RockstarWilson wrote: »

KenSmith108 wrote: »

KenSmith108 wrote: »

I finally found a sweetener that isn't very sweet.
Great Value 0 calorie sweetener made with stevia extract.
1 packet in a 20 oz coffee is just about right.

Now and with all new foods I have to check my bg# 2 hours
afterwards to make sure it's a good fit.

Pre-breakfast 99
Post-breakfast 104

Coffee & stevia are in

What was your breakfast?

My breakfast was: 3 scrambled eggs with a tablespoon of heavy cream, cast iron cooked
in a tablespoon of butter. Topped with a 1/4 cup shredded taco blend cheese.
Coffee with stevia

500 cals, 5g carbs, 0g fiber, 25g protein & 41g fat

Delicious!!!

I'll be so happy when I get my house-- I have so many plans to grow a nice garden like I had long ago. Stevia will be one of the first things. Then I'll just throw the leaves and water in the Vitamix and strain the liquid with a nut milk bag. Then I'll know there isn't anything in there that I don't want to ingest.

There is no way I will ever consume Aspartame or Splenda again, but I will use very tiny amounts of stevia and xylitol or real sugar.....but very rarely. I find that I don't want a sweet taste in my food very often. Just don't need any sweetener very often, so usually skip sweet altogether.

JessicaLCHF wrote: »

I have a FB friend who is on a mission against Splenda/aspartame. She's posting and tagging me in post after post. I DO thing they aren't the best choice, and maybe dangerous, but I think of them as the lesser of two evils.

Being a diabetic I can't do sugar or honey. Being a low carber, I don't want to waste carbs on them but I still want some sweet sometimes.

Her posts go to sites I don't consider real legit. But I am wondering if I'm doing serious damage to my body. Has anyone here studied this out and have real legit sources to share?

I'd include stevia in the fake stuff cause it's the processed stuff or TRUVIA which is readily available in foods I would buy (yes I'm aware you can grow it but I don't mean the plant).

I have gone up and down this whole gamut a few times now. I've posted this in other related questions, but what it comes down to for me is this.

I am insulin resistant with a strong side effect of postprandial solemnolance. I am not diabetic. However, I react to:

Aspartame - sore throat, headaches and cravings (tastes bad) - less reaction if paired with heavy fats.
Splenda (sucralose) - hard crashes, headaches (if liquid), and HARD cravings
Stevia, liquid, with dextrose or maltodextrin - headaches (liquid - natural flavors), hard crashes, strong cravings
Erythritol - hard crashes, moderate cravings.
Other sugar alcohols - severe gastro distress, crashes, cravings
Xylitol/SA in Trident gum - consumed in very limited quantities - no major reaction, in large quantities, same as erythritol.
Monk Fruit - Too Pricey for me right now.

Only one I have found that doesn't affect me in headaches or crashes - though it still does trigger milder cravings if used too much - is Sweet Leaf Stevia packets. However, I'm terrified to try the liquid drops because they include those scary natural flavors that give me migraine-like headaches.

Walden farms - headaches, crashes, cravings
Torani - tastes bad, crashes, cravings

So for me, I stick with the sweet leaf stevia packets/powder. It is the only one my body will partially tolerate. I have isolated each of the sweeteners above and verified reactions... So I don't know if they affect my BG, but it would stand to reason considering they do spike my insulin....

As most other said, find what you tolerate, use it as little as possible, and live your life...

My thing is that I love tea, but tea does not always love me. The tannins in tea cause a weird chemical-type reaction in my mouth that is not...enjoyable. A single sweetener packet or half of one minimizes this for me. I guess I can try just heavy cream to see if that helps. My body is currently boycotting coconut oil for some reason.

Ewwww.......im pouring away my sugar free chlorine drink now....

JessicaLCHF wrote: »

If love to get to the place where I could drink coffee black (mainly cause I'm impressed by it, lol) but I'm no where close yet! And now that I'm LCHF I'm loving heavy cream. I do think Ima try to halve my sweet dosage again tho.

I did this. I used to drink my coffee half coffee and half hot milk with 2 very heaped teaspoons of sugar. I replaced the sugar with monk fruit sweetener, gradually reducing the amount and replaced the milk with double cream.

I can now drink coffee straight and black although I prefer it with cream. I no longer use any sweetener at all.

This conversation makes me really wish I liked coffee.... I haven't found a way to tolerate tea this way yet.

@ladipoet

• The idea that aspartame causes "methanol toxicity" is based on the fact that when digested, aspartame does release a tiny amount of methanol. It's less than the amount you get from eating a piece of most any fruit. Tomato juice, for example, gives you four times the methanol of a can of diet soda. It's a common, naturally occuring environmental compound that is found in many foods. Nancy Markle, one of the most vocal aspartame conspiracy theorists, charges that the autoimmune disease lupus is actually misdiagnosed methanol toxicity caused by drinking 3-4 cans of diet soft drinks per day. If she's right, everyone who drinks a glass of tomato juice each day (or the equivalent in other fruits) is gravely ill with lupus. Time Magazine once devoted an entire article to debunking Nancy Markle's baseless claims about aspartame.
• 
  Much has been made of the claim that aspartame turns into formaldehyde in your system. This is true, because formaldehyde is a natural byproduct of digestion of methanol, and it happens whenever you eat almost anything. Formaldehyde is carcinogenic and is considered very dangerous in cases of occupational exposure, for example, when you get a dosage many orders of magnitude greater than the trace amounts produced during natural digestion. Again, aspartame does this in much smaller amounts than many common foods, so this has been a normal, healthy component of digestion for as long as humans have been eating fruits and vegetables.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4127

KETOGENICGURL wrote: »

I will only comment that Aspartame ( which Coke is now removing totally, as sales are dropping, as with pepsi..people don't want it in their drinks) is a substance that was POORLY tested, and yet the FDA inner circle went ahead and approved it..much like the untested grain experiment on the Amerina people by Ancel Keyes.

In any reading you will find more than 20,000 complaints filed on Aspartame, then the FDA decided to hide the issue by lumping the complaints inside a different group name..so they disappear.

Dr. Mercola is totally against it..but Dr.bernstein ( diabetes expert) is FOR it… and against Truvia as it spikes his BG

I am not thrilled to consume it..if it gets really hot, then cools I am not certain it is the same chemistry….soldiers in the M.E. said the soda cans were boiling in heat…and tasted weird after….

I do have it on rare occasion….Dr. Fung believes any AS is too tempting and delivers insulin kicks… so it is difficult to lower our need for a sweet taste with something really 'safe'

I switched to liquid Stevia to avoid maltodextrose, then the KAL brand started ADDING maltodextrose to that too!!

I use the Sweet Leaf liquid Stevia. A small bottle lasts me a looong time, since I use about 3 drops in an 8oz cup of coffee, ditto for any teas I might consume. NO added nothing that I am aware of.

KenSmith108 wrote: »

Please don't laugh. How do you measure drops? Even when I give the slightest squeeze on the
liquid stevia bottle it streams out, usually ruining my drink. The only work around I found so far is to make
really big drinks, I don't drink coffee by the quart. :-(

The sweet leaf and some others have an eye dropper type of dispenser. I also have the kind you're talking about too. Mostly measure those by how long you squeeze.

Here's an example.

Thanks, I just went to Walmart. I now have a Rube Goldburg stevia dispenser.
I bought a Scope sample size bottle & an eye dropper set.
My sweetie washed the bottle & I squeezed the liquid into it.
The eyedropper reaches all the way to the bottom of the bottle.
My world just became a better place.
Thanks again.

KenSmith108 wrote: »

Thanks, I just went to Walmart. I now have a Rube Goldburg stevia dispenser.
I bought a Scope sample size bottle & an eye dropper set.
My sweetie washed the bottle & I squeezed the liquid into it.
The eyedropper reaches all the way to the bottom of the bottle.
My world just became a better place.
Thanks again.

That sounds like a great idea!

Just for the record, phenylalynine is not a neurotoxin-- it's an essential amino acid. I'm not saying I advocate isolating aminos and then ingesting them separate from the source food. But it is an amino acid.