Watch this video on artificial sweeteners

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #21

Ilana, Okay I’m an admitted dummy with this stuff, but why did Dr. Ken Berry reply to their vid and say it was the best video on the subject… If the video had no importance ???

(mole person) #22

I can’t say that I have any clue what he was thinking. He’s an MD and a smart enough fellow but that doesn’t make him infallible.

(mole person) #23

@FishChris Here is a tweet where he’s recommending people stop drinking diet sodas because of findings in an epidemiological study. That is also terrible reasoning as it in no way implies causation.

He’s not a scientist and makes mistakes.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #24

So, I still want to test my blood for blood glucose levels, just to look for any changes. I think it will be somewhat interesting in any case.
As for all of these different studies that try to tell you what is and isn’t good for you, one can pick a health subject… “any health subject under the sun” and find multiple different ones to support their own personal beliefs in either direction. With very little time and effort, I bet I can find 10 studies which say that Keto is terrible for your health. Of course we don’t believe that, but just saying.

For myself, the bottom line is, I feel great and my Keto WOE seems to be serving me well. Also, I enjoy some sweetness in my diet, and I don’t see any obvious direct problems from artificial sweeteners. Might it cause some sort of long term health issues, or cancer ? Sure. But then again, anything I do might cause those same problems. OR, more likely, whatever I do, it may not make any difference with whether or not I develop those problems.

Just to reiterate, here’s what I believe;

Keep your carbs really low.
Don’t over eat.
Get some exercise.

…and you will be as good, or better off, than most of the people living on this planet :slight_smile:

(mole person) #25

Yah, I don’t think that people who are enjoying some non nutritive sweetners in their diet and continuing to have weight loss success need to worry about them. We bring it up only when people are having issues with a stall or suffering from a lack of energy as often giving up the sweeteners helps in these cases.

Just keep it in mind if you ever find yourself stalled out.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #26

100% agreed. And the same thing goes for folks who get headaches, or stomach aches from artificial sweeteners. If that happens then heck yes, don’t eat artificial sweeteners !

All that said, to be 100% honest, I don’t know if I’m at a stall or not ?
Maybe it’s just a very slow crawl :smiley: lol
But if I can’t lose these last few lbs in the next 2 or 3 weeks, eating just as I have, and doing a 26 hr fast once a week, it would be easy enough to replace my Gatorade zero’s with water for one Sunday, just to see for myself. My energy has been fine during my 26 hours Sunday fasts though. Only when I did that 50hr fast last week, did I feel like a completely worthless POS on the second day :smiley: lol

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #27

Ah! That makes sense. Sorry for the confusion. I was misreading your post. So much for keto clarity, huh? :grimacing:

And I absolutely agree with you, now that it’s penetrated my skull.

(Trish) #28

I had this happen. Took sweet n low. BG 5.0 pre taking. At 20 minutes post was 5.1. But get this…at 40 minutes my BG dropped to 4.4. I figured this meant an insulin dump to combat the perceived sugar which then drove down my BG. I might have to stop using this product.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #29

Sweet-n-low, with sacharine ? Oooh ! … I don’t know how you can swallow that stuff ? So nasty and bitter… Try sucralose. At least it tastes like sugar… and if doesn’t give you any problems (which is doesn’t for most people… and even for many of the ones it does, I think its just psychological) then your all good :slight_smile:

(Trish) #30

Which one is that? Splenda? I plan to test them all. Ideally I’d use none, but I just can’t drink my coffee without something more than just cream. I used to be a double-double gal. I suppose I could just give up coffee, but…my coffee :frowning:

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #31

Well I have used Splenda, and the generic version of it, for years. Love it ! But it does have a little malto dextrin in it, so a tiny amount of carbs. Its easy enough to avoid that though, by getting liquid sucralose (which I just got and started using a few days ago). Its super cheap too. 3700 servings (1 drop for a serving) for $11 to $16 depending on the brand… on Amazon, of course.

(Trish) #32

Haha 16 oz bottle. 70+dollars. Welsome to amazon.ca

(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman ) #33

Mouse study. Reduction not death. Altered metabolic pathway. We don’t really know anything about gut microbiome diversity other than from association studies…

Full text here:

I’m not saying you’re wrong to be concerned, but I am saying other folks are not incorrect to not be worrying.

(Robert C) #34

Isn’t that the same as saying “correct to not be worrying”? I may have picked the wrong study to make the point but, I do think people should take more into account than insulin and glucose reactions for food choices.

Heavily processed and very-bad-for-you seed oils may not negatively affect insulin and glucose levels but, there are certainly other reasons not to cook with them.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #35

All that stuff is so vague, and hard to prove. But more importantly, it doesn’'t have any obvious negative effects on me.
Before keto, I had some issues with digestion… as in, constipation. Took about 4 to 6 weeks of eating keto (along with a lot more artificial sweeteners) but my stomach finally straightened itself out. Not saying the artificial sweeteners helped my digestion, but they certainly haven’t hurt it.

Another thought… if any of you are going to worry about stuff like this, i sure hope your never having the smallest of carb cheats, watching your total calories, and exercising vigorously 5 or 6 days a week too. Because this is the stuff that will have guaranteed obvious effects on your health.

In other words, if you are a hard core keto health freak, and your trying to fine tune that final 2% of the equation, sure ! Why not ? But to worry about this kind of stuff if you haven’t done all of the big, up front stuff first, is just illogical, and silly.

(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman ) #36

My point, which is separate from the point about vegetable seed oils, is that gut biome science is in its toddler years, if not infancy. So I don’t think anyone is demonstrably wrong citing or ignoring data on the subject.

(Robert C) #37

If you ignore, then - how would you know when the science moved on past “its toddler years”? It may have already but, someone ignoring it wouldn’t know.

These forums are not really trying to replace Google in terms of only discussing things 100% supported by a hardcore human studies. More to @Ilana_Rose’s point above…

When someone supplies their daily food and it includes a lot of dairy at every meal - and they’re complaining about a stall - people that have stopped diary for a while and broken a plateau will speak up. They won’t necessarily have study (toddler level or otherwise) to support trying to cut down or skip dairy for a while and see what happens - they’re just sharing ideas on the forum.

As well, there is a bias that should be worried about. Say your favorite artificial sweetener is X. Some people will then not want to read or pay attention to studies that find X a problem. Studies that show X is a problem will be dismissed for any reason (mouse study, small study, short study,…) and company X’s studies showing it is safe will be considered truthful (regardless of study’s methodology). Lots of non-Keto people do this with X being carbs - they simply don’t want to hear “no pasta, no hot fresh bread, no ice cream, no chocolate…”.

This bias is true for many things - the person that likes alcohol will be very interested in the discussions around it being 0 carb and only stalling ketosis for a short time. They read the “pros” part of whiskey vs. beer but ignore the “cons” of alcohol generally.

(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman ) #38

How do we know when something is beyond infancy in research?

Maybe when they have an explanatory mechanism for why stuff works. Maybe a bit more than that. The science is never settled, but if you were advising someone who was starting a carbohydrated restricted lifestyle, where would you place the avoidance of artificial sweeteners due to gut bacteria variety reduction in your instructions?

I dunno about you, but it’s definitely behind: Restrict carbs, find and eat to satiety, set some goals, avoid crappy fats, get adequate magnesium, salt to taste, etc… It would be down pretty far. Like in the tweaking when it’s not working, and maybe down in that list.

That said, I lose a lot better when I drink more water and less soda. So, if we view gut bacteria suffering under artificial sweetener, I can now explain that. Of course, I haven’t sent my poop off to a lab, so I don’t really know. I can only guess based on my other results, some mouse studies and some gut advocates’ work.

I am tempted to send my poo off for study, but since they cannot really provide a recommendation for what to do once you know stuff about your poo bacteria, I’ve been hesitant.

(Robert C) #39

Not necessarily silly at all. While you are (you think) unaffected by artificial sweeteners - that may not be the case with everyone. The newbie that writes up their great Keto daily intake - but skips including their very long running 12-pack a day Diet Coke habit - might think Keto doesn’t work because they have dealt with the “big, up front stuff” but never thought to mention their high-caffeine-0-calorie habit (which might be making their careful whole foods shopping not really work to their advantage if it is keeping their gut in a bad state after the many years of daily chemical throughput).

(Robert C) #40

That is one approach. Another approach is to just eat whole real foods. Quest bars, artificial sweeteners, corn oil etc. automatically get ruled out (lots of which cause many people problems).

The approach of requiring an explanation of why a hyper-palatable fake food is bad for you is well - just that, one approach. But, having to remain hyper-vigilant about all of one’s fake foods study’s results seems like a lot of work.

The same place I’d put:

  • Cut back on diary if you have a lot and are stalling
  • Skip alcohol if it is causing excess carb intake after inhibitions are lowered
  • Try carnivore if you have gut issues with most vegetables
  • Skip the fat bombs and butter coffee if you are not at goal yet
  • Skip artificial sweeteners if you are otherwise strictly whole food and progress has stopped
  • Skip artificial sweeteners if your desire for sugar continues to bother you after you have been Keto for months (where most people have found it naturally is essentially gone)

There are lots of odds-and-ends ideas floating around this forum that just need to be read once and kept in mind in case one notices the issue within oneself.