Let’s Talk About Substitutes! 213Sweeteners
Patients often ask what can be used for safely sweetening foodstuffs. My
preferred answer is nothing: just change your palate. Even a carrot tastes very
sweet, once you have given up sugar.
However that may be too extreme and I myself do not follow a
strict exclusion. Sweet treats can be delightful, now and again. But not too
often.
The important thing, I think, is to be properly informed.
Firstly, understand there are many forms of “sugar.” High fructose
corn syrup (HFCS) is notorious and a widely used additive to food. You
will likely encounter it in manufactured foods more often than actual sugar.
What’s the problem? you may ask. Fructose comes from fruit, so it’s nice
and healthy and natural, right?
The answer is a resounding NO.
A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has
discovered that fructose is not so human-friendly. The researchers wanted to
compare the health effects of fructose and glucose, so they fed two separate
populations of study rats on either glucose or fructose. The glucose group
was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats
did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, delayed testicular development,
high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy. The key to this, the researchers
believe is that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing
animal interferes with collagen production. Copper deficiency, incidentally,
is widespread in Western society. The females were less affected, but they
were unable to produce live young. [Fields, M, Proceedings of the Society of
Experimental Biology and Medicine, 1984, 175:530-537.]
All this is very reminiscent of Frances Pottenger’s experiments on
cats I have already drawn to your attention (page 53). Pottenger’s Cats, as
they are known, soon became sterile on the wrong foods.
If that were not enough, the rats also developed cirrhosis. “The
medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar,” says
Dr. Field, “but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However,
all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the
high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and
cirrhotic.”
Moreover, because it is metabolized by the liver, fructose does not
cause the pancreas to release insulin the way it normally does. Fructose
is metabolized only very slowly and so converts to fat more easily than
any other form of sugar. This may be one of the main reasons Americans
continue to get fatter.