Word: sugars
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Cutting out sugar sounds like a winning strategy for a country that's 66% overweight or obese, but are sugar substitutes in fact good for you? The scientific record is less than absolute. Past studies of saccharin and aspartame, packaged as Sweet'n Low and Equal, respectively, suggested that large doses could cause cancer in rats, although human studies have shown no such link. The Food and Drug Administration says these high-intensity sweeteners--along with sucralose (Splenda)--pose no threat to human health. Most nutrition experts are willing to go along with that--with caveats. "I suspect that...
...doesn't. Some researchers think artificial sweeteners may actually interfere with our efforts to diet. A 2004 study by psychologists at Purdue University found that when rats were fed artificially sweetened liquids for 10 days, they lost their innate ability to gauge the calorie content of foods containing real sugar...
...been reinforced--and perhaps even intensified--by our environment. Susan Schiffman, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center, has found that African Americans and Hispanics like their food significantly sweeter than the rest of the population--a result she suspects is from campaigns that market high-sugar grape and orange sodas to predominantly ethnic populations...
Other experts speculate that the whole American diet may be calibrated to an artificially high level of sweetness, and that we may be in danger of generalizing our propensity for sweets--artificial or otherwise--to everything we eat. "Why do we have so much sugar in things like peanut butter?" Brownell asks. "Why do they put sugar in soups...
...take the sugar out of soup, of course, but you don't have to add to the trough. The key, as always, is to read labels and distinguish fact from marketing fiction. Low-sugar Froot Loops, for example, have a third less sugar than the original. But if you think the new version packs fewer calories or better nutrition, think again. "They aren't able to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse," says Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, "but at least they succeeded in putting lipstick...