Last week I bought a bottle of flavoured water. It was extremely sweet, so much so that I couldn’t drink it. I then looked at the contents (unlike me to do this after I buy a product, but I was at an event and was very thirsty). The additive that stood out a mile was aspartame, the artificial sweetener that has been banned in several countries but allowed in others.
Needing to worry about food additives should really be something consigned to the last century. The food industry appeared to have acknowledged the dangers of food colourings, preservatives and trans-fatty acids. Especially since we see so many foods proclaiming no additives, no preservatives, no added sugar, no artificial colourings and no hydrogenated fats.
However, the shocking fact is that there is hardly a single food or drink that is 100 per cent additive-free, unless it is raw, organic produce or glass bottled water.
In Europe there are a staggering 1,521 additives ‘permitted’ under official regulations. Some are vitamins and some are colours derived from vegetables. However, fully two-thirds of them have been concocted by industrial chemists.
Most additives are compounds that humans had never even encountered before the early 1900s. Unlike natural substances, which our digestive and immune systems have learned to cope with throughout our evolution, man-made additives in our diet are like invaders from outer space.
So, according to the latest research, that is the problem. It is not that the additives are potential toxins to our bodies, but they fool our bodies into thinking that it is getting the food energy and nutrients when it so clearly is not.
Western nations are in the middle of an obesity epidemic. We are informed that this is due to eating too much sugar and fat. The endless advice from authorities, governments and health officials is to switch to low-fat foods and to replace sugar with sugar substitutes.
An interesting quote from 10 years ago, by Michael Lean, chair of human nutrition at the University of Glasgow, said: “Sugar provides around 10 per cent of total calories. If this were entirely replaced by a non-nutritive, non-caloric sweetener, such as aspartame, the obesity could be vanquished.” (BMJ, 2004.)
There is hardly a single food or drink that is 100 per cent additive-free, unless it is raw, organic produce or glass bottled water
Artificial sweeteners are by far the largest sector of the additives market, worth €1.4 billion a year worldwide. Many people buy sweeteners for their own tea and coffee, but the biggest users are food and drink manufacturers. Any sweet-tasting, processed food product will contain some form of artificial sweetener (including toothpaste).
This can make sweeteners almost impossible to avoid unless you are scrupulous in checking ingredients.
Over a century ago, saccharin was the first sweetener to be discovered, added to by 19 more. This huge choice is largely a result of health concerns and their effects on our health, although manufacturers and health authorities generally insist that every new sweetener on market is perfectly safe. Aspartame once was, but you have to ask why a number of countries now ban this additive.
Aspartame is the most controversial. It has a long history of adverse health findings. All these have been rebutted by manufacturers and some health authorities. Therefore, it is still licensed for use. However, due to these concerns, maximum limits have been set on the amounts permitted in foods.
Despite this, food manufacturers have managed to sidestep the spirit of these regulations by using a cocktail of sweeteners in foods and drinks (BMJ, 2004).
The obvious problems are that a single sweetener might not exceed legal limits. However, the ensemble could, and combinations of chemicals can interact with each other, becoming toxic. Few of these potential interactions have ever been safety tested.
The main issue is that all these additives, showing zero calories or low calories, should help to lose weight or, at the very least, not gain it.
In practice, they not only fail to do so, but actually achieve the reverse. Yes, artificial sweeteners make you fat. This discovery was first reported about seven years ago after a nine-year US study looked at people with heart disease.
The researchers were surprised to find that people who drank the most diet sodas had double the risk of being overweight. They found “a significant positive dose-response relationship”, suggesting that low-calorie drinks were directly responsible for the extra pounds (Obesity, Silver Spring, 2008).
These findings raised the question of whether artificial sweeteners ‘might be fuelling, rather than fighting, our escalating obesity epidemic’. This was the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Texas. More studies, including more than 100,000 adults and children, found the same weight-gain phenomenon.
These findings have gone some way towards explaining why, despite millions of Americans switching to low-calorie diet drinks and sugar substitutes, obesity rates have continued to increase.
For nutritionists, none of this makes sense – on the face of it. A switch from a high-calorie to a low-calorie diet theoretically leads to weight loss, doesn’t it? We will look at this further next week.
kathryn@maltanet.net