We make decisions everyday that
will either help or harm our health.
Many of those decisions revolve around what we put in our body. Whole milk or skim milk? Regular eggs or cage
free? Butter or margarine? Sugar or artificial sweeteners? With the abundance of health and wellness
information that is available to us online, on TV, from our local gym and
fitness professionals and more, it is important to ask ourselves what we are
basing our decisions off of. The food industry has a way of highlighting just the
right benefits to create buzz and demand for their product, while leaving out
some critical information that could destroy their profits along with your
health. One such piece of knowledge that
everyone should be aware of is that the artificial sweetener Aspartame is
believed to be carcinogenic and accounts for more reports of adverse reactions
reported by the FDA than all other foods and food additives combined.1
Just because the
packaging states it to be “sugar free” doesn’t make it good for you, and may
not even be better for you as compared to its sugary filled counterpart. Your body is not fooled by these zero calorie
sweeteners. Studies have confirmed that
artificial sweeteners appear to cause even greater weight gain then calorie
based sweeteners2. You don’t
gain weight by eating too many calories and not exercising enough to burn off
those excess calories. You gain weight
because you eat the wrong kind of calories which in turn negatively affect the
hormonal and chemical balance within your body.
Even though is no sugar in artificial sweeteners, your body still
responds to it’s consumption by releasing insulin into the blood stream in
order to regulate blood sugar levels as interpreted by the brain upon consuming
aspartame. Long story short, when insulin is abundantly present in the blood
stream it is impossible for your body to burn fat.
One other major
explanation as to why you might gain more weight when consuming aspartame, is
that any food with aspartame included in the ingredient list will further stimulate
your appetite, specifically your cravings for carbs. When your body digests something sweet
without the calories to go with it, you disrupt your appetite control mechanism
and increase your body’s need to eat more food in order to satisfy the demand
for energy as interpreted in the brain.3 So that “harmless” calorie free diet cola
that you sip through to spare yourself 180 calories, is actually teaching your
body to eat more over the course of the day and at the same time store more
fat.
Besides the effect of aspartame on your waist line, it can also be
life threatening. According to the
Center for Science in the Public Interest’s (CSPI) Executive Director Michael
F. Jacobson “Aspartame has been found to cause cancer - leukemia, lymphoma, and
other tumors - in laboratory animals, and it shouldn’t be in the food supply.”
Aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. The
phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group, which
provides the majority of the sweetness. When digested, the methyl group on the
phenylalanine breaks off and forms methanol. Methanol is a serious neurotoxin
and is converted into formaldehyde within the tissues of your body, which
wreaks havoc on sensitive proteins and DNA. All animals except humans
have a protective mechanism that allows methanol to be broken down into
harmless formic acid and excreted from their body.1 If aspartame has
cancerous affects on lab animals even given their protective mechanism against
its dangerous affects, imagine what it can do to us humans who carry no such
protection...
To determine if you are experiencing any adverse reactions to artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, perform the following steps:
·
Eliminate all artificial sweeteners from your
diet for two weeks to detox your body.
·
Then, reintroduce your artificial sweetener of
choice about three times daily.
·
Avoid other artificial sweeteners during this
period.
·
Do this for one to three days and notice how you
feel following the detox as compared to before.
For more Fitness, Nutrition, and Wellness advice contact Paul Wantuck or stop by the Fitness Center to
schedule a consultation and get started on the path towards a healthier you!
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment