.
What does it all mean?
If you eat sensibly,
then there is a very good chance that you will eat somewhere between none and
very little intense added sweetener, in which case it shouldn’t alarm you. If
you are consuming two litres of diet soft drink, a litre of diet cordial, 1 kg
of diet yogurt and 10 cups of tea with two tablets of sweetener per cup then
I’m willing bet that your overall diet is pretty crap anyway. My blunt and
unattractive view is that people focus way too much on minor issues of no
consequence, distracting them from doing something useful like giving to
charity, walking the dog and reducing the amount of the most dangerous food
additive known to man. It’s called salt, but who cares?
And yes, I do enjoy a
diet soft drink after a long bike ride (60+ km for me), so don’t think that I
can be trusted to give you a balanced argument on sweeteners!
