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“Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.”
~ Socrates
214.6 lbs.
Last night I realized something; if and when I pass the 212.3 lb mark, I’ll be the lightest I’ve been since I was 12. Not necessarily the lowest in body fat nor the healthiest, mind you, as I’m losing muscle as well as fat.
While I now view food as a purely functional item, I maintain my oral fixation. This is not uncommon; cigarette smokers, when dieting, often smoke more cigarettes. People quitting smoking will often eat more or chew gum like it provided oxygen. People who are upset sometimes reach for comfort foods like chocolate.
Oddly enough, a recent BBC News story claims that chocolate can cause depression. The argument is that people who are depressed eat chocolate more often than those who don’t, therefore the chocolate must make them depressed.
Um… what? That’s like saying people who have stomach flu throw up more often than people who don’t, therefore throwing up causes stomach flu. At least near the end of the article a few experts debate the causality attributed to chocolate but the “facts at the end” trick is one I see used again and again, among others.
Then again, the same could be said for chewing huge quantities of sugar free gum. While a study by Bernadene Magnuson published in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology in 2007 says there’s no link between aspartame and illnesses of the central nervous system, and a report in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology by Harriett Butchko claims that there is no concrete evidence that aspartame affects brain function or behaviour, or causes any form of brain damage, I found the two most important facts are that Magnuson has ties to the artificial sweetener industry, and Butchko works for Nutrasweet. That makes me take their reports with a grain of sugar.
Then there’s Petro Humphries, a researcher at the University of Pretoria in South Africa( with no links with the artificial sweetener industry). Petro (can I call you Pete? No? Oh.) led another review of the literature, and published his findings in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2008. Humphries found that consumption of aspartame could cause headaches, insomnia, seizures, and other neurological and behavioural disturbances in sensitive individuals. That’s not good.
But wait, there’s more: aspartame may also be involved in cell & tissue changes that lead to certain mental disorders, and also compromise learning and emotional function.
So the jury is still out. The sweetner industry folk say aspartame is perfectly safe, but not everyone agrees. And by ‘not everyone’ I mean researchers, not the people who think Obama was born in Kenya and slipped into the United States as part of a long-term insidious plot by the cold-world era Soviets to put a Communist in the White House hinging only on the small tasks of secretly keeping him pro-communist his whole life in a capitalist country, and getting him elected President.
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7 Comments
I’m with Petro on this one!
Sounds like a bt like the Monsanto/FDA situation! (Food Inc. http://www.foodincmovie.com/) It’s nearly impossible to find low-calorie treats which don’t contain aspartame/acesulfame. Honestly, baking your own goodies seems like the best (if not easiest) way of controlling sugar intake AND staying away from potetially harmful additives.
I’m going to have to switch my yogurt brand and try to find one which is naturally sweetened but not overloaded with sugar.
It’s an unfortunate thing when studies are cited by journalists. The journalists not being familiar with such things as sample size and standard deviation as indicators of the validity of such study… they also rarely read past the abstract. Just because something is published it does not mean that it is a recognized school of thought or even peer reviewed. But the average news reader doesn’t either so we are at an impasse there.
I prescribe to a school of thought that people should only eat things as they are resembled in nature. Artificial sweeteners are the product of the average consumers fears of acceptance and poor self image. North Americans constantly diet, lets give them things that reduce their daily caloric intake even though no one is teaching them that their cravings for sugar are evolutionary in nature. No one is in the business of teaching people why we need or crave the things we do or how to take control of that biology. Psudo- psychology and science that would come against a brick wall from a basic first year uni science class are the norm. Unfortunately I’m no Professor nor I can pass over a decade of specialized study and work experience in a response such as this but I’ll leave you with one thing.
Eat real food, fresh food, less of it, mostly plants and enjoy it, savor it and appreciate it. Experience the full joy of something delicious, even if it’s full of devil sugar…. and question everyone, we’ve all got some motivation.
I read a take on the same study (written by the CBC – http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/04/27/chocolate-depression.html) , and the idea that chocolate causes depression was just one possibility the study authors put out there. Another was that the chocolate cravings could be an attempt to self-medicate (since there have been stories that chocolate can be a mood-booster – though this also hasn’t been proven conclusively). Or it the cravings/consumption could be linked in another unknown way, or even unrelated.
This is for Leah, whom posted above. “Olympic Dairy” makes a low fat yogurt that is sweetened with 100% fruit juice. Tastes really good! Olympic Dairy makes other products that are really good also.
I know I’m coming into this kinda late, but I had a few things to share. First of all, from what I have been told, aspartame is almost the same thing as formaldehyde (the stuff they use to preserve corpses). I’m not sure if this is accurate, but I have been told that if you heat up aspartame, you get formaldehyde. If this is true, I don’t want to touch it. Some good alternatives are sorbitol, maltitol, and xylitol. These are sugar alcohols that occur naturally in plants like berries and corn. Many diabetics eat foods containing these so they can still have the occasional sweet treat. Most of the products I’ve tried containing these substitutes are quite good, but be careful because if you eat too much at a time, you’ll get a laxative effect.
It’s not time sensitive material, Hannah, so there’s no such thing as ‘too late’