You are currently browsing the Advantage Diets (www.advantagediets.com) weblog archives for the day March 23, 2007.
March 23, 2007 by admin.
The makers of Splenda and Equal will be duking it out in court in about a month. Equal has lost a lot of market share to Splenda. The makers of Equal believe that Splenda should not be advertising that it “tastes like sugar because it’s made from sugar.” Because of the way it is made, Splenda is an artificial sweetener. It may start out as sugar but once the chemists have worked on it, it no longer is sugar. It is no longer something you find in nature.
It may not only be Splenda’s advertising that has garnered it more of the market share. It could be that while Equal is 200 times as sweet as table sugar, Splenda is 600 times sweeter than table sugar. Is this a testament to the American sweet tooth?
I think artificial sweetners have their place in one’s effort to lose weight. In order to achieve the level of sweetness that Splenda gives to a food, one would have to add many, many calories of sugar. What bothers me more than Splenda’s advertising tagline are their television commercials. Not only do we see adults sprinkling Splenda on fruits, drinks and other foods, but they show smiling children enjoying Splenda, as well. We would be doing more of a service to our children by teaching them from an early age that fruits, even dried fruits, should be enough sweetness to satisfy a “sweet tooth”. Once we start introducing sugar-laden foods, we’ve started them on a road to needing more and eventually having to resort to artificial sweeteners in order to lose the weight they’ll probably gain.
People who used to eat high-fat diets and eventually scaled-back on their intake of fat, now find that anything with a lot of fat in it isn’t pleasing to the taste. If we can learn to eat less fat, why not less sugar? I know that we naturally tend toward sugar; otherwise, we would not have been given taste buds dedicated to recognizing sweet flavors. But a lot of what we eat is learned. Cavemen probably loved eating fruits and berries, appreciating their sweet flavor and never asked for something sweeter. Maybe we need to return back to our roots.
Posted in Foods and Nutrition | 1 Comment »