There is a lot of nonsense. I simply prefer to avoid artificial sweeteners as I'm not sure just how safe they really are, but natural sweeteners have been around a long, long time and generally acceptable. A good argument can be made against refined natural sweeteners, too. I tend to drink plain water or unsweetened juice as that neatly avoids the issue of added sweeteners of any kind.
There was at least one study that I read about in Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/) that had an interesting result. Evidently the body doesn't like being fooled by non-caloric sweeteners and compensates by trying to get more, which makes some sense. If a person eats a low calorie item, more calories will be needed to make up for that deficit - which is a great system, but not for those trying to shed or or at least not gain pounds.
If you can get to it (I'm a subscriber, so I see all the articles), the Still Hungry? (http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050402/bob9.asp) article in the 2 April 2005 issue has some interesting things to say about hunger regulating hormones and how they are affected. While blaming all obesity on high fructose corn syrup is certainly silly, there may be some truth in it as a contributing factor. Fructose seems not to switch off the hunger signal all that well. That's fine - if you only get fructose from eating fruit.
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There is a lot of nonsense. I simply prefer to avoid artificial sweeteners as I'm not sure just how safe they really are, but natural sweeteners have been around a long, long time and generally acceptable. A good argument can be made against refined natural sweeteners, too. I tend to drink plain water or unsweetened juice as that neatly avoids the issue of added sweeteners of any kind.
There was at least one study that I read about in Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/) that had an interesting result. Evidently the body doesn't like being fooled by non-caloric sweeteners and compensates by trying to get more, which makes some sense. If a person eats a low calorie item, more calories will be needed to make up for that deficit - which is a great system, but not for those trying to shed or or at least not gain pounds.
If you can get to it (I'm a subscriber, so I see all the articles), the Still Hungry? (http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050402/bob9.asp) article in the 2 April 2005 issue has some interesting things to say about hunger regulating hormones and how they are affected. While blaming all obesity on high fructose corn syrup is certainly silly, there may be some truth in it as a contributing factor. Fructose seems not to switch off the hunger signal all that well. That's fine - if you only get fructose from eating fruit.