Natural Health Biz

From AMERICAN FREE PRESS – SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005
All That’s Sweet Isn’t Honey,
Warn Health Advocates
By Julia Foster
Four out of five Americans now consume some sort of artificial sweetener.

Aspartame, saccharin and sucralose are the most common. However, recent information indicates that these sweeteners may be more damaging to your health than previously thought. Your body is more than 10 degrees warmer than the temperature at which aspartame’s methyl ester bond breaks down into toxic chemicals, including methanol and formaldehyde. The chemical sweetener aspartame is sold under the brand name of Nutrasweet.

Besides being a likely carcinogen, saccharin, which goes by the trade name Sweet ‘N Low, has a discomforting metallic aftertaste. To some the very name saccharin sounds creepy.

But sucralose sounds even sweeter than sucrose—and it is 600 times sweeter than common table sugar. The brand name Splenda is a mnemonic suggesting vibrant splendor.
And the “lose” suffix at the end of the artificial name suggests the more of this sweet stuff you ingest, the more weight you’ll lose.

However, Sucralose is so alien that the body doesn’t recognize it as a sugar—or any sort of nutrient. But it’s not calorie-free. It’s bulked up with dextrose and maltodextrin until it has 25 percent of the calories of sugar.

Splenda became the nation’s No. 1 selling artificial sweetener almost overnight. Between 2000 and 2004, the percentage of U.S. households using Splenda products jumped from 3 to 20 percent. In a one-year period, Splenda sales topped $177 million compared with $62 million pent on aspartame-based Equal and $52 million on saccharin-based Sweet ‘N Low.
Sucralose is “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar,” or so the slogan claims.
Sucralose is touted by its manufacturers as “the most natural of all artificial sweeteners,” but that claim “has more to do with clever marketing than with chemistry,” says Eric Walters, a biochemist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago.

DANGEROUS BREW
Sucralose might start from sugar, but its chemical structure is ominously different: Sugar, or a sucrose molecule, is a disaccharide that contains two single sugars, glucose and fructose, bound together. It has three pairs of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. But synthetic sucralose is a chlorinated fructo-galactose molecule with three chlorine atoms.
Truckloads of sugar are transmogrified into sucralose, a halogenated synthetic chemical, by a five-step complex chemical process, using the chemicals chlorine and phosgene gas, in a well-guarded and infamously enigmatic chemical refinery in Alabama.

Splenda bears more chemical similarity to DDT (both are organochlorines) than it does to sugar. Fat-soluble substances, such as DDT, can remain in your fat for decades and devastate your health. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found dioxin, another toxic byproduct of chlorine, to be 300,000 times more potent as a carcinogen than DDT.
These chlorinated contaminants are also hormone disrupters because they mimic estrogen. The EPA has observed and documented hormonal imbalance, suppressed immune systems, reproductive infertility and alterations in fetal development of animals.
Dioxin has been linked to endometriosis, immune system impairment, diabetes, neurotoxicity, birth defects, decreased fertility and reproductive dysfunction in both women and men.
Dr. Joseph Mercola found from the research, which is primarily extrapolated from animal studies, that you will absorb an average of 15 percent of the sucralose into your digestive system. The sucralose is then stored in your body.

In one human study, according to Mercola, one of the eight participants did not excrete any sucralose even after three days. Clearly his body was absorbing and metabolizing this chemical.

Because sucralose’s chlorine atoms carry a stronger charge than the oxygen atoms they replace, it locks into the cell’s receptors even stronger than sucrose, creating an excitotoxin-like addiction affect: Bet you can’t stop with just one little 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy-beta-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-alpha-D-galactopyranoside.

The best known excitotoxins are the excitatory amino acids that can produce lesions in the central nervous system similar to those of Huntingdon’s chorea or Alzheimer’s disease.
Excitotoxicity is thought to contribute to neuronal cell death associated with stroke.