A) My advice would be not to eat artificial sweeteners because this book is all about a) eating naturally and b) getting rid of cravings. Let us look at each of these two points:
a) I can’t see how anything artificial fits in with natural, healthy eating. Some sweeteners have been banned. Some should be banned – e.g. Aspartame (brand names include NutraSweet, Equal and Canderel). We may discover others to be harmful, in time. We can be confident that sweeteners have no positive impact on our health and that we have no physiological need for them, (because they have no nutrients – just like sugar).
b) The second key thing is that we are trying to get rid of cravings and the most common cravings are for sweet foods, whether as a result of Candida, Food Intolerance, Hypoglycaemia, or all three. If you continue to feed your body artificially sweet things, you will continue to want artificially sweet things and the cravings won’t disappear.
I have also found compelling evidence in obesity journals that sweeteners have much the same impact on the body and insulin mechanism as sugar – the body can’t tell the difference and so releases insulin unnecessarily.
If you absolutely insist on keeping your sweet tooth fed, one of the ‘least bad’ alternatives is something called Fructooligosaccharide (FOS). This is a non-digestible, soluble-fibre carbohydrate that is claimed to support the growth of good bacteria in our guts (I have no evidence for or against this). You can buy it in health food shops and sprinkle it on porridge, or other cereal, if you really long for something sweet. It turns into a chewy, toffee like substance in your mouth.
