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A Many Splenda'd Thing - The Rise of Artificial Sweeteners

I stopped at a well-known marketplace to grab some sushi to take back to the office for lunch the other day, but my search ended dismally when I saw aspartame, otherwise known as Nutrasweet or Equal, listed as an ingredient in most of the packages laid out in the display case.

My day got worse that evening. I've been buying a particular tortilla lately, one called Carb Balance, which contains lots of fiber. Before I bought it the first time, I checked the ingredients, as I always do, but I must have stopped before I got to the last few items at the end of a very long list. (I try for high fiber, and can only imagine I was willing to overlook the less-than-healthful ingredients for the fiber benefit.) My curiosity piqued by the earlier sushi incident, I found an unopened package of these tortillas in the cupboard and read the ingredients, all the way to the bottom of the list.

And there, at the bottom, was sucralose, or Splenda. The tortilla in question is made by Mission Foods (www.missionfoods.com), but it's not the only company sweetening their food products with artificial sweeteners, even products that wouldn't seem to need sweetening. (Feel free to drop them a note about the sucralose thing, though; I certainly did!) I'd been assuming, wrongly, that artifical sweeteners would be listed more prominently on food packaging; maybe I was spoiled by the introduction of Nutrasweet, with its little swirl of red and white appearing prominently everywhere, as if the manufacturers were actually proud that they'd included it in their ingredients. Look, they seemed to say, we used Nutrasweet!

That, of course, was before the negative reports started appearing about the supposed safety of such artificial sweeteners. (An important warning for those who attempt to avoid consuming aspartame, in particular: Ajinomoto is renaming their aspartame products Aminosweet, although the "new" product is still the same old Nutrasweet.)

Admittedly, sweeteners in processed foods and drinks are not news, even though common sense would seem to tell us that an overwhelming number of products are being sweetened by their manufacturers for no good reason. (More on that in my next article.) Chef Boyardee products, Saltine crackers, most canned soups, most prepared dressings, pasta sauces, even breads, have for decades been sweetened with, most notably, high fructose corn syrup.

And while it's tempting to devote some space to the health concerns about HFCS, that isn't my purpose here. (I will, however, note that a study published in the current issue of Cancer Research has shown that fructose in particular causes pancreatic cancer cells to multiply more rapidly than other sugars do; you can read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/idAFN0210830520100802).

My purpose in this article is to look at the progression of sweeteners added to our foods, from sugar to corn syrup to high fructose corn syrup to artificial sweeteners. And interestingly, or ominously, enough, the package of Oscar Mayer Lunchables I have before me (no, I don't intend to eat it) lists both aspartame and sucralose as ingredients, with the word "sweetener" afterwards, but not the word "artificial." As the acceptance of artificial sweeteners has grown, and as the line between artificial and "natural" sweetners has blurred, we're going to find more and more chemical sweetners in our foods and beverages.

Why? As always, the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. It's all about the money, and the road from sugar to sugar substitute follows that money. Sugar is, very simply put, more expensive than high fructose corn syrup. Everything from government sugar subsidies to weather around the world has made it that way. Corn syrup was cheaper to make than table sugar, and government corn subsidies helped to make it so. The cheapness of corn syrup caused manufacturers to add it to their foods in place of sugar.

And now, corn syrup is being replaced in our foods by artificially produced sweeteners, an entire list of them, from aspartame, sucralose, and acesulfame potassium to sugar alcohols such as sorbitol, mannitol, and xylitol. (As for xylitol, let me ask you a question. Drugs and food ingredients are frequently tested on dogs to assess their safety to humans, and xylitol is horribly toxic, even fatal, to dogs. Do you really want to consume something that, even in tiny amounts, will kill your pet?)

Make no mistake, artificial sweeteners are cheaper than either sugar or corn syrup, and that fact means more money for the industry. Well, that and the fact that it weighs less, not an insignificant point since that allows it to appear lower down on the list of ingredients. Oh, sure, the industry attempts to tell us that, yes, it listened to our concerns about HFCS, but the truth is that they found something cheaper to lace their products with.

In fact, the industry has even joined the less-sugar bandwagon, along with all the usual government health agencies and even the White House. Everywhere, I see food packages proclaiming they contain less sugar. But light, low sugar, less sugar, reduced sugar, all mean the same thing: The product is decidedly not less sweet, it simply has less actual sugar in it. The lack of sugar has been made up for, and often more than made up for, by chemically produced sweeteners such as those named above.

Of course, the food industry comes out of this looking pretty good. They can send out news releases to all the major media, tell us what they're doing is in our best interests, how they're being good global citizens. They really do care about our health!

No, of course they don't. They care about their own bottom line, and reducing the amount of sugar in their products enlarges that bottom line. As sugar was replaced by high fructose corn syrup, now HFCS is being replaced by chemical substances. And these chemical substances, although often touted as "natural" by the industry, have well documented dangers.

And, at least according to my own examination of grocery store labels, the food and drink industry is, shall we say, less than forthcoming about including such sweeteners in their products, and there's no telling which ones, and how many, are in the foods we consume in restaurants.

My own bottom line? Read labels. Avoid processed foods like, well, the plague that they are. Do as much of my own cooking as I can, with real, simple ingredients. And, as always, know that the agencies charged with protecting our food supply are in the extraordinarily deep pockets of the corporations that produce that food supply.

Ultimately, when it comes to your health and the health of your loved ones, knowledge truly is power.

Some websites (and I have no connection with any of them) that may help in your search for cleaner, less compromised food:

www.slowfood.com
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/07/garden/eating-well-a-new-goal-beyond-organic-clean-food.html?pagewanted=1
http://www.terryskitchen.net/clean-food/
And finally www.foodsmatter.com, which has excellent resources for those trying to avoid particular ingredients.

A Many Splenda'd Thing - The Rise of Artificial Sweeteners

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