Artificial Sweeteners vs Sugar: Which is the Healthier Option?

Artificial sweeteners vs. sugar: this has been a common poll among health-conscious people and those with certain conditions like obesity and diabetes, among others.

Between the two, the first-mentioned are dominant in today's huge market of sugar-free food and beverages. Today, their attraction is not just due to their low price, but their possibility to fight the rising threat of obesity, as well as its linked health effects.

According to a ScienceAlert report, saccharin is more than 200 times sweeter than sugar but with zero calories.

However, does this mean our sugar should now be replaced with artificial sweeteners, or should we consider other factors?

Before we find an answer to the question, it is ideal to determine first what artificial sweeteners are and how they work, as indicated in the said science information site.

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(Photo: jan mesaros on Pixabay)
A recent study showed that saccharin is more than 200 times sweeter compared to sugar but with zero calories.

What are Artificial Sweeteners?

Artificial sweeteners offer the sweet tasted of sugar, but they don't have calories. There are two wide-ranging classifications of artificial sweeteners. One classification belongs to the sugar alcohols and the other, high-intensity sweeteners.

Sugar alcohols are structurally akin to sugars, although they are less readily metabolized. On the other hand, high-intensity sweeteners are tiny compounds a lot of times sweeter compared to sugar. High-intensity sweeteners, on the other hand, comprise saccharin and aspartame.

Although artificial sweeteners are providing minimal to totally zero-calories, that does not necessarily mean they are inactive.

More so, artificial sweeteners are interacting with the sweet-taste receptors' T1R-family in both the gut and mouth, which can have metabolic impacts.

This may interact as well with the microbes that make up the gut bacterium. Different sweeteners might vary in their impact on the body.

Link to Cancer and Weight Loss

The apprehension that artificial sweeteners could be cancer-causing stems from the late-1970 research, which discovered that mice that were fed with saccharin developed bladder cancer.

From that time, it has been found that this only occurs in rats, and saccharin does not cause cancer among humans.

Not only saccharin but all of the artificial sweeteners approved by the EU and FDA have gone through testing in lab animals, as well as data from humans. Consequently, none of the approved sweeteners are linked to cancer.

Artificial sweeteners' main attraction is that they can be a replacement for sugar. There is a great amount of evidence to propose that high sugar consumption is bad for the health.

Sugary drinks specifically can result in weight gain, metabolic disorders, and type 2 diabetes. It then follows that substituting sugar with calorie-free sweeteners could result in weight loss.

Several studies have examined if replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners results in weight loss. A meta-analysis study conducted in 2018, which incorporated the results of more than 50 different studies, concluded that the majority of the cases of those using artificial sweeteners did not lose more weight compared to those consuming sugar.

Nonetheless, obese or overweight people who shifted to artificial sweeteners did not lose more weight compared to their sugar-eating counterparts.

Why are Obesity and Overweight Still Prevalent?

In general, given that artificial sweeteners are importantly calorie-free, the data on their positive health effects is probably a little disappointing.

This might explain the observation of Jennie Brand Miller from the University of Sydney that the prevalence of obesity and overweight have multiplied about three times in the past five decades despite the popularity of low-calorie sweeteners, including their ubiquity.

Essentially, sugar-free substitutes, specifically of beverages, could be advantageous to an individual trying to lose weight or enhance his diet.

Nevertheless, the data propose that they are not the healthiest choice available, and while a diet drink might be better than the sugary one, water is still even better.

Related information about artificial sweeteners is shown on JJ Medicine's YouTube video below:

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