aspartame – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Stories filed under: "aspartame"
DailyDirt: Sugar, Yes, Please…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The number of calories you can ingest as soda or juice can be surprisingly high, if you’re not accustomed to accounting for your caloric intake. There’s a reason why so many diet soft drinks exist — and why a few low-cal beers are on the market. Drinking fewer calories just seems like an easier path to consuming fewer calories.
- Should you rely on artificial sweeteners instead of sugar to get your sweetness fix? Obviously, artificial sweeteners aren’t “natural” (well, except for Stevia or tagatose), but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad for your health. Added sugar in your diet correlates with some health problems, but so far, serious health issues aren’t so strongly associated with artificial sweeteners. [url]
- Aspartame acquired a bad reputation for causing cancer in rats, but actual health problems for humans haven’t been demonstrated. Unless you’re one of the rare individuals with phenylketonuria, there’s little scientific evidence that you should be concerned about consuming a reasonable amount of aspartame. But if you’re worried about your gut bacteria, the scientific jury is still out on the long-term effects from altering a person’s microbiome. [url]
- Coca-Cola is moving away from sugary drinks with lower calorie products that replace sugar with sweeteners like Stevia. Stevia-sweetened Coke hasn’t caught on (yet?), but it’s the more “natural” successor to Diet Coke. [url]
After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diet, food, health, microbiome, phenylketonuria, soda, stevia, sugar, tagatose
Companies: coca cola
DailyDirt: How Sweet It Is?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
We’ve been following diet fads for a while now — and seeing how sugar (in various forms) has been blamed for health problems. Artificial sweeteners are supposed to help us avoid consuming too much sugar (and be more healthy in the balance), but it’s probably not surprising that studies are starting to show that these alternatives to sugar also have their own side effects.
- Aspartame is being removed from Pepsi products, but it’s still in thousands of other items that people eat and drink. Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives, and there isn’t much evidence that it causes health problems such as cancer — although phenylketonurics should stay away from it (as well as phenylalanine or anything that turns into phenylalanine). [url]
- Sucrose (aka table sugar) is a reference on the sweetness scale with a value of 1.0, and other natural sugars such as fructose can be a bit sweeter (1.1-1.8). Other naturally-occurring compounds like chloroform and stevia are orders of magnitude sweeter than sucrose, but you probably don’t want to ingest chloroform. Lugduname is one of the sweetest compounds known, estimated to be over 200,000 times sweeter than sucrose, but it’s not approved as a food additive (yet). People throughout history have been poisoned by sweet toxins (eg. lead acetate), but hopefully we’ll avoid a similar fate. [url]
- Artificial sweeteners might reduce the calories a person consumes (depending on how much a person actually consumes), but these additives may also alter the microbiome in the digestive system, making some people less able to control blood sugar levels. It’s still uncertain what the net effect of artificial sweeteners might be on any particular individual, but it’s probably not as easy as you might think it is to eliminate all added sugar and artificial sweeteners from your diet. [url]
After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diabetes, diet, food, food additive, lugduname, microbiome, phenylketonurics, stevia, sucrose, sugar, taste
Companies: pepsi
DailyDirt: This Tastes Funny… Here Try It
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
There’s no accounting for taste — unless of course you have to quantify it with sensory panels and professional tasters. It’s not quite an exact science which is sorta why you can never get 4 out of 5 dentists to agree on anything, but researchers are still trying their best to learn about how we perceive different tastes. If you’re a serious foodie or just curious, check out some of these links on flavors and how we sense them.
- One hypothesis for why people have bitter receptors is that early humans needed to avoid poisonous plants, but that explanation hasn’t been supported by much evidence. It’s a mystery why we can perceive bitter as a taste because the ability doesn’t seem to correlate at all with diet and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. [url]
- Red pandas apparently like the taste of aspartame (and other artificial sweeteners), and these bears are the first non-primate mammals known to have such a preference. The researchers who made this discovery placed a sweet solution and a control of plain water in front of animals in a zoo for a day, and a preference was observed if the animals drank more of the sweet solution rather than plain water. Recently, giant pandas were also found to like sugar, even though they typically eat mostly bamboo. [url]
- Maybe you remember learning about a tongue map where sweet receptors are on the tip of your tongue and bitter receptors are on the back? Sorry, but researchers say that map is wrong. The ability to taste bitter, sour, sweet, salty and umami can be found all over the tongue, in the same areas. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, bitter, flavors, food, pandas, sweet, taste, tongue