One side effect of Nutrasweet is that it increases your appetite.
That's unproven. I have seen no credible evidence to support it as being a widespread side effect. If it happens, it's to a statistically small number of individuals, who should rightly try and avoid it.
Diaries and questionnaires
The 7-d food diaries completed 3 times during the intervention showed no significant differences between the 2 groups’ ratings of hunger, fullness, palatability of the food, and general well-being. Furthermore, mean scores for postprandial appetite sensations on day 4 of each dietary record showed no significant differences between the 2 groups during the intervention. There were also no significant between-group differences in the changes in the amount of physical activity or level of physical activity, as recorded by the subjects, after the 10-wk intervention
See: [link]
Aspartame, and other sugar substitutes as a group are some of the most unjustly maligned substances in my opinion.
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Aspartame is a migraine trigger and people keep trying to sneak it into my system.
More important (could I be more off topic) than substituting for sugar should be making food less sweet, period.
More important (could I be more off topic) than substituting for sugar should be making food less sweet, period.
Yes. Why can't someone make yogurt with fruit in it without dumping in either a bunch of sugar or artificial sweetners? Actually, I have found yogurt like this, but I haven't seen any for a long time.
Yeah, I know I can buy plain yogurt and add fruit. Too much of a PITA most of the time.
The Jewel store brand vanilla yogurt has no added sweeteners. Bliss. It drives me crazy that all the "light" versions just fill it up with nutrasweet or whatever instead of, oh, cutting the sugar. Ditto iced teas.
Took me way too long to realise "no sugar added" and "unsweetened" weren't the same thing. WAY too long.
I can understand your aversion if it's one of your migrane triggers.
Luckily it's not a trigger for everyone with migranes.
I guess I defend it vigorously because I kind of need it for sweetening, and I feel the need to defend it from the widespread myths and the unproven allegations.
At least until we get cyclamates back in the US, or Splenda drops in price, or something better and cheaper comes along.
I would be really happy with less sweetening in food, in general. This is actually because I love sweet things, but I know that lots of sugar makes me feel sick, so I'd rather eat it in things that I want to be sweet, and leave it out of most other stuff altogether.
I don't really like soda all that much. There's an old Bloom Country comic strip in which Milo and Binky are discussing Coke vs. Pepsi and wind up deciding that both of them taste like battery acid, that pretty much mirrors my own feelings on the topic.
In most foods I'd prefer less sugar/sweetener. I couldn't finish a side of cajun fries last weekend because they sprinkled so much sugar on them along with the hot powder, and the sweetness of most marinara sauces puts me right off. (Curse you, Piero, for ruining me for all lesser lasagnas!) But the diet Dr. Pepper that some find too cloyingly sweet is my favorite drink, and I'll use up to 3 heaping teaspoons of Splenda or sugar in a cup of coffee.
More important (could I be more off topic) than substituting for sugar should be making food less sweet, period.
I'm with ita, tommy and Kate on this. With processed and packaged foods from babyhood, most if not all of them, if "naturally" sweetened being so now with high fructose corn syrup rather than cane sugar, or if "lite," sweetened with either aspartame or sugar alcohols, our collective palates are cultured to crave the sweet.
Anthropologically, we're built to crave fats and sugars, even though our lifestyles mostly no longer require high-energy and energy-storing foods. But the double-whammy of natural cravings and deliberately-by-marketing cultivated ones makes us a society of overweight people prone to diabetes and other health risks.
The simple act of *not* adding sweeteners of any kind to foods that don't actually need them would improve Americans' health dramatically. But, over a generation or two, it would also lower the acculturated cravings that power the soda and snack industries.
