Ilaria Petrucci

Artificial Sweetners

ARTIFICIAL SWEETNERS

Sucralose

Ever heard of Sucralose? Well Sucralose is the newest non-nutritive sweetener on the market. It is most well known for its claim to be made from sugar. It is used alone or found in Splenda and is 600 times sweeter than sucrose (table sugar). When used alone, it provides essentially no calories and is not fully absorbed.

This artificial sweetener can be used for cooking, so it has rapidly become one of the most popular and highly consumed artificial sweeteners.

The most misunderstood fact about sucralose is that it is nothing like sugar even though the marketing implies that it is. Sucralose was actually discovered while trying to create a new insecticide!!!

 It may have started out as sugar, but the final product is anything but sugar and without going into the bio-chemistry of i…it is unlike anything found in nature.

If you read the fine print on the Splenda web site, it states that “although sucralose has a structure like sugar and a sugar-like taste, it is not natural.”

The presence of chlorine is thought to be the most dangerous component of sucralose. Chlorine is considered a carcinogen and has been used in poisonous gas, disinfectants, pesticides, and plastics. The digestion and absorption of sucralose is not clear due to a lack of long-term studies on humans. The majority of studies were done on animals for short lengths of time. The alleged symptoms associated with sucralose are gastrointestinal problems (bloating, gas, diarrhea, nausea), skin irritations (rash, hives, redness, itching, swelling), wheezing, cough, runny nose, chest pains, palpitations, anxiety, anger, moods swings, depression, and itchy eyes. The only way to be sure of the safety of sucralose is to have long-term studies on humans done.

Splenda is a product that contains the artificial sweetener sucralose, but that is not all.

Sucralose does have calories, but because it is 600 times sweeter than sugar, very small amounts are needed to achieve the desired sweetness so you most likely won’t consume enough to get any calories. The other two ingredients in Splenda are dextrose and maltodextrin, which are used to increase bulk and are carbohydrates that do have calories.

One cup of Splenda contains 96 calories and 32 grams of carbohydrates, which is often unnoticed due to the label claiming that it’s a no calorie sweetener. Because this is found in so many products and can be used in cooking, it can be possible to consume 1 cup or more each day. For people with diabetes, this is a significant amount of carbohydrates, and for people who are watching their weight, this can be a problem. Consuming an additional 100 calories a day can result in a weight gain of 10 lbs. per year!

Please spear some thoughts on this and think again before using any Artificial Sweeteners…they are “artificial”….therefore cannot be natural!

However do not panic! If you don’t eat sugar and don’t eat artificial sweetener doesn’t mean you are left with a bitter mouth! ….in fact there is ALWAYS a healthier alterative…the way to go when it comes to sweet tooth is STEVIA…never heard of it? Of course not! They do not sell it in the UK (It would be interesting to ask yourself why??? But I won’t go there!) But you can find it online, just google  Stevia Extract, and it comes in powder or liquid extract.

Stevia is totally natural as it is a plant extract and totally calorie FREE!

So as you can see…once again YOU have a choice…

Gym Love J

The Dangers of Sugar

Dangers of Sugar

I really wanted to make an in-depth article on Sugar but I also wanted to keep it as easy to read and understand as possible….so as I was researching this article, I surfed the web and was surprised to find that the majority of the websites that mention sugar say that it is fine to eat in moderation!!!.Most of them say that your body turns all food to glucose regardless of the kind of food eaten, so whether you eat sugar, vegetables, or steak is irrelevant. 

Now to me this is pretty shocking!!!

First of all, it is true that your body converts all foods to glucose. 

However, there is an important difference between sugar and those other foods…..meat, fruits, and vegetables all have vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and amino acids when it comes to HOW your body react to them.

 Sugar has none of those things to assist in its digestion and absorption.  As a result, metabolizing refined sugar puts the body at a severe nutritional disadvantage.

Oh yes! I know! How many times have you heard…and said it yourself in fact…”Oh I feel weak I need some sugar!”…NO…you do not need sugar…lets have a look and understand why…

There have been many researches on this topic and science has now shown us several times that there is NO DOUBT, the sugar in our food is damaging our health far more than we can imagine.

Sugar is loaded into your soft drinks, fruit juices, sports drinks, and hidden in almost all processed foods, ketchup, sauces, cheese…everywhere!!. And now most infant formula has the sugar equivalent of one can of Coca-Cola, so babies are being metabolically poisoned from day one if taking formula.

No wonder there is an obesity epidemic!!!

Did you KNOW…???

A can of Coke contains:

Caffeine → it’s a DIURETIC which means you will wee free water

SALT!!! → 55mg of Sodium per can! It’s like drinking Pizza

So what happens when you intake so much salt and eliminate water? You get thirstier!

And of course SUGAR! Why so much sugar? Nobody wants to consume a salty drink!  Thats the amount of sugar that covers the taste of salt!

Oh yes the people behind this are pretty clever hey… I’ll leave it to you to judge.

Too Much Fructose Creates a Metabolic Disaster in Your Body

Now…If your diet was like that of people a century ago, you’d consume about 15 grams per day… Amazingly, 25 percent of people actually consume more than 130 grams of fructose per day!

Making matters worse, all of the fiber has been removed from processed foods, so there is essentially no nutritive value at all. And the very products most people rely on to lose weight—the low-fat diet foods—are often the ones highest in fructose.

It isn’t that fructose itself is bad—it is the MASSIVE DOSES you’re exposed to that make it dangerous.

Why is fructose so damaging?

1. Your body metabolizes fructose in a much different way than glucose. The entire burden of metabolizing fructose falls on your liver. This is NOT the case with glucose, of which your liver breaks down only 20 percent. Nearly every cell in your body utilizes glucose, so it’s normally “burned up” immediately after consumption.

So where does all of this fructose go, once you consume it?

On your thighs!! It is turned into FAT which means more fat deposits throughout your body.

2. People are consuming fructose in enormous quantities, which has made the negative effects much more profound.

3. Fructose tricks your body into gaining weight by fooling your Metabolism—it turns off your body’s appetite-control system. Fructose does not appropriately stimulate insulin, which in turn does not suppress ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”) and doesn’t stimulate leptin (the “satiety hormone”), which together result in your eating more and developing insulin resistance.

4. Fructose rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity

One of the more recent findings that surprised researchers is that glucose actually accelerates fructose absorption, making the potential health risks from HFCS even more profound!!

You can now see why fructose is the number one contributing factor to the current obesity epidemic…

…read full article on www.ilariapetrucci.info 
(includes 75 reasons why we do NOT need Sugar!)

 Gym Love

Ila