Sweetners, Diet Sodas, and Gatorade


(Pam) #1

Good morning all,

I will try to keep this short and sweet, as I have a couple other questions this morning but don’t think they should be combined.

I have been looking for recipes (I am an avid baker) that I can make that are keto-friendly. This will help fill my baking hobby, and give me snacks: a win-win. The problem is I have seen who knows how many different sweeteners - Swerve, Stevia, Truvia, blah blah blah…and I have no clue what the differences are, if one is better than another, is one is more baking friendly —I skimmed though some old posts and the general thought process seemed to be “it depends on the person” but I have no clue how to tell what is effecting me negatively and what isn’t. :confused:

Another thing I have been reading about in older posts is diet sodas and sports drinks. I am a Dt. Mountain Dew fiend. I drink probably 2 or 3 cans a day on average. Is that something I should stop? The daughter works out 3 or 4 times a week and previously would always have a Gatorade after running. We purchased Gatorade Zero when we started Keto but I read something that said this might be a bad thing. She drinks mostly water the rest of the time. I—well—I have never been a water drinker. The only water I usually consume has been filter through coffee or tea.

I have been trying to up the water count recently but I really just don’t like it. Since starting this I have not had tea at all, but I am been chugging the Mt. Dew and Coffee. How will this effect this whole process?


(Cancer Fighting Ketovore :)) #2

I’d suggest dumping the Mt Dew.
As far as the Gatorade zero goes, look at the ingredients. Those and the Powerade zero aren’t the best, but you can make your own electrolyte drink easily.

I like to add a few drops (.25 ml) of peppermint extract to mine.


#3

Diet sodas are usually fine, some individuals get stalled by them but for most people they are okay, the most common ones (aspartame / ace-k) dont break fast either. Also, 2-3 cans is nothing, i use around 3-4 liters of coca cola zero daily and i dont stall.


(Susan) #4

I don’t use any sweeteners, diet sodas or gatorade myself. I stopped anything with sweeteners in early June.

If I make fat bombs now, -I use cream cream, coconut oil and orange extract and cream them with hand blender and put them in silicone molds in the freezer, then pop them into an airtight container.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #5

@PammyB

There are quite a few recipes in our Recipes forum that you can try. There are also Web sites that provide ketogenic recipes, such as Harlan Kilstein and the Diet Doctor site (I believe that you have to pay a small membership fee to get access to the recipes, since they don’t accept advertising). In all cases, I would strongly urge you to figure out the carb content per the serving size you are likely to eat—some of recipes I’ve seen are “low-carb” only if you eat a couple of grams, lol! In all cases, however, you are better off making your own recipes than buying a commercial product that claims to be “keto.”

The main sweetener in diet sodas is aspartame. If you do some research on the Web, you will find that aspartame is (a) perfectly harmless and (b) the Devil’s spawn, and just waiting to give you horrible cancers, destroy your thyroid, eat your brain, and so forth. It’s very hard to tell at this juncture how much of these claims are solid research and how much is junk science paid for by industry, whether for or against.

The sugar industry, for example, managed to produce research ostensibly showing that sodium saccharine and sodium cyclamate might possibly cause cancer in rats if they ate a huge enough dose of the stuff. How realistic the cancer risk might be in people is impossible to assess at this point, though it is probably not high, given how desperate the sugar industry was at the time to fight off competition.

I used to be an avid diet soda drinker, until I listened to a doctor who sounded reasonable, and who said that although aspartame was supposed to be safe, she just didn’t trust it. I ended up switching to carbonated water (Pellegrino and Perrier, when I can afford them, the cheapest supermarket Seltzer water or club soda, otherwise).

Some of our members who are sugar addicts feel that they are best off when they avoid sweet tastes, because using such sweeteners can, they find, trigger sugar cravings. From the point of view of most ketonians, however, the main problem with non-sugar sweeteners is that each one of them on the market seems to spike someone’s insulin. The effect seems to be completely individual, and a sweetener that works fine for one person might be a big problem for another person. You have to experiment to see which of those sweeteners you can use without problems.

This insulin effect, BTW, is something scientists are not sure exists, but we have enough anecdotes from people on these forums to suggest otherwise. No research has been done, because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require it. (Manufacturers do have to show that such sweeteners have no effect on blood glucose, or they are not allowed for sale in the U.S.)

One last point, and I’ll stop: from a baker’s point of view, all of these sweeteners behave differently, and it is best to use the sweetener recommended in the recipe, because the recipe will have been worked out properly for that sweetener. If sugar was present in the original recipe only as a sweetener, then you can generally inter-convert between sweeteners (though the calculations can be tricky). But it the sugar has a structural purpose (feeding yeast, say, or reacting with some other ingredient to provide texture), then only certain (if any) non-sugar sweeteners can be used in that recipe.


(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #6

First off, look at my signature :slightly_smiling_face: lol

I’m not afraid of any artificial sweeteners. I just think a lot of them taste lame… Also, alcohol sugars still contain carbs, but items that contain them can still say “sugar free”…

Any time I have a choice, I go with Sucralose, as it’s made from real sugar, has zero carbs, and taste the best… Or should I say, the most like real sugar.

If you can find Shasta diet sodas, you out to try them. They are sweetened primarily with Sucralose, taste fantastic, and are really cheap too :slightly_smiling_face:
https://images.app.goo.gl/LuLYDLxPNe52MdPj7