All the Stuff I Never Knew About Splenda (and Sucralose)

When I wrote that post about Splenda last week, I realized a couple things.

I have never heard of any major bad studies showing ill effects of Splenda (hereafter to be known as sucralose). I know that sucralose is made from sugar, But I don't know what else it is. Caramel is also made from sugar, but there are a few more ingredients, so that isn't enough for me. I didn't know what the daily expected intake should be. I don't eat sucralose. I don't care for the flavor. And as you know, I have issues with no calorie sweeteners because of how they trick the body into believing that calories will be digested, yet provide no calories. But I know alot of people who do eat sucralose. And for many people, the knowledge that sucralose is made from sugar is enough for them. So this post is for all those that eat sucralose. This post is also for all those people for whom the questions surrounding sucralose are scratching at the back of their heads.

Facts About Sucralose as I have found on the Internet

1) Sucralose is an artifical sweetener. It has no calories because your body doesn't break it down. You poop it out. Well, that's the official version. But according to Wikipedia, in the body of the article, you do absorb or metabolize somewhere between 11 and 30% of all sucralose ingested.

2) Each 1 gram yellow packet of sucralose contains 3.31 calories. I am not saying that this is some kind of heresy. It is only 3.31 calories. But you ought to know, right? One Splenda packet has the sweetness level of 2 teaspoons of sugar. Two teaspoons of sugar contains 30 calories.

3) The FDA acceptable daily intake level of sucralose is set at 5 mg per day per kg. For the average 150 pound person, this means just over 3 tenths of a gram. I found this confusing, because several sites said that one sole Splenda packet contained 1 gram. Yet Wikipedia referred to packets as being just over one hundredth of a gram-or one mg. Then I realized my mistake. Splenda is NOT sucralose. One packet of Splenda contains 95% dextrose and/ or maltodextrin (hyper processed corn sugars), and only the remaining 5% (or .05 grams, or 5 mg) is actual sucralose. Once I figured this out, I realized pretty easily, that a 150 pound person should consume no more than 68 packets of Splenda according to the FDA. And easily enough, that is exactly one packet for every kilogram you weigh. To get your weight in kg, just divide your weight in pounds by 2.2. And furthermore for all you math freaks out there, each packet is a quarter of a teaspoon, so at 150 pounds you can eat just one quarter cup (plus one extra tablespoon) each day of traditional Splenda. I don't know about their Granular product. Not sure if the makeup of that is different than what's in the packets.

4) Pure Sucralose is about 300-1000 times sweeter than sugar to the human tounge.

5) According to Wikipedia, sucralose "is manufactured by the selective chlorination of sucrose (table sugar), which substitutes three of the hydroxyl groups with chloride. The selective chlorination is achieved by selective protection of the primary alcohol groups followed by acetylation and then deprotection of the primary alcohol groups. Following an induced acetyl migration on one of the hydroxyl groups, the partially acetylated sugar is then chlorinated with a chlorinating agent such as phosphorus oxychloride, followed by removal of the acetyl groups to give sucralose" Did ya' catch that? So yeah, I guess it's true, sucralose is made from sugar. But it isn't like bread is made from grains. It is a little more complicated than that. But hey, now you know.

6) The Sugar Association (Washington DC Sugar Lobby) doesn't like Splenda. In fact, while they settled their lawsuit which alleged that McNeil Specialty Products falsely advertised Splenda since it is NOT a natural product, our lovely Sugar Lobby has set up a website dedicated to the undoing of Splenda. And for once I am in agreement with the Sugar Association. Splenda is not natural, it IS a chlorinated artificial sweetener.

7) The above website I mentioned cites a Duke University study (as does the Wikipedia article) that shows that sucralose intake of within the FDA approved limit "suppresses beneficial bacteria and directly affects the expression of the transporter P-gp and cytochrome P-450 isozymes that are known to interfere with the bioavailability of drugs and nutrients." So ingesting sucralose at certain levels (well within the FDA safe levels) can decrease many of the good bacteria. But it can also create an environment within the body known to reduce it's ability to absorb and utilize nutrients and medication.

So there you go! That is all the things I learned about Splenda in just one night of searching. What if I had spent more time searching? No major studies linking sucralose and Splenda to cancer. But at the very least, now I am educated. I am still not gonna eat sucralose and Splenda. But maybe, just maybe, someone who reads this will stop.

Just eat real food. Eat honey, rapadura, pure maple syrup. Don't eat alot of it, because it is also not good for you. But first and foremost, ask questions of your food. Google search until you find answers. Be skeptics. And once you find out what you are eating, make a good decision about whether you should continue.


Refer to--
Wikipedia, Sucralose Entry
Wikipedia, Spelda Entry
Food Additives Permitted for Direct Addition to Food for Human Consumption; Sucralose. Food and Drug Administration, Department of Heath and Human Services.

This Post is entered in Real Food Whole Health's Fresh Bites Friday
and Food Renegade's Fight Back Friday

Hot Hot Hot Sauce

Early last week, as I was contemplating my food priorities and closing some of the 'loopholes' in my current program, I had a yummy treat-a bagel with scallion cream cheese and lox. What better condiment to go with my yummy treat? Hot Sauce.

For anyone who has never had a spicy novie, go out and make one, they are divine. Soak some lox in your favorite hot sauce overnight and then place on top of a toasted bagel spread with cream cheese. Add thinly sliced cucumbers and red onion. Jeeeeez. It is really good.

In my friendly office I knew several people who keep hot sauce in the fridge and I borrowed a tablespoon or so from someone I knew wouldn't mind. She had Trader Joe's brand of hot sauce, which from the cult following I figured would be a good options. It was delicious. But I looked at the ingredients afterwards just to check. They were (from memory-sorry if I omit something) Peppers, Garlic, Salt, Spices, Xanthan Gum. Xanthan Gum? Huh? Another colleague had a bottle of Cholula brand sauce and I checked that one. It had Xanthan Gum too.

Xanthan Gum is a fermented polysaccharide that is derived from corn syrup that is used as a thickener in many food application. Like HFCS it is made from food, but I don't really count it as food. It is fermented because the bacteria Xanthamonas campestris is introduced into standard issue corn syrup. The bacteria eats the sugar chains in the corn syrup breaking them down into a single substance that is like a colorless slime with properties similar to cornstarch. This bacteria Xanthamonas Camestris is the same bacteria responsible for black rot on vegetables like broccoli and the like. Xanthan Gum will not make you sick from the bacteria, but yet again. I don't really want to be eating this stuff.

When I went to the supermarket last weekend I checked different bottles to see who had what in there. All the varieties of Cholula all contained Xanthan Gum. Most of the small brand hot sauces did not. All the Roland varieties had some kind of stabilizer in there. They produce many types of products from regular hot sauce to Asian sriracha sauce. I found the ingredients to Tabasco Sauce online which I was pretty impressed about, they only use peppers, salt and vinegar.

My most favoritest hot sauce in the world is Frank's Red Hot. When I was pregnant with Thing 1 I would balance a plate of tater tots on my belly and eat each one drenched in Hot Sauce. I was surprised that I did not give birth to a tater tot actually. I ate an entire bag every week, by myself, without fail. I was really scared that I would have to give up my favorite hot sauce.

Thankfully, Frank's Red Hot only contains Aged Cayenne Peppers, Vinegar, Water, Salt and Garlic Powder. Whew! Another bullet dodged.

And by the way--Happy Birthday Thing 1!!

What is Granulated Garlic?

I have been meaning to research this topic for several weeks. But I was nervous. What if I turned up something negative? How would I do without my precious pungent powder?

I have always had GG in my cupboard. But before Thing 1 and 2 came along I didn't use it that much. I was previously a garlic snob. I chopped or mashed fresh garlic for everything I cooked at home. But after the first Thing came on board I had a hard time with it. Imagine me on 4 hours of sleep with a 6 week old nestled in a bouncy seat on the threshold of our 50 square foot Manhattan galley kitchen trying to recapture some of my former kitchen glory. Thing 1 would be screaming his little head off and what was I doing? Fiddling with a sticky mess of garlic and an enormous knife. When I finally felt the stress of needing to pick him up and cuddle him or nurse him, I had these sticky stinky hands, and then fumbling with my shirt and boobs? Yuk. That's enough to traumatize your baby into never eating garlic.

I had to totally relearn how to cook when I had children. I no longer had time to noodle over the noodles. I needed a way to get everything into a pot and get back to being a mommy. I think that's why I turned to processed food to begin with, because I had a fussy baby and I needed to eat. I didn't know how to quickly prep something and walk away to let it do it's thing. But granulated garlic solved at least one problem. In many recipes it has become my go to spice rather than dirtying up a cutting board, chef's knife and my hands. But what is it? GG is precisely the kind of mysterious food that we all too readily accept. It is not like there is a granulated garlic plant out there where farmers are harvesting little glass jars with shaker tops.

Granulated Garlic (not to be confused with Garlic Powder or Garlic Salt) is dried ground garlic. You might have already guessed that-but you can never assume anything these days!! Garlic is most plentiful in California in the summertime. Fresh Garlic does keep for a several months in cool cellars and probably the conventional garlic you buy in February at the grocery store was grown in California the previous summer. But, GG is a good way of preserving garlic for future use. Garlic has a lot of antibacterial and antimicrobial properties, but just like any plant, these benefits diminish with additional processing and length of time from harvest. So don't fool yourself, GG is not the best way to profit from the health benefits of garlic. But if it is taste in a pinch you are after, you might just have found a soulmate.

Garlic is first harvested and the paper removed. The cloves are then chopped, dried and ground. Some GG and Garlic Powders (garlic powder is simply GG that has been further ground into a powder that is as fine as flour, Garlic Salt is table salt with ground garlic added) have stabilizers and anticaking agents in them so that they will pour better. It is important to seek out a brand that does not include them. I purchase Fairway's store brand. But an amazing store in Evanston, IL is The Spice House. They will ship anything and they have a great house made GG (among hundreds of unbelievable dried spices and herbs and spice blends). I used to have family that lived down the street from their Evanston location. I was so sad when they moved out of Evanston, but they do ship.

GG takes about 20-30 minutes to fully rehydrate and realize it's flavor. So when I use it in a recipe I will add it and allow it time to bloom. I like to add GG to meatballs, but I let the meat rest before I cook them. It is the same with dressings and sauces.

I was so thrilled that my granulated garlic is simple and straight forward. Some folks may feel that the drying and grinding constitutes too much processing to be considered a whole food, and I get it, they are probably right. But once again for me it is about cost/ benefit. If my brand does not contain any funny additives and my source is a trusted purveyor, I say Granulated Garlic gets the green light. Whew! I was sweating this one.

The To Do List: Big Brand Name Oat Circles

There is a sunny yellow box inside the homes of countless families' kitchens. There is a single product that is ubiquitous among children of all ages. There is a cereal so friendly it ranks high on the list of 'first foods' for babies without teeth all over the United States.

My brother ate so many of these oat circles growing up that I could hardly stand the smell of them by age 9. When I was a child, sugar cereal was a treat not to be eaten at breakfast. If it was really bad or had marshmallows in it, we could choose to buy it instead of another treat, but it could not be eaten for breakfast. It had to be for an afternoon snack. But we could get non-sugar cereals, and it seemed a popular choice was often the oat circles in the yellow box. But I really didn't like them. So I ate toast or something else.

Then after my kids were born this cereal was everywhere. Now all of a sudden it seemed like it was a household staple. The kids loved them, they made little mess when they feed themselves (Except when you step on them after they have fallen to the floor. I swear half of the dust in my vacuum is cereal dust sucked out of the area rug.), and they were healthy enough to feed to a 7 month old right? What was in it? OATS!! Right? Isn't it oats? I know it doesn't look like oatmeal, but that shouldn't matter.

Then after two years of feeding these brand name oat circles to my kids, I finally picked up the box. This is what it said:

Ingredients: Whole Grain Oats (includes the oat bran), Modified Corn Starch, Sugar, Salt, Tripotassium Phopsphate, Oat Fiber, Wheat Starch. Vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) Added to Preserve Freshness.

There is also a long list of added vitamins and minerals. Aaaaahhhh, enrichment. This enrichment is no different than the flour enrichment I discussed last week.

Now to be fair, this large manufactuerer of brand name cereals puts out alot more dubious products laden with sugar and marketed directly at children. Like I said, my own mother was exasperated by our constant pleas for sugar cereal when my brother and I were children. She put limits on what and how much she would buy and how much we were allowed to eat. This one particular brand of oat circle cereal is not the biggest threat to health out there. It probably does more harm than good when compared to all the highly processed foods heavy with salt and sugar that are so commonplace these days. But still, the long ingredient list surprised me, and one can hardly put it in the whole foods category. So what is all that stuff?

Modified Corn Starch: This additive is a starch derivitive. It is just like a starchy corn flour that the processor adds acids and other chemicals to break down the starches until it becomes almost like a powdered geletin (except it is not animal based geletin at all, it is plant starch based). It's purpose is to act as a thickener or stablizer. I am not a cereal maker, but I would guess it is what helps to keep all that ground up whole wheat oat flour together.

Tripotassium Phosphate: This is a water soluable ionic salt (huh?). It is also used in the food industry as a stabilizer and emulsifier. Oh, and it can be used as a fertilizer (a fertilizer with no nitrogen, but hey when you are eating fertilizer who is counting).

Oat Fiber: Just the germ and bran of the Oat Groat.

Wheat Starch: Exactly like Modified Corn Starch only made from the wheat plant.

Tocopherols: I learned something new recently. I always knew that when you see the word tocopherol you knew they were refering to Vitamin E. Well apparently there are 8 different kinds (read 8 different molecular structures) of vitamin E. Four of these kinds are classified as tocopherols. Beyond that, I guess I just wasn't paying close enough attention in my 11th grade chemistry class. The info is all there, but alot of the true chemistry stuff I just don't get.

By the way--I have been slacking on the bibliography feature of late. All information for today's post came from Wikidepia.org

So what does all this mean? Upon diving deeper, these oat circles probably do more good than harm as I said. They are mostly oats and they are WHOLE oats, which is way better than eating sausage breakfast sandwiches and pop tarts. But, they do contain salt and sugar and the highly processed starches and stabilizers leaving me wanting something better for my family. I love oatmeal the way it is. I was never looking for a shelf stable version of the thing I love. I gave my kids these oat circles because I am like everyone else out there, I never questioned them.

So I have switched to New Morning Oatios. This brand is organic, lists their ingredients online (try looking for the big guys, their nutritional page is empty) and the nutritional profile is largely the same as the big guys. There is slightly more sugar (2g vs 1g--which is almost nothing anyway) but in New Morning's product sugar is not listed as an ingredient which makes me feel better. And they taste more real to me, more grainy like a whole grain product should.