“You think you’re doing great things for your kids,” said a stay-at-home mom from St. Petersburg, Fla., explaining that the fragrance encourages girls to stay hydrated. “But now I’m thinking, should I give this to a 3-year-old, or should I give this to a 10-year-old who’s going through puberty?”
Faced with this dilemma, more and more parents are heeding the message to avoid added sugar, but instead reach for products laden with artificial sweeteners. These snacks and drinks often come with healthy cosmetics that advertise being “low carb” or “half the carbs” of their previous formulations. The only indication that it contains sugar alcohols or chemical sweeteners may be the long ingredient list on the back.
In a country where obesity has tripled since the early 1970s and where nearly one in five children has children, the goal of cutting sugar out of children’s diets is a lofty goal. But experts fear that parents are substituting one evil for another by choosing ultra-processed products full of understudied additives for their children. are doing. This week, a World Health Organization panel declared aspartame a possible carcinogen. It has been 40 years since this sweetener was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
“We are embarking on a large-scale experiment involving children without parental consent, without a control group,” said Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. I think,’ he said.
US foods now contain dozens of sweeteners, some of which have been developed in the last few years. Consumers may no longer find sugar-sweetened snacks and drinks marketed to children.
For example, Quaker Chewy’s 25% off sugar chocolate chip granola bars are sweetened with inulin, which is made from plants, and polydextrose, a complex carbohydrate made from glucose. Unsweetened chocolate puddings in snack packs are sweetened with sorbitol, maltitol, sucralose and acesulfame potassium, often combined to simulate the flavor and texture of sugary sweet treats. And are Flintstones Immune Support chewable vitamins the products parents give their children to keep them healthy? Four of his five ingredients in the first are sweeteners.
Even the new kid’s drink co-founded by Michelle Obama (the former first lady who made childhood health a hallmark of her White House days) relies on sugar substitutes. PLEZi is advertised as low-sugar and comes in flavors like sour apple and blueberry blast, sweetened with stevia leaf and monk her fruit.
Food manufacturers say they are complying with federal guidelines in response to growing parent demand for sugar-free and low-sugar products.
“We know some consumers are interested in sugar-free foods, so we’re trying to make it taste good and comply with FDA regulations,” said Dan Hare, spokesman for Conagra Brands, Snackpack’s parent company. We are looking for a compliant solution,” he said.
Nicole Hayes, Director of U.S. External Communications at Bayer, parent company of Flintstones Vitamins, said: “We’re providing a multivitamin that contains key essential nutrients to support children in a form and taste they’ll enjoy. It’s important for consumers,” he said.
Some older sweeteners, such as sucralose, sold under the brand name Splenda, have been repeatedly studied over the years and are considered safe by the FDA and regulatory agencies in other countries.
“Decades of research support the safety and efficacy of Splenda in a healthy diet,” said Ted Geroff, CEO of Splenda. He said Splenda, the best-selling sweetener brand, is considered safe. “Many studies over the years have proven that, along with exercise and a healthy diet, low-calorie sweeteners are important tools to help consumers manage their weight and reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases,” the FDA said. We are.”
However, long-term food safety is difficult to study because researchers cannot control subjects’ diets over decades, and children are even more difficult to test. This has dramatically changed nutritional guidance over the years.
Lydia Kyves is an attorney, documentary producer, and mother of two who lives in Beverly Hills, California. The area has an abundance of grocery stores serving health-conscious customers. But she struggles with how to get her kids to eat healthy snacks. Food labeling can be confusing, and what is considered “healthy” changes dramatically every few decades.
“I remember when my mother was trying to figure out what to feed the family. Margarine was the ‘healthy’ alternative to butter,” Kyves said. Later, trans fats in many margarines were found to be associated with an increased incidence of heart disease, so “I am very careful about using these alternative sweeteners.”
The proliferation of low-sugar and sugar-free products is not only due to changing consumer tastes.
Last year, the FDA announced it would require foods labeled “healthy” to adhere to strict limits on added sugar. Around the same time, the Biden administration announced stricter nutritional standards for school lunches, limiting added sugar to less than 10 percent of calories per serving across school weekly menus.
As a result, food manufacturers are looking at ways to reformulate their products to add less than 10 percent of their calories, and many are turning to sugar alternatives.
“Sugar must be solved!” That’s the tagline for a new sugar substitute called RxSugar, made from allulose, a sweetener made from corn and newly cleared by the FDA as safe. . He is 90% lower in calories than sugar because it is hardly digested by the body.
Some experts support the development and use of alternative sweeteners because of the immediate health risks posed by high-calorie diets.
PLEZi Nutrition uses monk fruit and stevia without apology, which are considered natural because they are plant-based and contain zero calories.children consume too much added sugarPresident Obama said during product launches that on average, 53 pounds per year. Sweetened drinks are the main source of added sugar, almost two thirds of young people consume sugary drinks on certain days.
Sam Kass, co-chair of the PLEZi Nutrition Committee and executive director of the Obama administration’s Let’s Move! there is,” he said. The campaign said in a statement. “We developed PLEZi as a healthier alternative to sugary drinks that can be less sweet and more flavorful. So we use natural sweeteners to significantly reduce the overall sugar content.”
Kass said the goal of PLEZi products is to have less sugar, less sweetness, and more nutrients, but they have to taste good, too, adding, “Otherwise, children will end up drinking sodas and other sugary drinks.” Because we will continue to choose .”
Professor Willett of Harvard University said that generalizations about the health effects of these sweeteners cannot be made because they are all chemically different and almost certainly have different biological effects. Stated. The fact that some of these are “natural” products is not reassuring, he said, as “they may be consumed in unnatural amounts.”
“Table sugar is also natural, but it is clearly harmful in large amounts,” he says.
Although stevia and monk fruit are plant-based and considered safer than other sweeteners, the number of Studies have shown that stevia can upset the microbial balance in the gut, but there are few published studies on the safety of monk fruit sweeteners in children. Both are sweeter than table sugar, and some experts say they can trigger a craving for sweet foods in children.
Food additives are subject to less intensive review by the FDA than pharmaceuticals. In 2016, the agency issued a rule allowing companies to self-certify that new chemicals and food additives are safe. Over the past 20 years, the FDA has embraced these studies and allowed many sweeteners to be added to the food supply by telling manufacturers “no more questions.”
Emerging evidence focuses on the effects of artificial sweeteners on the digestive system, which is increasingly thought to influence many aspects of our health. Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently discovered that chemicals formed during the digestion of sucralose can cause DNA damage and increase the permeability of the intestinal lining. However, it is unclear how much of the chemical ends up in the gut. Blood flow.The authors of the study conducted in vitro in the laboratory He said the results indicated the need for further testing.
It is not even certain whether these substances contribute to: weight loss. Many studies have found that replacing sugar with sweeteners may help reduce calorie consumption in the short term, but sweetener use does not provide long-term benefits of reducing body fat in both adults and children. suggests not.
Contains aspartame about 95 percent About 90 percent of sweetened carbonated soft drinks and ready-to-drink teas. A WHO panel said it could increase the risk of cancer, particularly liver cancer, but the WHO did not scale back its recommendations on how much is safe to consume each day.Many studies have found that with other sugar substitutes cancerDiabetes among young people but they are often inconclusive or contradictory.
However, sweeteners are strongly associated with: stimulation Increased taste receptors food intake. And this could become a significant long-term problem, researchers say.
Children inherently prefer higher levels of sweetness than adults, says Julie Menela, a biopsychologist who specializes in developing food and taste preferences at the Monell Chemosensory Center in Philadelphia. This is called the bliss point. Non-sugar sweeteners range from about 200 times sweeter than sugar (saccharin, aspartame, stevia, etc.) to 20,000 times sweeter (advantame).
“Adult bliss points are like Coke and Pepsi. Children are double that,” she said. “They live in different sensory worlds.”
Sugary foods geared towards kids can set in motion a lifelong craving for sweetness, but it could be worse. Some researchers believe that ultra-processed foods with increased sweetness fall under the term “addictive.”
“Children are conditioned to respond to cravings by wanting large amounts of dopamine in their brains,” says Joan Iffland, author of Processed Food Addiction. There is also growing link Between these foods and depression, psychological distressshe said.
“Manufacturers are adding these sweeteners to products that are also high in salt and fat, and they can stimulate multiple pathways in the brain,” Iffland says. “These manufacturers are making their products highly addictive and palliative.”
Even with all the right things—living in an area where healthy food is readily available, working from home, and having the time and energy to cook most of his family’s meals—Kyves knows that you can’t avoid the sweetener flood.
“It’s obvious that sugar is bad for kids. It affects their mood, their sleep, etc.,” she said. “But it’s complicated to read the label. There are many alternatives, but we don’t know what’s actually safe and how much.”
