What's The Deal With Artificial Sweeteners?
Takeaway Points:
Artificial sweeteners are a large and varied category. It’s difficult to conduct long term research on any one product, and it is unfair to assign the results of any one sweetener to the category as a whole.
The long term effects of artificial sweeteners are still unknown in humans. The fears people do have come from studies on rats that don’t align with human behavior and also don’t include all of the different versions of sweetener.
Artificial sweeteners can be useful for strict calorie management, but as with all things, should be used intentionally and in moderation.
Well, first off, I should remind everyone that I am NOT a dietician, and you should take everything I say here with a grain of salt.
However, today I wanted to go over some of the common arguments both for and against the use of artificial sweeteners.
What Are Artificial Sweeteners?
Artificial sweeteners are chemical compounds used to replace that most commonly demonized of nutrients - sugar. These artificial sweeteners are typically many times sweeter than sugar, but contain little to no calories.
However, they’re not generally a perfect 1:1 taste - many people dislike the taste of artificial sweeteners because they don’t quite taste like sugar, and this uncanny valley of “sweet-but-not-sugar” feeling can be offputting.
Most commonly, artificial sweeteners are found as food additives in low-calorie “diet foods”. They can also be sold separately as a baking ingredient/coffee and tea sweetener for you to use yourself. One of the most common diet foods is the typical diet soda, which aims to achieve the taste of a normal sweetened drink without any of the calories.
Since the advent of diet sodas, they’ve replaced a massive amount of the potential sugar calories that, population-wise, we would have eaten - every diet soda can be seen as a replacement for a fully sweetened soda that someone would have drunk, and therefore as a direct removal of added sugar calories from the population.
Is Sugar That Bad For You After All?
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that sugar itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most carbohydrate sources are broken down into simple sugars in order to be stored in the body, and sugar, as an already halfway-there sort of carbohydrate, is therefore the body’s preferred energy source - it doesn’t have to do much added breaking down, because it’s most of the way done already.
This means that throughout history, humans have evolved and adapted to prefer sugar, because in many ways it’s a kind of peak food - it’s an excellent source of quick energy, which you can use to fuel high intensity activity. In short, in many ways, sugar is a GOOD thing.
The problem is not necessarily with the sugar itself, but with the patterns of consumption - too many calories above and beyond what the body needs, will lead to metabolic issues down the line. This becomes more and more of a problem when, in the modern day, we tend to move less and eat more and more highly processed, sugar-laden foods which are purposefully designed to be addictive and delicious.
Do Artificial Sweeteners Actually Take Calories Out Of Our Diets?
This is an interesting question, and not one that people tend to ask. The intuitive answer is that artificial sweeteners must take some calories out of our normal eating patterns, right? Well, it turns out, not necessarily.
But how do we account for this?
There are a lot of potential mechanisms that could explain this. For example, it could be that the body isn’t really “fooled” by the added sweetness from an artificial sweetener, because it knows that there aren’t any calories involved and it doesn’t contain any of those carbohydrates that we need for energy. The end result of this would simply be that we would subconsciously eat a little bit more at other meals to feel full, and therefore not actually cut any calories in the process.
Another claim is that the artificial sweetness could potentially mess with our bodies in other ways. The sweetness could mess with our brain’s natural sense of cravings and rewards, causing us to desire more sweetness elsewhere (and thus consume more sugars), or it could mess with our hunger hormones and cause us to want to eat more.
As far as I know, most of these more mechanistic theories are just that - unsubstantiated theories which have a little bit of research but not enough to really justify strong conclusions.
Another possibility is that you aren’t actually cutting out as many calories as you think, anyway. If you’re someone who drinks twelve cans of soda a day, for example, then a switch to diet soda would potentially mean a huge decrease in calories - but if you’re someone who just has one can here and there, it won’t be a huge change. There are certainly stories of folks who used artificial sweeteners to cut out a huge number of calories and succeeded, so it’s not as simple as saying “using artificial sweeteners never works”.
Are Artificial Sweeteners Bad For Your Health?
Another important question is whether or not artificial sweeteners are bad for your health, independently of how useful they are for cutting out sugar-related calories.
One common belief is that heavy consumption of artificial sweeteners can cause cancer. This is largely based on rodent research, in which rats are given massive doses of artificial sweeteners - many times what an average human being would consume in a day. Many have pointed out that this equates to hundreds of cans of soda’s worth of artificial sweeteners per day, and that at that rate, you would die of caffeine toxicity or water poisoning long before you got cancer from artificial sweeteners. So, it’s probably safe to say that you’re likely NOT consuming enough to get cancer, and lots of the other “natural” stuff you consume in your life would be just as deadly at similar doses.
Another concern is that artificial sweeteners can have a negative impact on your gut health, in the form of killing off microbes which are important to your digestion. This is also demonstrated in rat studies, but as far as I know, has yet to be sufficiently replicated in human studies - so, it’s a possibility, but again, I suspect that it’s unlikely that most of us are consuming so much artificial sweetener that it’s causing really serious issues.
There Are SO Many Sweeteners Out There, And The Research Isn’t Complete
An important thing to also understand, is that there’s not just one artificial sweetener out there - at this point, there are quite a few, and most of them aren’t really very chemically similar. As a result, getting fully fleshed-out data would be difficult and take a long time, because we’d have to study each artificial sweetener individually, and studies take a lot of time and money. They’re also regularly in the process of inventing new ones, only making the whole thing more complex.
In short, we have a tendency to lump all artificial sweeteners under that “artificial sweetener” label, but they’re not really all that similar. Some are made artificially, and some are naturally occurring. They are all likely to have very different effects on the body, so it’s hard to make any sweeping statements about “all” artificial sweeteners because the research simply isn’t there yet.
Research on anything takes time - first you start off by testing whether something is generally safe to consume, at which point it can get approved to go on the market. Then, you start doing research to examine potential long term effects - and this is difficult, because the longer a study lasts, the more expensive it is and the more difficult it is to get funded and carry out. So, you might start off testing only a small number of people to minimize the cost, but then this runs the risk of not having much predictive power because you don’t have enough subjects. Then, other folks have to repeat (“replicate”) that research to confirm that your initial subjects weren’t all outliers, and that the same conclusions hold true when you examine more and more people.
Eventually, over time, you get to a point where you have a lot of good data on a subject - but even then, that body of literature can be muddied by things like publication bias, inconsistent methods applied, and so on - and as a result, difficult to draw strong conclusions from.
The point here is that science is a lot messier than a lot of people think - and when you’re examining a BUNCH of different artificial sweeteners instead of just one, and they’re all easy to confuse for each other (or in many cases, multiple artificial sweeteners are mixed together in a single product!) it gets harder and harder to really understand everything.
Can Artificial Sweeteners Be Useful?
At the end of the day, the answer is still yes, artificial sweeteners can be useful.
When in the context of a mindful diet plan, artificial sweeteners can be a useful way to remove calories while still enjoying your diet.
For example, I’m a habitual caffeine person, and I drink a cup or two of coffee in the morning as well as tea periodically throughout the day. This becomes a problem when I’m in a cutting phase of my diet, because I just really don’t like the taste of coffee without a bit of sugar. In my case, replacing that with a bit of artificial sweetener, or a bit of diet soda with caffeine in it, makes it a lot easier for me to stick to my diet.
Likewise, I tend to find that throughout the day, I have a lot less of an issue with hunger, so long as I’m drinking something regularly to keep my belly full. I generally like to drink black or green tea without any sweetener in it at all, but it’s nice to have more options in the form of diet soda or a bit of added artificial sweetener.
In short, while simply slapping diet soda on top of an existing diet is unlikely to actually cut any calories, it’s still a tool that can be used, in the context of intentionally managing your diet, to cut calories. If you’re watching what you eat and using artificial sweeteners as a tool to hit a certain calorie target, it can certainly be a useful one indeed.
What Is My General Recommendation?
At the end of the day, the reality is that the science just really isn’t fully settled on artificial sweeteners, and it may legitimately turn out that they do more harm than good, or that some may be worse for you than others.
In the meantime, I recommend that artificial sweeteners CAN be used as a meaningful tool in managing a diet, but that they should be used cautiously. Overusing anything is likely to cause problems, and human bodies enjoy variety and moderation. Much in the same way that a couple of alcoholic drinks here and there are unlikely to hurt long term health or fitness very much, and a few days off of training is always a good thing in the context of a larger, consistent training program, veering too much into either is going to cause problems down the line.
Artificial sweeteners can be used in moderation just fine - and if you don’t need to manage your total calories with artificial sweeteners, sugar is just swell as well.
Some References
Naturally, you shouldn’t just listen to me. Here are some excellent posts on the topic from Precision Nutrition:
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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