Diets / NutraSweet

Question
Hi,

I am in the process of trying to lose a bit of weight - quite a lot in fact, and one of the things I have done is to swap sugar filled soft drinks for sugar-free versions which contain artificial sweetners such as NutraSweet instead of the sugar. However, I have been told that there are possible side-effects to drinking a lot of these drinks, including some which are linked to an increase in Cholesterol.  Do you know of any such problems, in taking a lot of these drinks ?

Any advice you could give in relation to this would be very much appreciated.  Thank you.

Regards,
Scott Armour


Answer
Scott,

I have never heard of any relationship between NutraSweet (aspartame) and an increase in cholesterol.  I did a literature search on PubMed (a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from life science journals for biomedical articles) and there is no medical or scientific literature on aspartame and cholesterol/lipids.  Therefore, I feel that there is no evidence of an artificial sweetener/cholesterol connection.

Certainly, there are those who accuse artificial sweeteners of causing a list of problems, such as; cancer, hair loss, depression, dementia and behavioral disturbances.  However, many scientists & doctors do not see a connection when they look at the evidence.  They tend to dismiss any connection to the extremely high amounts of artificial sweetener fed to rats (who developed health problems).

You will have to make up your own mind. This may be another example that moderation is the best way to go.

Todd
www.lipid-clinic.com

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