This article has information about how Splenda is made, and some of the effects it can have on your body. Negative effects on health have been associated with other artificial sweeteners as well. The reason most of us choose to use artificial sweeteners instead of a natural sweetener like honey, maple syrup, or sugar is to avoid excess weight gain. But studies have found that people who consume artificial sweeteners are actually more likely to be overweight. These chemicals play tricks on our minds and our bodies, causing us to consume more than we might if we ate actual food. Removing that benefit, there is no reason to consume these potentially harmful chemicals.
Try natural sweeteners like local honey, unrefined sugar, molasses, and maple syrup. I especially love maple syrup or organic brown sugar in my coffee. Stevia is a natural sweetener that goes very well with tea. Sugar in general should be consumed in moderation, so whatever you use to sweeten, don’t overdo it. Avoid high fructose corn syrup (better yet, avoid corn syrup in general), and limit the overall amount of sugar you ingest. If you find that you’re craving sweets, whether pregnant or not, it may be a sign from your body that you need to increase your protein intake.
3 thoughts on “Is Splenda safe during pregnancy?”
Yikes, I think they put Splenda in my latte that I get at Dunkin Donuts. Think I’ll stick with raw sugar! Much yummier, too. 🙂 Thanks for the great info!
Well, a site called “The Bitter Truth About Splenda” is probably not biased at all 🙂
Here are some studies puslished in the pubmed database about splenda’s safety:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10882825
“No adverse experiences or clinically detectable effects were attributable to sucralose in either study.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19464334
“The collective evidence supports the conclusion that the ingredient, sucralose, is safe for use in food and that the sucralose-mixture product, Granulated SPLENDA No Calorie Sweetener, is also safe for its intended use.”
I think moderation of natural sugars is probably the better choice. But that article is using crap science. It’s “just a few molecules away from DDT”? CO2 is carbon dioxide which is prevalent which we exhale with every breath. CO is carbon MONoxide which is harmful in even small amounts. H20 is water which we drink. H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide which is not safe to drink. But they are only molecules away from each other!!! 😉
If you click through that article to the link at the bottom with the studies that supposedly show sucralose toxicity, and you read the abstracts… they don’t. I guess they figure if they cite a study that people will just believe them and not actually read the link? This one for example, the title seems to support their cause “A combined chronic toxicity/carcinogenicity study of sucralose in Sprague-Dawley rats.” – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10882819 – but the study concludes that “Evaluation of the data obtained from the two phases of this study showed that sucralose was not carcinogenic. Sucralose did not adversely affect the survival or clinical condition of the rats, and there were no toxicologically significant findings.”
Please note that I’m not suggesting that Splenda is “safe” for pregnancy though. Obviously pregnancy is a time to exercise even more caution than usual about which chemicals we choose, and it is hard to ethically study what is safe and unsafe to pregnant woman.
I just urge people not to be scared off by fear-mongering quote-unquote science. It’s easy to get ahold of abstracts of studies to read for yourself 🙂