I often shop at our lovely, local supermarket. While choosing some veggies and fruit, one of those forklifts they use for big crates of stuff appeared next to me.
Then a gray-haired shopworker ( have you noticed, these places are employing many people now, who are past retirement age?) started offloading huge amounts, cases in fact of “diet” drinks. They made up a solid block of “special deal” offerings.
Right away, customers came to put these caseloads of pop into their shopping baskets. Later, at the checkout, a woman in front of me had two cases. Her son, about 10, carried another. There were no fresh ingredients in their cart. Just boxes of packaged items. Snoopy of me, I know, but I’m constantly amazed at the stuff that people eat and drink.
Statistics
According to 2019 stats, Mexico, with an average of 634 per person, per year is a world leader in consumption of carbonated soft drinks. USA follows closely with 618. India, with a very high population, ranks last with 18.
So this week we’re having a conversation about what is known in the food labs’ as Non-Nutritive Sweeteners. (NNSs). You find lots of these artificial chemicals in your drinks and your food. They are sugar substitutes.
All NNSs are developed in laboratories. They are hundreds or even thousands of times sweeter than sugar, so only tiny amounts have to be used for any given purpose. They serve the main goal of food manufacturers and retailers; profitability.
When you read your labels and see modified starch as an ingredient on your sugar-free drink, translate that to mean fillers of maltodextrin and dextrin. These lab-created substances contain about ¼ of sugar calories. So they might be sugar-free, but they are not calorie-free.
The fizzy drink manufacturers love the word “natural” on their labels. It makes everyone feel better about things. “Natural flavours” sounds healthy enough, even though it is usually last on the label list.
For instance, stevia, the incredibly sweet plant, is used often, but not as a plant. The sweet substance is lab-extracted. The leaves are steeped in acids and solvent first, to achieve the chemical glycosides extraction. This happens in labs of course.
Then those active compounds are further refined, purified and concentrated to the point that there are only minute amounts of the original stevia plant left. But that’s enough for the label. There are other chemical compounds too, that are not labeled, because their addition is deemed to be not necessary on the label.
Most of the time natural flavours conjure up a healthy image in your mind. But there’s little difference between the lab procedures to extract from plants, and artificial flavours derived from the thousands of available chemicals. It’s all in the wording.
Image via VickiW
Why would you pay four, good Canadian dollars for this? We have water. We can grow stevia in a pot if you don’t have a garden. We can mash up the leaves and put them in the water. But it might be way too sweet! Add some fruit for flavouring. Just one leaf can be all you need in your tea. I plan to grow another plant in a pot next year.
Decisions, decisions...
You’re between a rock and a hard place with this dietary “problem.” Go for a can of sugar-sweetened soda, and in the one above you’ll be consuming more than 9 teaspoons of sugar, to counteract the 12% bergamot, a type of bitter orange.
The plastic bottles and cans that contain soft drinks cause huge pollution in most countries and oceans. Soft drinks are very popular everywhere! I don’t know how many countries are even able to deal with the enormous discard/littering problem.
Let’s be honest. Soft drinks, meaning non-alcoholic, usually carbonated (fizzy) drinks, have no nutritional value at all. In fact, some studies show that rather than helping your thirst they can even cause it to become greater.
There’s a lot of controversy about this.
Image via VickiW
Microbiomes
Years ago, (2015) I read that there were real concerns about aspartame (ASP) being used in soft drinks. Then Pepsi announced they were discontinuing it in their Diet Pepsi. (Their sales were down.).Instead of it they would use a mix of sucralose and acesulfame potassium ( ACE-K) in their USA manufacturing.
Big mistake. Pepsi market shares nosedived. They brought back the original Pepsi diet cola in 2017, after numerous complaints about the new improved taste. The bottom line always rules.
Most folks decide to drink diet sodas because of their determination to lose weight. After many studies though, it seems there is a definite correlation between diet sodas, sports drinks and obesity.
In a previous post, I discussed the existence and function of your microbiome, a major collection of microbes in our bodily systems.
When you subject your microbiome to a constant supply of sweeteners in your diet your digestive microbes ultimately get interested enough to try using them, even though there is absolutely no nutritive value in them.
The microbes have a collective goal. Use what is fed to them as real food. If they can’t, because of different chemicals, the glycogen usually stored as glucose in the liver will instead be released straight into the bloodstream.
It takes some while, but in some individuals, after constant exposure to NNSs, there is a build-up of glucose in the blood. Next stage is glucose intolerance, then full-blown type 2 diabetes.
There is still ongoing research into this. Scientists are beginning to think that the brain reacts to the stimulus of artificial sweetness by skewing your need for food. To the brain sweetness equals energy. The NNSs overstimulate you to think you need more food than you actually do.
Obesity is a worldwide scourge now. The chemical extracts and other chemicals are difficult to avoid, not only in sodas, but just in almost every commercially produced foods. That means you don’t only ingest from one source. It may be several each day.
Still want a fizzy drink? Save the money you’d spend on buying them for a time, and you’d be able to buy a machine that would fizz your plain old water! Add a slice of lemon, or other favourite fruit. Want it sweeter? Grow a pot of stevia, and throw in a couple of leaves.
Or…just learn to love water without the fizz!
Purple Mountain Majesty
Not quite in the boundaries this week, but those mountains are still to be seen from the balcony.
If you look carefully, you’ll see a little snow on the top of the peaks!
Image via VickiW
