Artificial Sweeteners 1

Everybody knows that eating to much sugar leads to obesity and other health problems, right? Or does it? Are artificial sweeteners like Splenda® and that stuff they stick in diet pop actually better for you than regular sucrose sugar?

The answer to this question requires a bit of chemistry talk. Don't worry, I'll talk you through it! The term 'sugar' refers to any substance that has a sweet flavor, usually sucrose, lactose, and fructose. Sucrose is regular table sugar taken from a sugarcane plant, lactose is the sweet component of milk, and fructose is sugar found in fruit. Artificial sweeteners are sugars that are completely made within a laboratory, not created via a refining process like table sugar (sucrose) is.

Now for a bit of history regarding artificial sweeteners.

The first artificial sweetener is called sugar of lead. See, lead has a naturally sweet taste to it. Of course, I've never actually tasted it myself. As you might guess, sugar of lead is gained by cooking or eating food in/on lead dishes. As you also might guess, sugar of lead is just as toxic as regular lead. Don't try it. Please.

There have been a few other artificial sweeteners between the ban of sugar of lead and the use of modern sweeteners, but I won't go over them now. Most of them have been banned since they were discovered to cause cancer or other diseases.

The two biggest modern artificial sweeteners are aspartame and sucralose.

ASPARTAME

Aspartame was discovered by a chemist who was in the process of creating an anti-ulcer drug. Aspartame was a byproduct in his creation; he discovered its sweetness when he licked a finger he had unknowingly coated with aspartame. Aspartame isn't used for baking, as it breaks down and looses its sweetness when it hits about 30°C  (86°F). Instead, aspartame was recently used in cold beverages, like diet pop.

The FDA holds that aspartame is completely safe. This is true, until you consider the products from breaking down aspartame. Aspartame breaks down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol.

Aspartic acid sounds bad, but it is just an animo acid found in our bodies and used to create other, essential animo acids. Phenylalanine is another animo that our body manufactures and uses naturally.

Methanol, on the other hand, is highly toxic in humans; as little as 10 ml (2.03 tsp) can cause permanent blindness, 30 ml (6.03 tsp) and above gradually increases the risk of fatality. In contrast, the minimum lethal dose of pure arsenic is about 70-200 ml (14.20-40.58 tsp). The FDA states that aspartame is completely safe; they are completely correct, unless it is heated to 30°C (86°F) and breaks down into toxic components. The internal human body temperature is about 37°C (98.6°F), which is well above the breakdown point of aspartame. After this breakdown occurs, toxic substances are absorbed into the bloodstream and carried straight to your brain, effectively acting like a neurotoxin. Since the FDA finally recognized the lethal effects of aspartame, they have removed it from the public eye and have mostly replaced it with sucralose.