How can anything good come out of lying to our own bodies?
-
Work Blog
This was going to be a blog about my experiences working as an Assistant Editor at Nature Protocols.
-
Artificial sweeteners
- Date:
- Saturday, 22 Mar ch 2008 - 16:15 GMT
Last updated: Saturday, 22 Mar 2008 - 16:15 GMT
-
Comments
-
Bron – it depends what you mean by lying. I lie to mine all the time. ‘One more biscuit won’t do any harm.’ ‘I’ll go for a swim tomorrow.’ ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so there’s nothing wrong with the occasional fry-up.’ And quite possibly ‘These vegetables must be good for you, they’re organic.’ Sigh.
Rather than make a comment about artificial sweeteners, hows about the rather interesting related topic of sugar substitutes.
This is an area that I have been following for a few years now.
Check out this wiki on Xylitol
One cannot mention Xylitol without crediting the tireless work of Prof Kauko Makinen in Finland. His Rocky Road Paper (free access) IMHO is a seminal piece of work and most worthy of a read.
The US Military for instance are well up to speed about this and here’s one example.
There are over 800 articles about Xylitol now archived at PubMed Central.
Brian: I am smiling! I am not sure whether our bodies understand words – and that is probably a whole nother can of worms – but they must have made the connection between a sweet taste in the mouth and an increase in blood glucose. So to tell them that the blood glucose is about to increase and then not deliver, is quite a fundamental deceit or failure to keep one’s promise. (large smile to indicate that while this argument is important to my own choices, I am not seriously suggesting that it need be the basis of anyone else’s)
Graham: Thank you for making the point about xylitol. It is important to clarify that “alternative” sweeteners come in very different varieties, probably some more “dishonest” than others. There are also of course many medical reasons to avoid sugar, and people often have to make all sorts of compromises in order to lead a normal, healthy life.
My main thought-experiment-type problem is when the “healthy” person daily uses a mixture of high-sugar and artificially-sweetened products. Donuts and diet-coke, for example. How should this person’s body react when it experiences a sweet taste in the mouth? Or does the body only react after the increase in blood glucose has occurred?
If the body asks for something sweet (i.e. our blood sugar is a bit low) and we give it an artificial sweetener, isn’t that a bit mean / counter-productive?
Like this experiment….
Graham: That video was horrific!! And is a completely different thing to what I was rabbiting on about – Coke, while great-tasting, is pretty evil stuff and the Diet varieties seem to be even more so. The movie did, however, remind me of a concert of “modern composition” that I went to at university. The performers prepared and ate food next to microphones and the final “cadence” was a guy vomiting over the microphone.
Link to the wikipedia article on the Diet Coke and Mentos eruption
And as an aside, the Mythbusters is a new to me and quite cool. Find a link to their site here.
Time for a wee cup of tea and a slice of shortbread here…