You may have been wondering where I have been and how come my blog has not been growing. True, my wife and I did take a couple of weeks off to visit our son in the San Francisco Bay Area. While there I had my pacemaker changed out for a new one with a fully charged battery and all the latest s/w & h/w bells and whistles. So, what have I NOT been writing about?…Artificial Sweeteners!
On the artificial sweetener front…I have been stuck in a plethora of factoids trying to see my way clear for several weeks. My basic concern is over the health effects of artificial sweeteners based on Sucralose (Splenda), Aspartame (Equal), Stevia (Stevia in the Raw, Truvia, etc.), and Xylitol.
I am not going to get embroiled in the questions about the safety of any of the artificial sweeteners here on Diabetic and Vegan. The research I did convinced me that I’d need advanced degrees I don’t have in order to evaluate all the conflicting information about artificial sweeteners. It does seem important to keep in mind, when reading about artificial sweeteners, that the stakes are extremely high: one estimate is the global non-sugar sweeteners market was at $9.3 billion in 2011, and will be at a projected $9.9 billion by 2016.
I have tried the Stevia based products and find them to have a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. For baking and cooking, Aspartame is out because it is not heat stable. It is excellent for non-heated applications, unless like my wife, it gives one a headache (also there is a very serious side effect for persons with phenylketonuria if they consume aspartame). Since I am diabetic, the artificial sweeteners blended with sucrose (such as Truvia) are out for me. That leaves Splenda for use in recipes that require sweetener in which the food will be heated.
My wife and I use a lot of Splenda in packets. She asked me how many packets of Splenda per day one can safely consume. In 1998, the FDA set the ADI (Acceptable Daily Intake) for sucralose at 5 mg per kg of body weight per day. So take your weight in lb, divide by 2.2 & get weight in kg. Multiply weight in kg by 5 to get the mg of sucralose it’s safe to consume per day. Now you say, “But I want to know how many packets of Splenda can I use?” For that you need to know that there are 11.9 mg of sucralose in each Splenda packet. For those who “do the math” and those who “don’t do the math”, it goes like this:
Start with your weight in pounds.
Divide by 2.2 to get your weight in kilograms.
Multiply by 5 to get the amount of sucralose per day in milligrams
Divide by 11.9 to get the number of Splenda packets per day.
So for me it would be:
280 lbs
280/2.2 = 127 kgs
127 x 5 = 635 mg sucralose per day
635/11.9 = 53 packets of Splenda per day
So on to the recipes!
Diabetic and Vegan 