Why You Should Stop Eating Fake Sugars, According to the World Health Organization
As a teenager and young adult, I drank a lot of high-sugar carbonated drinks – mostly Mountain Dew. One day I decided that I would trade them all for their dietary equivalents, and the resulting calorie loss would mean I would lose five or even ten pounds by the end of the year. I kept my promise, and do you know how many pounds I lost without changing anything in my diet? Zero.
I still don’t drink full sugar soda. (Now, like my colleague Claire Lower , I am a member of the Diet Coke cult.) But I intuitively understand why the World Health Organization has issued a guide against the use of “sugar-free sweeteners” like aspartame as weight loss magic bullets. or healthy eating.
If you want to see the scientific data they were working on, you can read here (their meta-analysis of the health effects of sweeteners) and here (the manual itself, 90 pages of evidence and recommendations).
By the way, I love that the World Health Organization uses the term “sugar-free sweeteners” (NSS) instead of “artificial sweeteners.” Stevia, for example, is “natural” but is still in that category because it provides the sweetness of sugar but isn’t actually sugar.
Why sweeteners don’t help you lose weight or improve your health
What I learned from my soda switch experiment probably should have been obvious to all of us right from the start: Our bodies are pretty good at making us feel hungry enough to eat and drink enough calories. Take away calories from one place and we’ll just eat more of something else.
It’s hard to prove that this happens, but studies like those cited by the World Health Organization show fairly consistently that people who consume a lot of sugar-free sweeteners are neither thinner nor healthier than those who don’t. In fact, some studies show the opposite, which likely has a reverse causation. If you think you need to lose weight, you are more likely to order a diet soda. Thus, people who regularly consume sugar-free sweeteners tend to be overweight or have health problems that they try to control with their diet.
The WHO claim for sugar-free sweeteners is based on “lack of evidence that NSS use is beneficial for body weight and other measures of body fat in the long term” rather than any belief that sweeteners are actually harmful to us. . Regarding potential long-term health effects, the WHO writes that “the evidence is ultimately inconclusive.”
You must change your diet if you want to eat healthier.
The World Health Organization’s director of nutrition and food safety has bluntly stated , “People should completely reduce sweetness in their diets” if they are trying to cut sugar. If your diet isn’t as healthy as you’d like, replacing sugary foods and drinks with artificially sweetened alternatives won’t really change your diet much.
(However, if you have diabetes, they say that sugar-free sweeteners can still be in your diet because the point is to help you eat less real sugar. For the rest of us, the point is to improve our diet in general.)
Instead , you should eat more fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and whole grains. We have more ideas on how to eat healthier without counting calories or obsessing over grams of sugar.