Health campaigners marked the fourth anniversary of the soft drinks industry levy with impressive numbers. Thanks to this policy, the UK consumed 48,000 tonnes less sugar every year from 2015 to 2019. If you struggle to envisage this quantity, it’s the equivalent of 192 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with an Original Coca-Cola. Let’s pop the corks on that success.
But it’s a hollow victory. This tax was always flawed, because while it tackled the nation’s sugar problem, it wilfully ignored the overarching issue – our addiction to sweet tastes – and the elephant in the room, artificial sweeteners. So manufacturers have been able to brag about sugar reduction while maintaining or even increasing their products’ overall sweetness by using chemical substitutes.
Artificial sweeteners have been given a free pass from health NGOs for far too long simply because they aren’t sugar and are low or no-calorie. But calories have always been a useless measure of the overall impact that food has on our bodies. And the bad news about synthetic sweeteners just keeps coming.
Only last month a large-scale, population-based cohort study of 102,865 French adults found artificial sweeteners – especially aspartame and acesulfame-K – were associated with increased cancer risk, more specifically breast and obesity-related cancers.
Last year UK researchers also found that artificial sweeteners can turn healthy gut bacteria into pathogenic (disease-causing) ones.
Might artificial sweeteners even increase our dependence on sugar? The thinking here is that when the brain registers an exceptionally sweet taste, insulin is released into our blood in anticipation of incoming sugar that never arrives. That insulin then lowers blood sugar below the ideal threshold and the brain sends out starvation signals, triggering hunger pangs and a drop in metabolism: the infamous ‘sugar crash’. At this point, we crave an instant high-carb snack to quickly bring up our blood sugar to baseline.
The bitter irony here is that sweeteners may very well be indirectly feeding sugar addiction and overeating.
It’s plain to anyone with eyes that this recently lauded sugar reduction hasn’t translated into a slimmer, healthier nation. There really is no point endlessly banging on about sugar reduction if you turn a blind eye to the health damage caused by sweeteners.
No comments yet