Why Aspartame Isn't Scary

ChaoticMoira wrote: »

I hope this isn't considered off topic. I thought as this was a discussion on aspartame and it's safety it seemed a good place for it.

I recently have started using low cal sweeteners myself, and having been trying several of them out. I am not diabetic, but would like to stay that way, and believe I was on my way to it. So sweeteners that do not spike blood sugar are important to me. One of the ones I have been trying out is Equal. But I noticed the main ingredient is a filler, dextrose. This confused the heck out of me. Equal supposedly is great for diabetics because it doesn't spike blood sugar, but how is that possible with dextrose as the main ingredient?

High-intensity sweeteners like aspartame are often bulked with something like dextrose or maltodextrin just to provide you enough material to work with. Since the aspartame is 200x sweeter than sugar there is too little there to actually handle realistically. Bulking agents still need to be a food product, you don't want it to be talcum powder or something, but clearly it doesn't need to be what provides the sweetness. So typically companies use some sort of sugar as a bulking agent, dextrose or maltodextrin are common, but much less than you would need to actually sweeten anything.

So yes, "zero calorie" sweeteners aren't zero calorie. But the amount of dextrose present in one of those packets is considerably less than what you would use to actually sweeten a drink.

Aspartame itself actually has calories, equivalent to that of sugar. Its protein and its digested as such and protein has 4 calories per gram same as sugar does. The reason it is "zero calorie" is because you need so little of it to sweeten a drink. It isn't zero calories, its 200x less calories because you need 200x less of it to get equivalent sweetness to table sugar.

Sweetener packets are probably going to have 2-4g of carbs in them that are caloric from the bulking agent, so you are talking like 8-16 calories worth of carbs. That is barely anything. Thats basically the amount you get if you stare too long at the bakery section. It is not an amount that is going to be a problem for someone who is diabetic let alone someone who is concerned about diabetes but not yet diabetic.

If you really want to avoid this it is possible to purchase pure aspartame with a tiny little scooper but given how little you have to transfer to not be overpoweringly sweet its difficult to work with. But then you could technically cut it with whatever you want.

I mean here you go, this would last you a looong time for $30.

https://www.amazon.com/NuSci-Aspartame-Powder-Calorie-Sweetener/dp/B00566EPOA

That is the equivalent sweetness to buying 45 kilograms of sugar. That is enough to flavor over 14 thousand drinks, you could use that to sweeten two drinks a day for 20 years. You'd probably want to cut it with something to be able to work with it but not sure what you'd cut it with other than sugar. I mean any sort of soluble powder that is digestible could work just that typically is sugar.