Artificial Sweeteners VS. Sugar

Throughout my whole life, my mom has been trying to keep up with the new healthiest things to make up her daily diet. As she is most definitely addicted to coffee, she is always back and forth between how to sweeten it. One day regular sugar will be the healthy option and the next day she will switch to an artificial sweetener. As I am in my freshman year of college and coffee has become a necessity, I began to question which of these is better for you.

I thought this was a pretty straightforward question that would have a straightforward answer, but after researching, I understand why my mom has rapidly changing opinions on whether artificial sweetener is better than sugar. For the most part, it seems as if the majority of concrete evidence shows that artificial sweetener is a better choice for weight loss and diabetes, which is explained in this article. However, there is a theory that the artificial sugar creates a confusion within your body that can result counteractively towards losing weight. After my research, I am going to use artificial sweeteners because there is more legitimate results that back the notion that it will cause less weight gain than sugar, which I believe to be the correct assumption for anyone who knows the facts.

Many of the people who believe that artificial sweeteners are bad for you developed this opinion from a warning that was let out in the 80s regarding the sweetener called saccharin. It is explained in this article that there was a study performed on rats that found evidence that this artificial sweetener causes bladder cancer. This immediately forms opinions in people’s minds against all artificial sweeteners. The issue here is that later, it was discovered that the experiment done on the rats does not correlate with the human body, and therefore does not and could not apply to any of these people who believe this substance causes cancer. This study is an example of the faults of performing experiments on animals when trying to figure out truths about humans.

sugars-vs-sweeteners

4 thoughts on “Artificial Sweeteners VS. Sugar

  1. Kateryna Okhrimchuk

    Darby,
    It’s so funny that you mention your mom changing up what she uses to sweeten her coffee because my mom is a huge stickler when it comes to sweetener too. The difference between them, though, is that my mom is convinced that artificial sweeter is extremely bad for you, so whenever I’m drinking tea or coffee with her she’ll only let me use sugar. Recently I found about about a really cool alternative to both sugar and artificial sweetener – agave. From all the research that I’ve done on it, the most important thing that I’ve found out is that it’s glycemic index is much lower than white sugars, brown sugars, maple sugar, cane juice, and date sugar, making it a healthier alternative. Apparently it’s really good if you don’t want to gain weight either, unlike white sugar.

  2. lkr5215

    I never really thought about artificial sweeteners versus sugar so this made me think about what I use on a daily basis and if I want to switch to Artificial Sweeteners. I found an article where it says that while it might cause weight loss it is not necessarily true since you have to think about the increase of energy from other sources. it also talks about how Artificial Sweeteners have more calories than regular sugar and there was a study where people who had artificially sweetened drinks were reported to have a 47% higher increase in their BMI than people who did not drink Artificially flavored drinks in the study conducted.
    heres the article
    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-drinks/artificial-sweeteners/

  3. Melanie Noemi Campos

    It is very true that peoples opinions change over time as new information comes out, however it is hard to keep up with a world that is always doing research and finding new evidence to support or reject a thought/hypothesis. I also find that it is hard to stick to the recommended intake of sugar a day when usually one bottled juice will contain more than your daily intake. Sugars are put into more than we can even imagine. Therefore in order to truly take care of our bodies i feel as though we need to implement more regulations on our food companies and offer better alternatives that arent synthetic or harmful. THis is a list of foods you would not imagine to be high in sugar content https://authoritynutrition.com/18-surprising-foods-high-in-sugar/

  4. Chris North

    In an article I found online (link below), artificial sweeteners were actually found to have contributed to weight gain. The artificial sweeteners create more of a craving for sugary foods in the body, causing you to intake more unhealthy foods and gain more weight. The sweeteners may provide fewer calories, but they actually could be more unhealthy for you than regular sugar.
    http://www.medicaldaily.com/diet-soda-vs-regular-soda-one-worse-you-other-308063

Leave a Reply