On Saturday, I was taking the bus from Pine Centre mall to transfer to the bus up to the university from 15th and Nicholson, only to realize that the bus I needed to transfer to, wasn't going to show up for another half hour. Keeping my kind words to myself, I decided to kill some time at the McDonalds on 15th. While I was there enjoying my olden fries, I couldn't help but overhear two senior citizens talking about their friend who was struggling with health problems regarding diet sodas. Diet sodas that are claimed to be a practical alternative for sugary pop were, ironically, causing their friend to crave more sugar and leading to a downward spiral. I thought to myself, there must be quite a number of people struggling with this same paradox of artificial sweeteners like aspartame. Being a UNBC student and having access to peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Nature and Science in the library, I did a search for the latest studies done on artificial sweeteners. One article in Nature, published last month by a team of researchers in Israel, suggested artificial sweeteners like aspartame induce sugar intolerance by altering the composition of microbes in the gut. In other words, sugar-free diet pop, in fact, increases blood sugars and directly contributes to the problem that they are fighting for. The implication is that the artificial sweeteners are changing the composition of bacterial species in the gut that take out energy from food that gets stored as fat, contributing to obesity. Although preliminary in human studies, it raises more eyebrows on non-caloric artificial sweeteners as a magical bullet for sugar addiction.
Steven Shibata
Prince George
