To be annoyed about artificial sweeteners in absolutely everything

[squarecorners]

I'm not a health food nazi at all. I love a Bernard Matthews cheesy hamwich as much as the next slummy mummy but I do make about 70% of our meals from scratch. I just think we should be informed and have a choice about what we consume. I noticing more and more that artificial sweetener is now the default option. In McDonald's they only do sprite zero now- I had a bout of sickness a few weeks ago and needed a boost and literally could not buy anything that wasn't boosted with artifical sweeteners. When I've eaten out recently I could taste sweeteners in the food, I even found one of my favourite cooking sauces has sweeteners added (it's like a Worcester sauce type thing).
I'm convinced this will end up like trans fats (oh fuck I've just said trans on mumsnet, take cover...) where the food manufacturers used them as a cheap solution to getting rid of saturated fat but found out they are actually worse. Without becoming a complete organic hippy how the hell do we go about getting convenient food that isn't full of aspartame?

Totally agree. Why manufacturers can't just use less sugar and allow us to get reacquainted with food/drinks that aren't sickly sweet is beyond me.
I agree as well

In bacon? WTAF?!! Aspartame gives me diarrhoea.

Yanbu. There have been enough threads about this on Mumsnet over the last 5 years or so.

Someone should organise a petition.

Totally agree. I'm currently in Austria no AS here and I've not seen a obese person in 4 days.

Can't stand the taste of them. My favourite fizzy drink at the moment is innocent bubbles, it tastes nice, has less sugar than most other fizzy drinks and so is less sticky.

Why can't all the manufacturers just reduce the amount of sugar and avoid the AS? If they all do it at once people will have no choice but to get used to it.

Ah I haven't been on that long, I haven't seen many. It's been annoying me for the last couple of weeks since I sent to stay with a pregnant friend who is a terrible cook unless she follows recipes, and now does slimming world for every meal. She cooked me a thai green curry where the recipe called for a heaped tablespoon of canderell?! I had to specifically ask her to leave it out, and it tasted fine without it. Her cupboards are full of reduced sugar / "lite" stuff that she's convinced is healthier, so when I got home I looked at what was in my kitchen and it was disturbing.

Some sweeteners are migraine triggers for me. Aside from that I can't stand the taste! There has been research done which shows some people are genetically predisposed to dislike the taste (as with e.g. coriander): news.psu.edu/story/284556/2013/08/20/research/multiple-genes-manage-how-people-taste-sweeteners

(Not sure if link will work as I'm on my phone).

I was furious to discover Orangina now has sweetener! Ffs, there is already a 'light'/diet version.

I had a custard doughnut that had sweeteners in the custard. It was awful. Came from morrisons.

Aspartame causes D&V in my DD

I used to be able to buy pomegranate juice and cranberry juice in the sugary versions but now struggle to find them without sweeteners. I really dislike the taste and some make me thirstier. I wanted to buy ginger ale the other day and it was all lo-cal stuff. Charge me more if you like, but I'd prefer real sugar over fake!

Wouldn't it be great if the daily fail picked up on this thread and told food manufacturers what we wanted, instead of lazy wannabe journalists spending their weekend reading the chat threads for a change! But then, that isn't likely if it involves them doing somethign useful!

I am a health food nut and still agree with you!

If I want sugar, then it’s up to me. I detest sweeteners as I think they probably still make us sick and fat but by buggering our metabolism and messages to our brain about how sweet the food is that is arriving in our guts.

It’s everywhere and I don’t buy any of it now

SandraDi

Aspartame and sucralose were originally devised as rat and ant poisons because they were sweet and tempting whilst causing insidious neurological damage.

This is rubbish.

www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-worlds-best-ant-poison/

Can I ask what your actual ‘health nut’ qualifications are?

Isn’t that aimed at me husky?

There have been quite a few published papers suggesting the metabolic effects of sweetners actually.

No, it was aimed at SandraDi. Hence my quoting her and naming her.

My daughter has well controlled epilepsy (at home). At school, and at her day centre, she keeps having seizures. I have tried to explain that she cannot have drinks which say ‘sugar free’ on the label, but she can have fresh orange, milk or water. They honestly don’t seem to understand, however clearly I say it. She has a fizzy drink a day on holiday, or a hot chocolate, but I use these (fizzy water with the squash).

Oh, and she’s busy and active at home, so it’s nothing to do with overdoing it.

The amount of AS is rising sharply within a short space of time, and as with all things that suddenly become ubiquitous, there will be a backlash as negative effects become apparent. I give it 10 years before manufacturers are forced to look for an alternative to AS.

I am sceptical, to put it mildly, about “we dredge around in anecdote and poor quality data making thousands of comparisons and find a few significant correlations, even though we have never heard of the bonferroni correction” associations. There’s an xkcd cartoon: xkcd.com/882/

But artificial sweeteners taste terrible, so any marginal and unproven health effect is secondary.

Why eat and drink things that taste like shit? The only thing I ever buy which has added sugar, now sweetener, is the occasional bottle of Ribena for use as a warm placebo when I have a cold. Ah well, Waitrose sell the sugar version if Teissere syrup, and after that gets ruined I can live without it.